Boys were musically unreliable and would eventually reach puberty and go through the change of their voices. There, the high voices were sung by either boy sopranos or countertenors (male falsettists), but neither of them were completely satisfying. 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”. Operas had tenors in important roles, but his last one, L'incoronazione di Poppea (1643) already had a castrato as the main Monteverdi’s hero was sung by Francesco Rasi (1574-1621), who was himself a composer, poet and singer and a student of Caccini. Jacopo Peri (1561-1633) and Giulio Caccini (1551-1618) were among them, Caccini having even enjoyed an international reputation as a soloist.Īmong 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). The reason was, to him, because tenors equated more to “a well-adjusted and perfectly organized body” than other voices.Īnother 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. 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 Italian musicologist and theorist Giovanni Battista Doni (c. But before their appearance, several of the leading roles in the first operas were assigned to tenors. 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.

In the transition between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the first operas were being composed. By the sixteenth century, the “tenor” would be any voice carrying the cantus firmus.

In medieval polyphonic music, it was the voice that would sustain the fundamental line of the song, the cantus firmus. The word Tenor comes from the latin tenere, which means 'to hold'. 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 tenor voice we are used to hearing today is a product of centuries of evolving performance practices.

Italian opera singer male