In the main, though, that is not at all the picture we are left with of this half-century of British tenorizing. In the set’s booklet, Aspinall traces the dominant influence of Italian models and teachers on the development of British singing in the 18th and 19th Centuries, beginning in force with the great castrati and female prima donnas who inundated London with the rage for Handel’s Italian operas, and continuing through several generations of Italians who, as Aspinall puts it, “. . . willingly gave up their sunny home climate for the sake of the possibility of earning fortunes teaching their art to nobility of the foggy British Isles.” Following on from Pier Francesco Tosi, who takes us as far back as we can go in terms of Italian pedagogy for the operatic voice, the basic precepts of such instruction are recorded in the writings of Domenico Corri (a pupil of Nicola Porpora’s), Isaac Nathan (in turn, a pupil of Corri’s), and Richard Mackenzie Bacon, whose vocal cultivation was of the English High Society amateur sort (study with a Dr. Samuel Arnold is mentioned), but whose listening and critical writing skills make his observations valuable. All three offer commentary on the basic musical and stylistic principles involved, which Aspinall summarizes clearly, though only Nathan deals much with the structuring of the voice and the functional aspects of singing—which is to say, with the aspects of study that enable the execution of everything we call “technique” and “style.”^(I)

The trail through this pedagogical succession leads to the figures of the two pre-eminent English tenors of the 19th Century, John Braham and Sims Reeves, the early career years of the latter overlapping with the later ones of the former. Aspinall looks to Reeves (1818-1900) as the paradigm for many of the tenors heard on the Marston release. That Reeves was a marvelous singer seems not open to question. Operatically, he triumphed in great roles and in the company of the acknowledged best of his time, not only in the U. K. but on the Continent as well. He was Great Britain’s premier oratorio tenor in the era of that culture’s flourishment, and was beloved for his singing of concert ballads on the recital platform. Though he had relinquished his highest tenor roles before the age of 50 (the last mention I find of him in the vocally informed biography by Charles E. Pearce^(II) of a role of fully extended range is as Faust in 1864), was often indisposed and sometimes discomfited by the rise in the diapason (in which England seems to have led the way), by all reports he sustained the solidity, quality, breadth, and carrying power of his voice for a very long time. And one of the things that is intriguing in regard to these tenors is that Reeves was first trained as a baritone, and made his first professional appearances as such. In Pearce there are a number of references to the richness of Reeves’ midrange and the unusual fullness of his high notes. We must keep in mind that though Reeves sang such roles as Faust, Edgardo, Elvino, Florestan, and even Huon (in Oberon, a part “created” by Braham), at the time he undertook his finishing studies as a tenor (with Bordogni in Paris, then Mazzucato in Milan), the instruction by these masters of a previous generation undoubtedly partook of the technical practices of the older-style tenors. Whether Reeves ever sang notes above A or so (and at a lower tuning standard, at that) in what we would term “full voice” is at least doubtful. And that comports perfectly with the upper limit we find in the oratorios of Handel and Mendelssohn, the “mature” Mozart, and Wagner, among others. By the time we arrive at even the oldest of the Marston tenors (Edward Lloyd, b. 1845), the expectation for the fully developed tenor voice extended to the B-flat, B-natural, and for the most fortunate, the C—at modern concert pitch, and without falsetto or head-voice blends except for selected refined effects.