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The general public applauded her as vehemently as ever, but the judicious grieved that the greatest of contraltos should forsake a realm in which she blazed with such undivided luster. It is difficult to fancy why Alboni should have ventured on so dangerous an experiment.
It is with these imperfect models that the scientific man in dealing and on which he bases his deductions. Be it right or wrong singers do not all use the vocal mechanism in the same way. I have in mind two well known contraltos one of whom carried her chest register up to A, and even to B flat occasionally. The other carried her middle register down to the bottom of the voice.
From this point of view it would seem that the best manner of giving Orphée would be to conform to the author's definitive version. A tenor would have to take the part of Orpheus, since we no longer have male contraltos, and to keep to this kind of a voice in Orphée we would have to have recourse to what is called, in theatrical terms, a travesti. There are obstacles to this, however.
"But this time in parts. Still without expression." "Fast! Ah, too Fast." With the gloom of the contraltos added, one could scarcely help shuddering. "Fade the Roses of Pleasure." Last time he had come to see her, Basil had worn a rose in his buttonhole. How handsome he had looked in that bright blue suit, with that dark red rose! And he knew it, too. He couldn't help knowing it.
Instead of specializing his vocal parts after the manner of Verdi and Gounod for high sopranos, screaming tenors, and high baritones with an effective compass of about a fifth at the extreme tiptop of their ranges, and for contraltos with chest registers forced all over their compass in the manner of music hall singers, he employs the entire range of the human voice freely, demanding from everybody very nearly two effective octaves, so that the voice is well exercised all over, and one part of it relieves the other healthily and continually.
A grand ballad concert, at which the most sentimental of contraltos, helped by other first-class throats, was to minister wholesale to the insatiable secret sentimentality of the north, had been arranged for the evening. "One will be enough," said George. "Are you alone?" asked the Town Clerk's clerk. George took the ticket.
So when all were ready, washed, and in their clean clothes, every one of the kabouter families, daddies, mothers, and young ones, were ranged in lines and made to sing. The heavy male tenors and baritones, the female sopranos and contraltos, the trebles of the little folks, and the squeaks of the very small children, down to the babies' cooing, were all heard by the gnomes, who were judges.
Instant visions of dazzling sopranos, of mezzos and contraltos, of angelic voices and of vast beauty and exquisite gowning, had flashed in appalling procession before her mental vision. The idea, in the face of the appalling actuality, was so rich that Bobby pursued it no further lest he spoil it, and talked about the weather and equally inane topics the rest of the way.
The pitch has changed since the Eighteenth Century; it has gone up and it is now impossible, or nearly so, to sing the rôle written for Legros. The contraltos of the Italian chorus have become the counter-tenors, who, for the same reason, find themselves struggling with too sharp notes.
For mezzos and baritones about the same system is followed, the exercises being sung a major third or so lower. In the case of contraltos and bassos, the voice is usually trained from the middle in both directions. Most teachers favor the "chest voice" for singers of these types throughout the entire compass.
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