The tenor voice we are used to hearing today is a product of centuries of evolving performance practices. It is a relatively new way of singing that gained and lost its space in the opera history until it established itself in the early nineteenth century.
The word Tenor comes from the latin tenere, which means "to hold". In medieval polyphonic music, it was the voice that would sustain the fundamental line of the song, the cantus firmus. By the sixteenth century, the “tenor” would be any voice carrying the cantus firmus.
In the transition between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the first operas were being composed. The tenor voice already had an important role in those early operas, and this lasted for several decades until the “fabrication” of a new voice, more powerful and expressive: the castrati. But before their appearance, several of the leading roles in the first operas were assigned to tenors.
The Italian musicologist and theorist Giovanni Battista Doni (c. 1593 – 1647) suggests that the choice of the tenor voice was the more adequate one for important roles, such as Jesus Christ, for instance. The reason was, to him, because tenors equated more to “a well-adjusted and perfectly organized body” than other voices.
Another reason for the importance of the tenor voice in the beginning of opera history is, perhaps, the fact that many of the major opera composers of the time were themselves tenors. Jacopo Peri (1561-1633) and Giulio Caccini (1551-1618) were among them, Caccini having even enjoyed an international reputation as a soloist.
Among the main roles sung by tenors, we can list Orpheus in the Euridice operas (1600) by both Peri and Caccini, as well as Claudio Monteverdi’s in his L’Orfeo (1607). Monteverdi’s hero was sung by Francesco Rasi (1574-1621), who was himself a composer, poet and singer and a student of Caccini. Several of Monteverdi’s operas had tenors in important roles, but his last one, L'incoronazione di Poppea (1643) already had a castrato as the main male role, Nero.
The Italian practice of castration of young boys to be used as singers begun in sacred music, where women were not allowed to “exhibit themselves”. There, the high voices were sung by either boy sopranos or countertenors (male falsettists), but neither of them were completely satisfying. Boys were musically unreliable and would eventually reach puberty and go through the change of their voices. Countertenors would only be able to produce sounds that were unpleasant and unsatisfying for the musical taste of the time. The solution found was the castrato – a singer with the looks of a grown man and a voice that was considered angelical and above all others in terms of expressiveness and sweetness.
The video below, an excerpt from the 1994 movie Farinelli, can give us an idea of the immense success and fame the castrati enjoyed in the baroque opera period, as well as the very different experience opera was back then.
The advent of this new voice meant the decline of the tenor as the main male singer in Italy. The heroic roles and those of lovers were now assigned to the castrati, and the tenor was given to small or comic roles. These roles could be of servants, grotesques or even in travesty such as old women or nurses (Fallows, 2014).
Italian music since the seventeenth century was highly influential throughout Europe. The practice of the castrati production, however, was not followed in other countries. In France, neither the tenor nor the castrato voice was the most commonly used. Instead, with opera being developed under Lully, the haute-contre was given more space. The French haute-contre was a very high tenor voice, similar in range to the English countertenor of the alto castrato in Italy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), French philosopher, writer and composer, stated that the French hardly used the tenor voice at all in their operas.
The tenors fared better in Germany and England, especially as a solo voice in sacred music. Handel wrote several major parts for tenors in his later operas and oratorios, such as the title roles in Samson (1743), Belshazzar (1745), Judas Maccabaeus (1747), Joshua (1748), and Jephtha (1752).
By the time Mozart was reaching his mature works, the castrati were being exported all over Europe, and so his operas followed the previous traditions where the castrato played the lead roles, with the tenor as a secondary character – a king or military commander. But with Mozart we can already see a change in casting choices. His mature Italian operas had now the baritones as the leading roles (Don Giovanni and Leporello, Figaro and Count Almaviva). Tenors had comic roles or distinctly secondary ones, such as Don Ottavio. Mozart’s German singspiels, nonetheless, had tenors as important roles – like Belmonte and Tamino. It is clear that parts were written with specific singers in mind and, therefore, would have different vocal characteristics that would allow the singers to sound their best, showing their qualities while hiding their flaws. This practice, probably born with opera itself, will have an important role in the history of vocal writing until the beginning of the twentieth century, and will be further explored on the next few chapters.
As the nineteenth century arrives, the art of singing became increasingly more scientific and technical. For the first time, the vocal physiology begun to be studied in a search for healthier and better ways of achieving an optimal vocal production. We have the discussions on registers and passagio, and the chest voice versus the head voice – a very important distinction that will elevate the tenor to a super star position in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Until this point, tenors had a lower voice than what we are used to. Their register sat lower in their voices, like a baritenor of nowadays. High notes were sung in a different way – switching to a pure head voice or falsetto once the singer would reach a certain note. That would change with Rossini and the Bel Canto school.