Years ago Weldon Whitlock told me that there were some singers billing
themselves as "mezzo-contraltos"! Talk about confusion! He said the contralto
lower register is as dark as the voice of a male tenor or baritone. He
described the upper register as very "heady". Whitlock said that one of the
lovely qualities of Louise Homer's voice was how it "melted into" that of Enrico
Caruso! There are few recordings of her voice that sound like a "real" voice.
I'd have to say that Jeanne Gerville-Reache missed the era of more realistic
recording entirely. Madame Schumann-Heink was recorded live singing "But the
Lord is mindful of His own" and the voice sounds quite real and similar to her
other recordings. Rosa Ponselle stated that Schumann-Heink's recording of
Humperdinck's "Weihnachten" (available from Classical Vocal Repertoire!) is the
best representation of her instrument on a record.
Ewa Podoles has had her voice compared with the voices of Schumann-Heink and
Louise Homer, but the reviewers who make these comparisons did not hear the
early singers in person. I think the contralto voice is a rare bird. I have
worked with church choirs for 30 years and only heard two mezzo-sopranos in all
that time! The church choirs fill their alto sections with "short-ranged
sopranos" who haven't figured out their passagios and have the mistaken feeling
that, since they don't know what to do at the top of the treble staff that they
surely MUST be contraltos. These ladies are basically "warm bodies" in the
choir. It is amazing how many become "mezzo-sopranos" after listening to Louise
Homer singing "O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion" and Dame Clara Butt
singing Samuel Liddle's "Abide With Me"!
Ed
"Jeffrey Snider <snide76258@y... wrote:I did my
dissertation on the songs of Sidney Homer, and necessarily
spent a lot of time researching his wife, Louise Homer. NEVER was
Louise referred to as a "mezzo-soprano." (Nor was Schumann-Heink, or
anyone else as far as that goes.) However, most of the roles she
sang, we would consider "mezzo" roles today: Amneris, Azucena,
Dalila, etc.
A quick glance at Musical America will show that there are
comparitively few "contraltos" out there, and lots of "mezzos". I
studied at Indiana with Martha Lipton, who told us that early in her
career she billed herself as a "contralto" because, in her words, "I
wanted to be something nobody else was." She soon found that all she
was getting offered were oratorio solos and "old lady" parts. She
started billing herself as a mezzo.
It's really too bad that we have lost this distinction. I find that
there is a general confusion about the two voice types. From what I
have seen, the mid to late 19th-Century concept of "mezzo-soprano"
was more like a "second soprano" than a high contralto.
Adding to this confusion is that many "mezzo" roles are, in fact,
soprano roles. Check out the score: Siebel, Cherubino, Dorabella, and
many other roles usually sung by mezzos are in fact listed as soprano
roles.
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