Roland Barthes on the Art of Charles Panzéra!

Here is an excerpt from the French radio program "Les Greniers de la Mémoire" with Karine Le Bail interviewing literary theorist and semiotician Roland Barthes (1915-1980) who discusses the vocal art of Swiss baritone Charles Panzéra (1896-1976). The musical excerpts are from Debussy's "Pelléas et Mélisande" and Duparc's "L'invitation au voyage".

Link to my Charles Panzéra playlist:
   • Charles Panzéra (1896-1976)  

Barthes loved music and actually took lessons in voice from Panzéra.

Panzéra represents the ideal model of the genotext -- the singing and the speaking voice, the space where significations germinate 'from within language and in its very materiality'; it forms a signifying play having nothing to do with communication, representation (of feelings), expression; it is that apex (or that depth) of production where the melody really works at the language-not at what it says, but the voluptuousness of its sounds-signifiers. Panzéra is not of the technical and stylistic caliber of say Fischer-Dieskau, but his impact is, Barthes would argue, more felt, precisely because its affect is more bodily, i.e., more revealing of the body. For instance, "with Fischer-Dieskau," Barthes explains, "I seem only to hear the lungs, never the tongue, the glottis, the teeth, the mucous membranes, the nose. All of Panzéra's art, on the contrary, was in the letters, not in the bellows. . ." (from Contemporary Aesthetics, vol. IV, 2006)