Where have all the contraltos gone?

By Rupert Christiansen Published: 10:52AM GMT twenty-five February 2010

Karen Cargill

Once they were everywhere, mainstays of all the choral societies in the land, rousing us to movement or balmy us with motherly balm. But right away the contralto usually seems to exist in the realms of the old joke. Even in her heyday, the statuesque woman raised a plain embonpoint and creation a receptive to advice in between that of a hooting foghorn and a post-prandial burp was a theme developed for ribbing: Thomas Beecham famously claimed of the distinctively cavernous Clara Butt that, on a excellent day, "you could attend to her voice opposite the Channel".

Yet currently the multiply has withered. With really couple of exceptions (most of them Slavic for example, Ewa Podle´s and Larissa Diadkova), there are usually mezzo-sopranos: should you instruct to occupy a contralto, you will poke the websites of singers agents in vain. Have womens voices altered over the past 50 years, as the outcome of something put in the H2O or taken out of the diet? Or have contraltos merely left in to broke hiding?

Apple iPhone 3GS: Review of reviews Manchester United v Barcelona: United fans destroy to find the voice of impulse Dan Black: looking an existential sugar-rush Former Plymouth goalkeeper Luke McCormick locked up over genocide pile-up Europe might be Arsene Wenger?s most appropriate track to excellence

Before addressing these questions, a bit of compendium work is necessary. A contralto can be tangible as a womanlike thespian with a range stretching from the G next center C to the G dual octaves on tip of it. In the beginning Venetian operas, contraltos were since the purposes of unusual old witches or crones a expel of characters predestine they have never jarred off. After 1750, they were at the moment eclipsed altogether: there are no contralto purposes in Mozart or the bel canto repertory.

It was usually in the mid-19th century that they re-emerged, still aged or grotesque, in functions such as Un ballo in maschera (Ulrica), the Ring (Erda) and The Mikado (Katisha). There are multiform good purposes in post-war works, as well Peter Grimes (Auntie), The Midsummer Marriage (Sosostris) and Dialogues des Carmelites (Old Prioress), for e.g. but todays composers have not intent with the contraltos potential.

Opera, however, has never offering her abounding pickings: nothing of these purposes are starring ones. Sentimental or religiose songs were her bread and butter, and the oratorios of Bach, Handel, Mendelssohn and Elgar were her poignant inventive challenge, met by a good array of 20th-century British singers, particularly Clara Butt, Astra Desmond, Edna Thornton, Kathleen Ferrier and Helen Watts: a non-British list would embody Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Sigrid Ongin and Marian Anderson. Today, Catherine Wyn-Rogers appears to be the last of that line, nonetheless her representative describes her as a mezzo-soprano and her voice lacks the tonal brilliance of her predecessors.

The contralto still thrives in the African-American gospel and essence tradition, but in exemplary song her tumble from beauty and conform has been complete. Half a century ago, in an epoch with a less righteous perspective to the printed score, contraltos would be expel in glamorous purposes such as Carmen or Amneris in Aida. Inconvenient high records were left out or reversed down, and the weighty, plummy contralto timbre radiated the own sort of passionate potency.

But right away we find that receptive to advice evocative of matronly culture rather than amorous allure, and the unhappy songs sung by Ferrier and Schumann-Heink are not to the ambience of a asocial and irreverent age. We cite the reduce reaches of womens voices to receptive to advice golden rather than purple, and the � la mode reconstruction of seductiveness in Rossini and Handels operas has led to a larger direct for mezzo-sopranos with a lighter, brighter timbre and a some-more stretchable technique that can communicate the brag of the younger characters they contain.

The keyword is up rather than down: effervescent immature throats can to a little border be spread out in one citation or another, and teachers lend towards to pull students voices higher, since thats where the income and the some-more comical repertory lie. Nobody wants to outlay their career personification old baggages or holding a Messiah measure in Wigglesworth Town Hall.

Karen Cargill, one of todays excellent mezzo-sopranos and a featured artist in Scottish Chamber Orchestras stream season, is a box in point. When she was a immature student, she could reach an E prosaic next the contraltos normal extent and had "a really complicated chest voice". But a new teacher, Patricia Hay, helped her to open up her tip register "and gave me entrance to a tip C. I felt Id been set free, and right away I can sing Rossini."

The bottom line is that if you are a "natural" contralto you are rather stranded and of singular usefulness. Its turn a receptive to advice to censor or "correct", rather than excellence in.

But the loss of the contralto is something to be mourned: I challenge any one to attend to Kathleen Ferriers "Land of Hope and Glory" or Marian Andersons "My Lord, What a Morning" and not feel profoundly changed by the solemn, sexless beauty.

Karen Cargill sings Wagners "Wesendonck Lieder with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in Edinburgh on Mar twenty-five and Glasgow on Mar twenty-six