Opera and the Stanislavski System
Konstantin Stanislavski, was a great theater actor and director, and the creator of the “Stanislavski System.” He gained his international fame and historical prestige on the stage in theater for his development of the Stanislavski’s System. The system was a method of training to mobilize the actor’s conscious thought and will in order to activate other, less-controllable psychological processes–such as emotional experience and subconscious behavior–sympathetically and indirectly.
Stanislavski was developing a system of teaching based on the way he himself had been taught. They seem to have been founded on principles he learned from his music teacher. While he was attempting a career in singing, Stanislavski had studied under N.M. Safonov, and listened well to his lessons on orthophonics and singing diction. Safonov was a gifted orator, especially when analyzing words and explaining how to achieve expressivity through them. Under his tutelage, singers were able “to feel very deeply the meaning of a lyrical ballad.” Unlike many other teachers, he did not keep the secret of his success hidden from his students. He developed a technique, including
elements of vocal training and diction, to train his students in a methodical way to facilitate their expression of the music. This notion of a methodical way of training singers became the basis for Stanislavski’s acting system that would become the basis for his international renown.
In order to prove the universality of this system of training, Stanislavski decided to test it with the creation of his opera studio. It began under the Bolshoi Theater in 1918 but eventually broke away in 1924 to become the “Stanislavski Opera Studio” and its own independent theater. Stanislavski ran the studio with the help of his sister Zindaïda Sokolova and his brother Vladimir Alexeyev. Sokolova was gifted in helping students create what was called the “inner score” of a song or part, “she had the gift of finding the subtlest shadings for that inner life.” Stanislavski valued his brother’s sense of pacing. He could often be heard saying, “No, you have not yet established the rhythm of this part on your role. You have not got it under control, you do not savor it. Ask the advice of my brother.” Other areas of training were fulfilled by Stanislavski’s colleagues, teachers, and friends.
Here, he put two main objectives before the young actor-singers. The first was to achieve expressive, incisive diction, thanks to which they could convey clearly and colorfully the words they sang. He tried to impress upon his students that, “Fifty percent of our success depends on diction. Not a single word must fail to reach the audience.” The second objective was the complete freeing of their bodies from all involuntary tensions or pressures, for the purpose of achieving easy, simple handling of themselves onstage. It was to achieve this ability to free their bodies from excessive tenseness, especially in the arms, wrists and fingers, that daily exercises were devoted. They were all done to music in order to train the singers in making every movement consonant with musical rhythms.
The process is hailed as one of the greatest innovations in Western theater of the twentieth century. In fact, the cultural awareness surrounding Stanislavski and his system in the theater is so pervasive that the inspiration for the structure of his System, based in opera, is all but written out of his narrative, if not his Wiki page. The ways in which he applied this system in teaching real actor singers will be revealed in the second part of this series!
