Doctor Matthias Echternach explains what happens when singers sing top notes – and what causes vocal problems.
Matthias Echternach, the professor of phoniatrics and pediatric audiology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, will of course not reveal which opera stars he has had under the knife. Doctor-patient confidentiality is a must. However, the department he heads at the LMU hospital is one of the centers that professional singers in Germany turn to. Echternach, who has also researched stage fright in singers, has now worked with his scientific colleagues to look into the larynx of sopranos. Using high-speed video recordings, they were able to prove that opera singers do not whistle top notes such as the revenge aria from Mozart’s “Queen of the Night” in “The Magic Flute,” but vibrate their vocal cords as they do when singing. Echternach, who once sang in “The Magic Flute” himself, explains what the myth of the “whistling register” is all about. And why hyper-high voices fascinate us.