" Upper thin register 85

XVI. " " Small register 85

Diagram of compass of the registers 93

INTRODUCTION.

We are living in an age which is singularly poor in fine voices, both
male and female, and with regard to the tenors of the present time there
is this additional misfortune, that, as a rule, their voices do not
last, but are often worn out in a very few years; in many instances
while their owners are still under training, and before they have had an
opportunity of making their appearance in public. If we remember that
there was a time when most beautiful and highly cultivated voices were
so plentiful that even in comparatively small towns there were to be
found Opera Companies consisting of excellent singers, we may well ask
ourselves how this remarkable change for the worse has come about.
People have attempted to account for it in various ways. Up to the
middle of the last century women were forbidden by Ecclesiastical Law to
take part in Church music. The voices of boys being available only for a
very short time, means were taken to prevent their voices from breaking,
and thus a class of male soprani and contralti was created, who made
their first appearance in Rome in the beginning of the 17th century, and
to these singers the education of the female voices was soon almost
exclusively entrusted. In the middle of the last century, however, when
women were permitted to participate in Church music, there was no longer
any occasion to procure artificial female voices, and these singers
gradually died out, though there were still some of them living and
teaching in the beginning of the present century. According to Rossini,
who certainly was eminently qualified to give an opinion on the subject,
the decline of vocal art in these latter years is mainly due to the
disappearance of this class of singers, and if it be true that
henceforth the training of female voices was undertaken by tenors, who,
being of course unable to give a true pattern to their pupils, treated
the female organ according to their own very different registers, then
it can easily be understood that many voices must have been ruined by
the process, and the scarcity of distinguished female singers would thus
be satisfactorily accounted for. But I fail to see in what way the
disappearance of male soprani and contralti could possibly have affected
tenors and basses.

Again,