Julie Andrews, One of the voices of the Century

When I learned that National Public Radio was compiling a set of 50 greatest voices, I immediately thought of Julie Andrews. Not only was Miss Andrews gifted with an amazing voice, she also had a unique charm with which she imbued everything she sang. I was looking for a good rendition of Handel's "Where'er you walk," a simple, lovely aria from his opera Semele. In the opera, the god Jupiter sings this to a pretty girl, and not really knowing the story I'm guessing that he didn't hang around very long afterwards; a simple benediction would have to do, and it was off to the next conquest. YouTube is full of unremarkable performances of this sweet, unaffected aria, but a few stood out: Julie Andrew's rendition of Where'er you walk among them. Listen to the diction. No one pronounced their consonants better than Julie Andrews, and she still does, whether she speaks, or sings. One may quarrel with the way she caresses a phrase, giving it just a little too much affection for classical singing, but then, she never set herself up as a classical singer (at least, not in her post-musical-theatre career); she mostly sang what she liked, and sang it the way she liked to sing it. There are no stories of her being a difficult woman; in fact one hears only about how easy she was to work with, how patient, how great her sense of humor was, how little temperament she displayed. I recently watched a clip of an interview of her on the Ellen De Generes show in which she let slip a remark that might have been considered a little undiplomatic by some, but I thought it simply brought home how uncomplicated a person she is, even for the grand old sexagenarian I believe she is at this date (2010). Unpretentious charm is the phrase that comes to mind when thinking about this delightful entertainer who has given us so much. (I must not forget to mention John McCormick's performance of Where'er you walk, which is just as satisfying as Julie Andrews's. While Miss Andrews endeavours to interpret the words faithfully, McCormack simply loses himself in the melody, content to speak the words in his usual beautiful diction (tinged with a slight Irish accent), without letting them distract him. In Handel's time, arias were not major dramatic moments in the opera, they were simply interludes in the action, which was conveyed in the recitatives. The famous Largo, for instance, is a paean to a plane tree in the garden of Xerxes, hardly a major player in the story. Finally, Handel, all his life, was a German-speaker, and there is some evidence to believe that his grasp of English pronunciation and intonation was rough, at best. In many of his greatest arias, in Messiah, for instance, the accents fall in the wrong places --even making allowances for the speech of those times. This means that a great deal of latitude is excusable when a singer adjusts the syllables of a Handelian aria to make better sense. I was often indignant, when I was younger, that singers took liberties with the arias in Handel, but the young, as you know, are often notoriously inflexible in matters of variance from what they're accustomed to. Both McCormack and Dame Julie tend to scoop just a little. This was an acceptable expressive device in an older style of singing, and indulged in to this day by operatic singers, and within the vocal traditions of the Roman church.) To get back to Julie Andrews: I sincerely hope these decades are kind to her, when she is unable to use her cancer-weakened voice to sing, but only appears on variety programs to commemorate major media events of the past, and provide some interesting insights about the making of her movies, and stories about her co-stars, with whom she keeps in touch. Arch