TENOR: History of a Voice.
By John Potter. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. xi + 305 pp. Hardback. 12 b/w illustrations. $35.00
There are probably almost as many books about tenors as there are about sopranos, though, like those latter, they tend to hew closely to the biographical. J. B. Steane’s excellent guide to the subject,
Voices, Singers and Critics
(1992) looks for descriptions like “lyric tenor,” which are illustrated by specific singers as a way of remembering the type. John Potter attempts here to talk about the voice itself, technically and historically.
This latter aspect is useful because it covers the period before such terms as “tenor” or “soprano” were applied to the voices that sung them rather than to the part they sang, designations that seem to appear only in the 19th century. He uses specific singers in each period to exemplify what he means, insofar as we can actually know what these early singers sounded like. For these early tenors, he must, of course, rely on external evidence: what others said about their singing and what they sang. Potter notes that what seems to have been required of such singers was great agility and clarity of words. For instance, he talks of Fernando Rasi, who sang Monteverdi’s Orfeo as a tenor and gives an example from Rasi’s own song, “Indarno febo” (p. 16), showing the great agility it demands. Interestingly, however, considered in terms of pitch, the example has only a modest range, extending from d to e'♭. What is difficult to infer from early writing about singers’ voices is the matter of voice quality. William Byrd, for instance, was of the opinion that what we would call a tenor sound with what we would call a baritone range was the most useless male voice. As one possessed of this voice, I can attest to its essential truth, but early (and, indeed, later) composers wrote their solo pieces for specific singers, where the idea was to work within what that singer could do, regardless of range. The great number of legitimate variants of Handel’s
Messiah
, for instance, testify to that, as does Mozart’s substitution of “Dalla sua pace” in place of “Il mio tesoro” for Francesco Morella (who does not appear in this book), his Viennese Don Ottavio. That no modern Ottavio will willingly give up either aria is another matter.
Potter is himself a tenor, a previous member of the Hilliard Ensemble, and this gives him a unique insight into the voice. He is interested in what the voice
is
and how our ideas and expectations of it have changed over the centuries, especially where pitch and sound quality have become more important than agility and expression. He is deeply aware of the physiological changes required to get to the modern tenor voice, beginning with the extension upwards of the chest-voice into today’s head-voice, as exemplified by Giovanni Battista Rubini, with his famous soprano f" in Donizetti’s
I puritani
. The day of the visceral thrill of high notes had begun.
Though he has useful things to say about the evolution of the
Heldentenor
as a response to what Wagner felt his music needed, Potter’s heart is with the Italian tradition, and once we get into the recorded era, examples come thick and fast. While the later chapters do not simply degenerate into lists of tenors here, there, and everywhere, they do have a greater tendency than the earlier ones just to name important singers and their roles, without giving as close a scrutiny as the earlier ones as to what they have to tell us about the tenor voice itself. Though he has a chapter on British tenors, and Russian and French ones, Americans, with three or four exceptions, are conspicuous by their absence.
The book comes with an extensive list of more tenors than are discussed, for each of whom there is some sort of bibliographical entry or Web site given, followed by a discography and videography, both highly selective. There is a brief list of Web-site sources and a brief general bibliography. There are small glitches here and there, but none disastrous, though I was startled to see that the chapter on Handel and Mozart tenors was illustrated with a well-known picture of Rubini singing Arturo in
I puritani.
Alan Swanson
