COLLAB CORNER
The Art and the Skills of Vocal Coaching:
Pierre Vallet on l’accent d’insistance
and Singing in French
Margo Garrett
Margo Garrett
Journal of Singing, November/December 2018
Volume 75, No. 2, pp. 207–210
Copyright © 2018
National Association of Teachers of Singing
November/December 2018
A
s I have written before in this column, I am drawn to
increasingly focus, in classes as well as in private coachings, on
two things only: the need for long and musically metric German
consonants, which I learned from the great Martin Isepp (the
topic of the last “Collab Corner”), and, from the singular and brilliant con-
ductor, coach, and pianist, Pierre Vallet, the magic that comes from the
understanding and use of l’accent d’insistance (emphatic stress) in French
singing. I can’t seem to help myself focus otherwise, because I have seen for
a long time now how very powerful the use of these two practices, or arts,
are in gaining idiomatic diction and intimacy with words, intimacy that
goes far beyond effective pronunciation. We are allowed sight and sound of
a performing singer’s deepest subjectivities and subtleties in interpretations,
and yet, these powers are begun and learned via simple rules of articulation.
The layers of gifts hidden within these simple “diction” concepts grow in
the user in profound ways that, when the potential is there, truly can make
a good singer into a great one. It is as if these practices essentially add talent
to a singer! For me, there is nothing more important to which a coach should
aspire and labor than the thorough understanding of these two concepts and
the identification in one’s ears of the staggering powers they contain to aid
a singer’s ability, not just to be better understood, but to create a personal
defining power over words. This power tells the listener not only what words
mean, but what the singer wants the listener to believe about the meaning of
words in the context of his or her wishes, interpretations, and desires. The
rest is experience: continual study of recorded history and learning on the
job in one’s own coaching studio.
I must thank Pierre Vallet for his overwhelming generosity in allowing me
to share with you so much of his own writing and quotes from conversations
enjoyed recently with him. I wish you could have shared those FaceTime
chats with us. Mssr. Vallet’s very way of speaking, the lilt and the energy in
his voice, his use of delicious accents that pepper his English, are also trea-
sured lessons in expressive French singing. My fondest hope is that you will
experience coaching with Pierre Vallet yourselves.
Although you can best get to know Maestro Vallet via his wonderful website,
(www.pierrevallet.net), I would be remiss if I did not tell you that he is a deeply
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devoted educator of singers at
the world’s leading operatic and
song training programs includ-
ing the Lindemann Young Artist
Development Program at the
Metropolitan Opera, Ravinia’s
Steans Institute for Young Artists,
the Houston Opera Studio, Opera
Hong Kong and, where I met
Pierre Vallet
him, at the Tanglewood Music
Center. Pierre Vallet has performed in recital with
iconic singers Natalie Dessay, Maria Guleghina, Denyce
Graves (including at The White House), the late Dmitri
Hvorostovsky, and most recently, at the Vienna State
Opera in a live stream concert with Roberto Alagna
and Joyce di Donato, in celebratory release of her album
Stella di Napoli. A totally committed educator, Pierre
Vallet is much sought after as guest teacher, lecturer,
and coach to both singers and pianists. His knowledge
of operatic and song repertoire is vast and includes the
works of many languages other than those in his native
French. He is truly a Renaissance performing musician
and master teacher.
Pierre Vallet came to New York City from his native
Paris some time before he began to coach there. In vari-
ous conversations over the years, he has told me that he
went often to New York concerts, and especially, to the
Met. (Little did he know, I imagine, that the Met would
become his American musical home.) He admired the
singers he heard there. They were always fine singers,
he said, among the finest he heard anywhere, if we are
speaking of technique. He remembers hearing beautiful
French at the Met. He heard words, vowels, phrasing . . .
all beautiful, but he understood very little. In recitals and
concerts he heard by student and professional singers, he
again confessed admiration for American training. There
was just one problem. He still understood very little! And
so, not having come to the U.S. to be a French coach,
he nevertheless set out to restudy his own language. He
did not know it then, but this was to benefit all French
singing here and far beyond.
I met Pierre Vallet in 1997 at Tanglewood. Seiji
Ozawa, Music Director of the Boston Symphony and
the Tanglewood Music Center, had been working
with him for some time as his musical partner in what
ultimately was to grow to about forty operatic pro-
208
ductions and concerts they did together in the U.S.,
Japan, and Europe. Ozawa respected Mssr. Vallet tre-
mendously, had told us much about him, and we, the
faculty, became as keen as was Ozawa to bring Vallet
to Tanglewood. Indeed, in the summer of 1997, Ozawa
mounted a production of Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de
Tirésias with the TMC Fellowship, and Pierre Vallet
was there as Ozawa’s artistic partner, attentive to and
involved in every aspect of the production. Mssr. Vallet
was also generous in presenting a master class on
mélodie with Debussy’s Ariettes oubliées. At that class
on July 16, 1997, my relationship to mélodie was for-
ever changed. I now love it most of all song and I have
Pierre Vallet to thank for it. That seminal Tanglewood
class, as well as those many to come at Ravinia’s Steans
Institute for Young Artists, gave him venues to spread
precious, never before heard information about sung
French. From 1998 until my departure in 2006, Steans
singers, faculty, and staff had the rare honor of having
Pierre Vallet’s private and public classes to feed upon
annually. Through such international programs, from
his many residencies in leading vocal performance
schools, and from his worldwide travels as conductor,
Pierre Vallet has raised the standard of French singing
to high levels, indeed. And, we understand!
In a FaceTime chat from St. Louis, where he was
conducting what I hear was an exquisitely beautiful
production of Gluck’s Orfeo, Maestro Vallet told me
recently that in the Paris Opera “one never hears, ‘Isn’t
that a beautiful voice?’ You hear, ‘Do you understand
les mots?’’’ For the American, he said, the smooth feel-
ing of the French language is more important than the
understanding. But in his restudy of his own language
from the vantage point of his experiences listening to
sung French in New York, he began to remember La
Comédie Francaise to which he often went on Sundays
at home in Paris. He remembered the tonic stress or
l’accent d’intensité of the language, which was cleanly
intelligible; but he also remembered having heard some-
thing else: the actors always passionately articulated the
language. Vallet’s diligent research then produced it:
l’accent d’insistance, or the emotional accent.
I am looking now at the actual pages of notes I took
at that July 16, 1997 master class Pierre Vallet gave to a
hungry and excited TMC audience and, with his gener-
Journal of Singing

ous permission, I give them to you below after offering a
small legend for the reading of the following examples:
unstressed syllables: lowercase
l’accent d’intensité: LARGE, ITALICIZED
l’accent d’insistance: LARGE, BOLD
both accents simultaneously: LARGE, BOLD,
ITALICIZED
In a word pronounced with no emotion, l’accent
d’intensité falls on the last syllable, or the penultimate
syllable if the word finishes with the mute vowel e. Only
the tonic accents are noted here:
molleMENT seCRET
châTEAU deMEUre
L’accent d’insistance is a greater intensity of the voice
over a syllable of a word that one wants to emphasize.
It falls on the consonant whose expressive lengthening
brings emphasis on the vowel that follows.
If the word to emphasize starts with a consonant, the
accent d’insistance falls on the first syllable. Only the
emotional accents are noted here:
SAlue MEner
SEcret DEmeures
If the word starts with a vowel, the accent d’instance
falls on the second syllable.
acCOUdée aMANdier
I would ask that you read and reread the above many
times. This is the heart and soul of the matter. When,
on July 16, 1997, Pierre Vallet facilely managed to elicit
clean and clear, understandable French words from his
student sopranos singing Debussy’s Ariettes oubliées, I
must tell you that I sat in the back row and felt tears in my
eyes from the sheer joy of actually hearing French words
articulated. I understood French words clearly, and that,
for me and others there that day, was unprecedented.
Pierre Vallet said, in that recent FaceTime chat, that
the big difference between tonic accent of English/
German and that of France’s accent d’intensité is the
idea of lengthening and lifting. He illustrated: “I can’t
// stand it!” That huge, intensity filled, strongly down-
ward stoppage before the word “stand” can escape the
pressure of consonants on the imploded final “t” of the
word “can’t” and the sibilance of “st” in the word “stand”
show us what is not a characteristic of desirable French.
He then went on to illustrate the lessons found in the
November/December 2018
Collab Corner
Gounod aria from Roméo et Juliette, “Ah! Lève-toi soleil”
when he sang:
“Aaaaah! LÈ -ve-TOI SO-LEIL! fais PÂ-LIR les
é-TOI-les”
Qui, dans l’a-ZUR sans VOI-les, BRIl-lent au
FIR-ma-MENT.
And for me, “the sun shone brighter” in his singing of
these words because of his clear delineation between
tonic accents and emotional accents. Mssr. Vallet went
on to say that without accentuation there is nothing
going on in the language, yet a generic sense of emo-
tion is not a correct goal for any singer. “The accent
d’insistance is the vessel which carries emotion, but chaos
is the result of emotion that is misplaced, generic, or
improvised.” (We in North America have a strong ten-
dency towards being “generally” expressive.) Accents, he
said, are the emotional life of the language; they attract
and renew our attention. The crucial goal, however is
to have an absolute understanding of where we need to
hear l’accent d’intensité (on strong beats) in its flow and
uplift and where we need to hear l’accent d’insistance
(on weak beats, most often) in its emotional intensity.
Together, these two articulations lift language off the
page and bring it to life.
Vallet went on to tell me that l’accent d’insistance is
also called un accent intellectif, in the sense that it brings
the word in focus in both articulation and understand-
ing. So, it is through an intellectual exercise that a singer
creates for his audience an apparently emotional deliv-
ery. It then makes sense to me that l’accent d’émotion, is
another name often used for l’accent d’insistance.
The question Vallet posed then is: what to do when
you have so many accents? Front-loading accentuation
(l’accent d’insistance) is that which leads both word
understanding and the uplift that follows in tonic stress.
Through the actual stressing of first or second syllables,
the flow forward is created and one is propelled through
and over the phrase. So we do not need to worry about
so many accents. They are a natural part of the effective
metamorphosis of language as it is used in the theater.
Two bonuses of this are actual understanding of words
and flow forward. I think of it as a diver who lifts himself
into the air only to return to the diving board to propel
himself where and how he wishes to go. The touching
of the diving board is the insistance. The tonic stress, the
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actual final syllable, then blossoms, flows, and is uplifted
as the diver soars and floats through his intended moves,
or the singer flows, uplifted, through his vocal phrase.
Pierre went on to say something that stopped me in
my tracks. “When the plasticity of language is lined up,
it becomes lifeless and unemotional.” The use, then, of
l’accent d’insistance is that which frees a vocal line so
that it knows really where to go (l’accent d’intensité)
and empowers the singer who creates it all. I must say,
this sounds most akin to what Pierre Bernac said to me:
When a singer supports the natural and effective rhythm
of words (including l’accent d’insistance) and a pianist,
other single player, or ensemble leads with instrumental
meter, the accommodations necessarily made by the
accompanist(s) create the space for words to mean to
the listener what they are intended to convey. Bernac
went on to say that when a singer and an accompanist
(pianist or conductor) work together in this way, true
French style is found. Aha!
Another of Pierre Vallet’s favorite examples was from
Bizet’s Carmen.
Près des REMPARTS de SÉVILLE
chez mon aMI LILAS PASTIA
j’iRAI DANSER la SÉgueDILLE
et BOIre du MANzaNILLA
Please note the BOIre contains in its first syllable, both
tonic and emotional accents.
Perhaps the finest example, of the many Pierre Vallet
has offered over the years of successful and idiomatic
use of l’accent d’insistance, is his example from the third
song, “La reine de coeur” of Poulenc’s cycle La courte
paille on poems of Maurice Carême. With his kind per-
mission, I reproduce here what he presented at Ravinia.
Please study and restudy this by listening to that greatest
of French singers, Regine Crespin, in a recording she
made with one of our iconic American accompanists,
John Wustman. (Regine Crespin. Poulenc. La Reine de
coeur—YouTube)
MOLleMENT acCOUDÉE
A ses VItres de LUne
La REIne vous SAlue
D’une fleur d’aMANDIER
C’est la REIne de coeur
Elle peut s’il lui plait
210
Vous MENER en SECRET
Vers d’éTRANges DEMEURES
Où il n’est plus de PORtes
De SAlles ni de tours
Et où les JEUnes MORtes
Viennent PARLER d’aMOUR.
La REIne vous SALUE
HÂTEZ-vous de la suivre
Dans son CHÂTEAU de GIvre
Aus doux VITRAUX de LUne.
Note, in all the examples, how many monosyllabic
words, even though they be made at the hands of com-
posers into more syllables, take both tonic and emotional
accents. In fact, to cite Mssr. Vallet, often the accent
d’insistance is the same as the tonic accent, in words
where one syllable is followed by a mute syllable—the
syllable that has the -e muet. Traditionally, composers
have placed the tonic accent on the beats, but it would be
a grave mistake to emphasize them for fear of bringing
the phrase down and making your listener aware of the
bar lines. Sometimes composers, such as Massenet and
Saint-Saëns, put the emotional accent on the beat. But
more systematically and for the first time, Debussy did
this in Pélleas et Mélisande. Yet if he had put all of them
on the beats, we would have had no life in the phrase.
Because it is the return at regular and irregular intervals
of the accented syllables that produces the rhythm of the
phrase, the lilt of the phrase.
I close with a few of my favorite quotes from Pierre
Vallet, from that magical, first class in 1997 in which
I experienced for the first time truly intelligible sung
French, which has so benefited my own teaching and
the performances of so many French singers throughout
the world. There are no words equal to our gratitude.
I know I speak for many when I say, thank you, Pierre
Vallet, for showing us the way!
Diction is ACTION.
Say words with intention and emotion and you will
know the tempo.
The miracle of diction is that an audience can receive
the meanings of the words in their souls if they are
idiomatically presented. The language takes over and
beyond that, the performer takes over the language. This
goes far PAST the mere study of diction.
Journal of Singing
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