isappeared from the operas in which it
formerly played so conspicuous a part. The elevated tone of our whole
inner man has deprived us of any ear for the alto.

In any case we have here reached an extreme which is contrary to the
very construction of the human vocal organs. Scarcely is moderate and
natural compass of tone still permitted, even in a song. In every age
the song-composer had been allowed to construct his melodies out of the
fewest possible tones. While the elder Bach in his arias often chases
the human voice in the most ruthless manner from one extreme to the
other, his sons and pupils in their little German songs confine
themselves to the most modest compass. Most of the later composers
proceeded in the same way up to the time of the Romanticists; then the
bonds were snapped, even in this respect. Schubert, on the one hand,
could compose the most moderate songs, on the other, the most
immoderate. It often seems (and this is also the case with Beethoven)
that his fantasy rebelled against the fact that a curb was placed upon
it by the natural limitation of the human voice.

This natural limitation, however, is once for all not to be done away
with, and it is ignored only at the expense of feasibility. Some later
Romanticists, therefore, such as Spohr and Mendelssohn, came back
immediately to the comfortable middle register as the real vocal
register of song. The thirst for shrill sounds had made men entirely
forget that a song must be easy to sing just because it must always be
sung suggestively and never be delivered with full dramatic execution.
Do not our singers, who since Schubert's time are so fond of making a
song a dramatic scene, feel how ridiculous it would be if a reader
should declaim a song at the top of his voice like the dialogue of a
drama?

In the invaluable privilege of writing for a moderate compass, a
song-composer, almost alone of all composers, is provided with a means
of reacting gradually upon instrumental music and of tuning anew the ear
of our generation, so that it shall no longer find satisfaction in the
shrill tones of extreme voice registers and the euphony of strong,
easily and comfortably attained middle tones shall again be universally
perceived. At the present moment our instrumental art has, in this
particular, fallen under the tyranny of piano manufacturers and makers
of wind instruments. When the keyboard of the grand piano has been made
longer by a few keys, the comp