Mezzo Soprano Essay

Once the proper vocal category is selected, the next issue to ad- dress is the kind of voice necessary. It must be a large voice. A castrato cannot be replaced with a small-voiced soprano or mezzo-soprano. Here, given the central role of Handel in this article, and the central role of Senesino in Handel's operas, we face an irony. It appears to be easier to find large-voiced sopranos who sing fioritura adequately than mezzo- sopranos. Onstage are women whose voices are not large even by mezzo- soprano standards. Unfortunately, Marilyn Hore's career is over. But even if it were not, we must accept the fact that there are not a great many sopranos and mezzo-sopranos with large voices who can sing de- cent fioritura.27 These singers
cannot be asked to meet the standards of the castrato, because such a feat is impossible physically.
We are there- fore again faced with the difficulty that there will not be a host of poten- tial performers who could do justice to the scores and to the performance practices they imply. This conclusion, however, is not totally bleak. If an appetite for staging these operas exists or may be cultivated, there is no reason large-voiced sopranos and mezzo-sopranos cannot be induced to sing this repertory by first teaching them how to develop a satisfactory vocal technique for expressing the coloratura. A singer like Dolora Zajick, for example, clearly has enough power to attempt an alto castrato role, and she has expressed a desire to sing the heavier Rossini contralto en travesti roles. Another solution, which certainly was indulged in in the past and which has been championed by Paul Henry Lang, is to transpose the cas- trato roles down to a normal male voice, usually a bass, at least when staging Handel's castrato-centered operas.28 Anyone who supports such an approach is aware of the considerable musical distortion-and loss- of having the role sung in a completely different range. However, there is less distortion in castrato-centered operas than in other operas
because of the composer's tendency to have the castrato soloist sing without other vocal accompaniment. However it is parsed, though, it certainly is not what the composer intended, and it departs completely from the baroque fixation on high-pitched voices for heroic roles. If, however, we resign ourselves to the fact that there is no adequate substitute for the castrato, one effect of such an approach is to create the impact on the audience of what the power of the castrato might have been like and what the virility of that voice might have meant to an age that had a different understanding of the word. The operas would sound heroic to an audience that has heard nineteenth-century opera and perhaps con- vince them that baroque composers were not bloodless and the music not tepid. The bass would have to be able to make a decent attempt at fioritura. However, there have always been such voices. When Handel
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All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Castrato and Countertenor 183 renounced opera for oratorio and basses became more prominent in his music, the heroic role was often sung by a bass. In Handel's Messiah, it is the bass who sings the heavy fioritura (e.g., "The Trumpet Shall Sound").29 It may very well be that the best solution, depending on the particular opera revived, is to choose between the female substitution and transpo- sition, being aware that whichever of the two choices is made, some- thing irreparable is lost. But at least these choices offer a valid means of achieving the dramatic impact on the audience that these composers