A Singer’s Guide to Voices: Tenors Pt1
This is an article in a short irregular series which will take a look at the voice types that categorise professional singers.
You might have thought that, as a bass, I would have begun with the Bass voice, but, heck, everyone loves a tenor, and who am I to disagree! I have been fascinated with tenors since I began my career over 40 years ago and have enjoyed meeting many of the best and working with them. I thought I might explore how the tenor came to be the Daddy of male singing voices, gaining the greatest fame and the greatest fees! Usually, in the operas, the tenor gains the girl too!
In the period I have been writing about in my Great Composers Blog, the mid Baroque, many of the heroes on stage, and off, were singers with the unlikely voice, castrato. This became a great scandal, the fact that boys were castrated before puberty in the hope that they might be able to sing high vocal parts on stage or in chapels and cathedrals. The practice appears to have sprung up in the mid-16th century, firstly in Italy and then all over Europe, and seems to have started as a way of improving papal and other religious choirs, allowing them to keep women out and avoiding the need to replace boys every few years. By the mid-18th century, the superstars of the Italian opera in particular were the famous castrati, the most renowned being Farinelli. The operation produced singers with much stronger voices than boys, and who often developed tall frames and increased lung capacity. By the end of the 18th century, the craze was dying out, and the new stars became the tenors, a voice range that excited the ear with its extreme high notes and sensual sound.
At the beginning, composers were writing for a light tenor voice, with a mellifluous lyric quality. Bach had written for this voice in his Passions, especially the Evangelist parts, and Handel had written for both tenors and castrati. By the time of Mozart and Haydn, a tenor voice was becoming more important, although the main roles in ‘Don Giovanni’ and ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ are for bass/baritones. However, in ‘Cosi fan Tutte’ and particularly in ‘The Magic Flute’, the tenor has become the ideal voice for the romantic hero, a position he has held ever since. In the period after Mozart, composers such as Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini were using tenors as their romantic leads and asking them to sing more and more florid parts with extraordinary coloratura, often the higher the better. At this time, it appears that the higher notes in the tenor voice were lightened into a sort of falsetto, or mixed voice, with the power and brilliance of the modern voice undiscovered. Gilbert-Louis Duprez, a French tenor of note, astonished the world of opera when, in 1831, in Lucca, in the first Italian performance of Rossini’s opera ‘William Tell’, he sang a top C for the first time ever in full voice, with no mixing or falsetto overtones. With this giant leap, the floodgates opened for what we now know as the modern tenor, and a phenomenon was born which we have enjoyed ever since, and which culminated in the popular mind with Luciano Pavarotti’s album from the mid-1970s ‘The King of the High Cs’.
As the 19th century passed, composers were beginning to appreciate the power and beauty of a really big sound which could ride over even the largest of orchestras, and we saw the creation of spinto tenors, dramatic tenors and, with Wagner, Heldentenors (heroic tenors).
Most men are possessors of light baritone voices, and so the more extreme voices are both rare and treasured. The fact that a tenor has to sing way out of a range that most people can imagine is another part of the attraction, and combined with some of the most beautiful music ever written, has led to the dominance of the tenor voice in the world of opera. As I have written extensively in ‘A Singer’s Life’, I can’t emphasise too much how hard it is to become a professional singer, involving years of study in technique, stamina and flexibility. Even though most tenors have a naturally high voice to start with, you can only achieve success by working constantly to make sure that your instrument works correctly at all times, and that you can rely on it at times of stress or strain. It is quite similar to the greatest sportsmen and women, who achieve greatness by constantly striving to get better, and practice and practice until they find something close to perfection. I noted in my Blog that, unlike sportspeople, we are not competing against each other, and cannot afford to have many off days. A golfer may win one week and fail to make the cut the following week. Singers can’t do that. We have to be on the winners’ podium every time!
Enrico Caruso
The first great tenor of the modern recording age was Enrico Caruso (1873 -1921), who many people feel was as good as any that have lived. With the improvements in technology which allow us to hear his voice more or less as it was, the subtlety of his quiet singing and the thrilling quality of his full voice are revealed to a modern listener, and show us that the legend was based on the most wonderful sound imaginable. YouTube has several examples – his Una Furtiva Lagrima from Donizetti’s ‘L’Elisir d’Amore’, recorded in 1904 at the age of 31, is beautiful and heartfelt, if somewhat wayward stylistically, and his O Sole Mio from 1916 is rougher but thrilling. His story as a poor lad from Naples who made good is heart-warming, and his worldwide success, especially in America, is one that would be repeated many times in the 20th Century.
The first tenor to make an impact on me was Beniamino Gigli, whose recording of Rodolfo on a very old set of long-playing records was played a lot in my youth at home. His voice was sweeter than Caruso’s, and well-suited to roles like Rodolfo and Cavaradossi (Tosca). Most Verdi roles were beyond him, although his Duke in Rigoletto was fine, and there is a version of Nessun Dorma from his later years that does him a disservice. The fact that he was Mussolini’s favourite tenor didn’t greatly enhance his reputation either!
The breakthrough in recording and record producing techniques in the 1950s and 60s resulted in a huge number of singers becoming available to those who didn’t live in the great metropolitan centres, and it was incredibly lucky that this era was awash with great tenors, as indeed has been the period ever since.
The great Swedes Jussi Bjőrling and Nicolai Gedda had careers which just overlapped, Bjőrling dying in 1960 and Gedda making his debuts at the Royal Swedish Opera in 1951. That same year, 1951, Bjőrling and Robert Merrill recorded their version of the great tenor/baritone duet from Bizet’s ‘Pearl Fishers’, a recording that still thrills the listener. The older singer was more suited to the great Italian roles of Verdi and Puccini, whereas Gedda with his lighter, higher voice was best suited to Mozart and the French repertoire, roles like Faust, Don José, Nadir, Benvenuto Cellini and Hoffmann. An excellent linguist with perfect French and fine Russian (his Lensky in ‘Evgeny Onegin’ is superb), Gedda lived to a ripe old age, only dying in 2017 at the age of 91. I almost sang with him. He was booked to sing the role of Vaudemont in Tchaikovsky’s ‘Iolanta’ at Aldeburgh with Galina Vishnevskaya, conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich, when I was singing the great role of Bertrand, the Keeper of the Gate, but sadly he was ill and had to cancel.
The two finest German tenors of the 50s and 60s were Wolfgang Windgassen and Fritz Wunderlich, with entirely different voices and careers. Windgassen, whose voice could never be described as beautiful, was lucky enough to be at his peak when Bayreuth was revived after the Second World War with ground-breaking productions of the Wagner operas by the composer’s grandson Wieland Wagner. He dispensed with all the old Norse helmets and armour, and with minimal sets and props and a wonderful use of light, transformed the performance of his grandfather’s operas for ever. Windgassen sang all the great tenor roles such as Siegfried, Lohengrin and Parsifal with unflagging stamina and power, and though no film star actor, brought credibility to these roles. The only previous tenor who could truly sing Siegfried was the Danish tenor Lauritz Melchior, who became the darling of New York’s Metropolitan Opera in the 30s and whose recordings demonstrate a voice of untold power and richness, perhaps never bettered. A fascinating fact I discovered today is that Melchior, who was a friend of the novelist Hugh Walpole, gave a recital in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall, when he and Walpole were visiting the writer’s parents in 1921.
Windgassen’s Siegfried is preserved for all time on the classic Decca recording of Wagner’s ‘Ring’ conducted by Georg Solti, and although far from perfect, it has stood the test of time, and few singers have come near his performance.
The story of Fritz Wunderlich is ultimately a sad one. For me, he possessed the most beautiful tenor voice for the German repertoire I have ever heard and fortunately, he made enough recordings to allow us to hear him at his best. His Tamino in Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’ from 1964 with Karl Bőhm is easily the finest on record, smooth, elegant and seemingly without any strain, and perfectly tuned to the Mozart style. As far as I know, he only sang in German, but his Lieder recordings, especially Schumann’s Dichterliebe, are outstanding. He was planning to make his NY Met debut at the age of 36, but just before his birthday, he had a fall at a friend’s hunting lodge and died soon after. We can only imagine what he would have gone on to sing and record.
Britain has produced quite a few excellent tenors, the finest being Sir Peter Pears, with whom I had the privilege to study (see ‘A Singer’s Life’), and of course, Scotland’s own Kenneth McKellar, who, despite being famous for his Scottish songs, was in fact a superb classical tenor, astonishingly featuring in an old recording of Handel’s ‘Messiah’ alongside Joan Sutherland and conducted by Sir Adrian Boult (not the most authentic recording, but historically fascinating). I also remember as a child seeing him narrate and sing in a BBC Special about Neapolitan songs, which demonstrated his versatility. A worthy successor to McKellar is my friend Jamie MacDougall, who also combines classical and popular, and who I have sung and recorded with on many occasions. Of the younger generation, Nicky Spence from Dumfries is making quite a name for himself in the opera world. Look out for him.
I am conscious that this article has only reached a little over halfway, as we have not yet touched on the great tenors of my lifetime and career. Therefore, I propose to write a second article as a follow up. Watch this space!
