Therefore begin your study in the youth of your voice; but, recollecting that its life is the most short-lived of your faculties, let your study be most earnest and painstaking. Especially if singing is to be your profession, act upon the wise advice of Dr. Burney, and "Never go to bed till you have learned something which you did not know the previous night."
Voices.—"What is your voice?" is a very common question, sometimes expressed in the rather less polite but more intelligent form, "What do you call your voice?" The answer almost invariably is either "Soprano," "Contralto," "Tenor," "Bass," or "Barytone." Here is a warning for you at starting. Do not limit your notions of what voices are to those four or five generic names. Because choral music is generally written in four parts, for soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, the non-musical public, and a great many musical people (some composers included) seem to think that those names are an inclusive description of every human voice.
This would be of very little consequence if it were only a question of names; but it is of no use to say "What is in a name?" if the result of a wrong name is to lead to mischief. The misfortune of wrongly naming your voice is that it will lead you to practise wrongly, and to choose the wrong style of music for study and performance. For instance, a young lady may call herself a soprano because she can "sing up to C," and may therefore fancy that the whole repertoire of a Tietjens or a Clara Novello is within her reach; and acting on this notion, she may fatally damage a naturally bright and pleasing voice by giving it work to do which belongs of right to a voice of totally different calibre, the mezzo-soprano.
Naming the Voice.—Remember always that the character of a voice is determined not by compass or range of notes, but by quality, or body and timbre, of tone. Two ladies may have voices ranging from A to A—two octaves—and yet one might be a pure light soprano, and the other a genuine contralto; while in length of compass a mezzo-soprano may even beat them both. And so with male voices (the variety in which is even greater than in female), you may have a voice of pure tenor quality, and yet of such limited compass that your energetic barytone friend next door may make your life miserable with jealousy of the ease with which he bellows high Gs, G sharps, and even on great occasions an A or so.
But compass has nothing whatever to do with the name of the voice: it may limit the quantity of music which can be performed, but it should have no influence on the choice of the style of music to be studied. This is a point of the greatest importance, therefore I repeat it briefly once more—Your voice must be described and used with reference to its quality, or volume and timbre, and not with reference to the number of notes which you can sing.
Male and Female Voices.—The actual varieties in tone and quality in different voices cannot, of course, be expressed on paper; but a careful use of your ears in listening to good public singers will soon teach you to discriminate. Female voices are of at least four kinds: soprano, mezzo-soprano, mezzo-contralto, and contralto. Male are of five or six, or even more. Alto; tenore-leggiero or light tenor; tenore-robusto or strong heavy-voiced tenor; barytone—basso-cantante (erroneously identified with the barytone by some persons); basso-profondo or bass.
Beside all these divisions or species, voices must be again classed according to their power. Any one who has ever heard an opera singer in a moderate-sized private drawing-room, will readily appreciate the difference between a voce di camera, or "chamber voice," and a voce di teatro.
Compass.—The respective compasses of the several voices may be roughly set down as follows, but it should be borne in mind that it is by no means a matter of course that a singer of any particular voice should possess or cultivate the whole range of notes supposed to belong to that voice. He or she may be none the less a tenor or a soprano because the one cannot produce an "Ut de poitrine," or the other "F in Alt." There is a special individuality in every voice, as in every face, and therefore every voice must be treated, by a good teacher, on its own merits, as a thing in some respects unique.
Perhaps it will be best, therefore, instead of saying that the compass of any given kind of voice is from —— to ——, to say that music for such and such a voice is generally written between such and such limits. The range allotted by composers to the various voices is about two octaves to each—for solo work, of course—and is as follows, it being understood that the male voices are an octave lower in pitch than the female:—