THE MALE SOPRANO
1919; Oxford University Press; Volume: V; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/mq/v.3.413
ISSN1741-8399
Autores ResumoF ROM the point of view of the twentieth century there is nothing in musical history more curious or harder to explain than the importance and popularity of the male soprano during the first two centuries of Italian opera aeria (1600-1800).Nowadays, if there were a survivor of this sexless tribe, we might take an interest in him as in a freak, but should certainly consider him out of place in any dignified musical environment.Occasionally in vaudeville or minstrel shows one hears men ringing in the feminine register, but, probably in all such cases, they are employing a highly developed falsetto or are possessed of exceedingly light and high tenor voices.We are here concerned with the castrate soprano, who down to the close of the eighteenth century held the same exalted position in Italian opera that the tenor held in the nineteenth and still holds in the twentieth.He is now as extinct as the dodo, but the leading part that he played in the early history of the art of singing quite justifies the writing of a chapter on the rise, supremacy, and gradual disappearance of this strange being and his art.For reasons not far to seek, much, if not most, of the history of the male soprano is shrouded in mystery; his origin is entirely obscure.Admiration for the lower notes of the human voice, both masculine and feminine, exists only where there is a considerable development of musical taste.Among primitive peoples there is an unmistakable preference for a high-pitched voice, deep tones being considered grotesque or mirth-provoking.It is possible, though not demonstrable, that the vogue of the male soprano in the early days of art singing in Europe was due to an undeveloped musical taste.The exclusion of women from the choirs of the Roman church accounts for the introduction of male sopranos into choral singing.Boys could be substituted satisfactorily for women then, as now, but there was one drawback to their substitution-their voices were very short-lived.A boy had scarcely attained efficiency as a church singer when the process of mutation robbed him of his peculiar vocal fitness and transformed his voice into quite another organ, an octave lower in pitch and altogether masculine in timbre.One remedy for this unfortunate state of things was the use of the masculine voice in its falsetto register, but this was only partially successful, because the falsetto voice,
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