About Diction

Singers are often expected to sing in different languages. While it would be ideal to fluently speak every language in which we sing, this is often not the case. However, performers should strive to pronounce all sung texts as idiomatically as possible while also gaining a working understanding of the grammatical structures and prosody of any given language. In this section, we will discuss and provide diction resources for standard languages in the classical vocal music canon – English, French, German, and Italian – as well as other languages often neglected in classical training.