Tenore contraltino

The tenore contraltino is a specialized form of the tenor voice found in Italian opera around the beginning of the 19th century, mainly in the Rossini repertoire, which rapidly evolved into the modern 'Romantic' tenor. It is sometimes referred to as tenor altino (or contraltino) in English books.

It is a type of tenor voice with a compass not much wider than that of the coeval baritenor, but able to sustain far higher tessiture. It means that the basic range remained substantially the classic one, from C₃ to C₅: only the best baritenors, however, were able to reach up to such heights and used to pass anyway to the falsettone (or strengthened falsetto) register about on G₄; for tenori contraltini, on the other hand, the threshold of the passage to the falsettone register rose a tone/a tone and a half, and they could so easily reach C₅ but often up to E₅, or even, exceptionally, to F₅. The real difference, however, consisted in the tessitura, or the pitch range that most frequently occurs within the given piece of music and where the artist is called upon to execute syllabic singing with the best sound results. The tenore contraltino’s required tessiture rose, so that the roles could not be sustained even by the best gifted baritonal tenors. Manuel García, for instance, who had a wide range as a baritenor, "had L'italiana in Algeri in his repertoire , but faced with the extremely high tessitura and the mainly syllabic writing of ‘Languir per una bella’, he transposed the aria down a minor third, performing it in c major instead of e flat".

In France, which was the only European country that had rejected the employment of castrati, a voice type similar to the Italian early-19th-century tenore contraltino had been developing since the 17th century, under the name of haute-contre, for which the majority of heroic and amatory parts were written, both in grand opera, and in opéra-comique. This type reached its apex in the age of Rameau. It was, in fact, a type of tenor voice extremely light and widely ranged, but nearly systematically uttered in falsettone in the high pitch, so as to somehow re-echo the castrato "contraltista" of the Italian stamp. This thesis, evidently borrowed from Rodolfo Celletti’s positions, does not seem to have been fully shared explicitly, in Potter's recent work about the tenor voice. According to him, the main difference between the 18th century Italian tenor (no longer so deep a baritenor, or "tenor-bass", as the seventeenth century one) and the French haute-contre, was that the former would use falsetto (and not falsettone, which Potter never explicitly mentions) above G₄, whereas the latter would go up to B flat in full voice or, to be more exact, in a "mixed head and chest voice, and not [in] the full chest voice that Italian tenors would develop later" which is consistent with Celletti and the editor of Grande Enciclopedia’s terminology, in falsettone).

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