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Updated: July 17, 2025
Nobody who heard the singing in Putney church that day ever forgot it. Untrained basses and tenors, unrelieved by a single female voice, are not inspiring. There were no announcements of society meetings for the forthcoming week. On the way home from church that day irate husbands and fathers scolded, argued, or pleaded, according to their several dispositions.
In their lofty eminence of pomposity they are challenged only by Anglican bishops and grand opera tenors. I have spoken of the danger they run of bursting. In the case of tenors it must sometimes actually happen; even the least of them swells visibly as he sings, and permanently as he grows older....
The sopranos took a B flat on the last note, while the tenors and altos rambled up and down the scale and the bassos bombarded the theme with their deepest chest tones. In the meantime the traveler had been washed out to sea. As the next wave brought him to the strand the company advanced once more a short distance, and began. "In the name of Mercy, help me!" screamed the drowning man.
In no other work of Mozart known to me does he ever become hysterical, and in the Requiem only once, towards the end of this number, where the sopranos are whirled up to the high A, and tenors and altos strengthen the rhythm; and even here the pause, followed by that scholastic cadence, affords a sense of recovered balance, though we should observe that the raucous final chord with the third omitted is in keeping with the colour of the whole number, and not dragged in as a mere display of pedantic knowledge.
Il primo uomo, il musico, sings beautifully, but his voice is uneven; his name is Caselli. Il secondo uomo is quite old, and does not at all please me. The tenor's name is Ottini; he does not sing unpleasingly, but with effort, like all Italian tenors. We know him very well. The name of the second I don't know; he is still young, but nothing at all remarkable.
Of these various four-handed animals, the most remarkable are decidedly the "gueribas," with curling tails and a face like Beelzebub. When the sun rises, the oldest of the band, with an imposing and mysterious voice, sings a monotonous psalm. It is the baritone of the troop. The young tenors repeat after him the morning symphony. The Indians say then that the "gueribas" recite their pater-nosters.
In the highest range, the vowels are merged in each other, because then the principal thing is not the vowel, but the high sound. For this reason tenors often, in high notes, resort to the device of changing words with dark vowels to words with the bright vowel e. They could attain the same end, without changing the whole word, by simply thinking of an e.
"He had it pretty bad, hadn't he?" he said of the desperate lover. "Oh, if only you could once have heard Sims Reeves sing 'Come into the Garden, Maud'!" she sighed. "A kind friend once took me to hear him, and I have never, never forgotten it." But Mr. Temple Barholm notably did not belong to the atmosphere of impassioned tenors. On still another evening they tried Shakspere.
You will never croak! You will never die. And your arms? Look at mine. Yes, yours will be like mine, some day. Margaret hoped not, for Madame Bonanni seemed to be a very big woman, though she still managed to look human as Juliet. Perhaps that was because the tenors were all fat.
When singing in Italy, King Victor Emmanuel each night visited the opera for the purpose of hearing her; and at Florence, where the enthusiastic Italians applauded to the very echo, Mario, prince of Italian tenors, leaned from his box to crown her with a laurel wreath. A similar honor was bestowed upon her by the Duke of Alba at Madrid, who presented her with a laurel crown.
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