tti, was a male soprano. But other
breaks have been made with tradition, breaks which are not yet taken
for granted. When you find that all but one or two of the singers in
every opera house in the world are ignoring the rules in some respect
or other you may be certain, in spite of the protests of the
professors, that the rules are dead. Their excuse has disappeared and
they remain only as silly commandments made to fit an old religion. A
singer in Handel's day was accustomed to stand in one spot on the
stage and sing; nothing else was required of him. He was not asked to
walk about or to act; even expression in his singing was limited to
pathos. The singers of this period, Nicolini, Senesino, Cuzzoni,
Faustina, Caffarelli, Farinelli, Carestini, Gizziello, and
Pacchierotti, devoted their study years to preparing their voices for
the display of a certain definite kind of florid music. They had
nothing else to learn. As a consequence they were expected to be
particularly efficient. Porpora, Caffarelli's teacher, is said to have
spent six years on his pupil before he sent him forth to be "the
greatest singer in the world." Contemporary critics appear to have
been highly pleased with the result but there is some excuse for H. T.
Finck's impatience, expressed in "Songs and Song Writers": "The
favourites of the eighteenth-century Italian audiences were artificial
male sopranos, like Farinelli, who was frantically applauded for such
circus tricks as beating a trumpeter in holding on to a note, or
racing with an orchestra and getting ahead of it; or Caffarelli, who
entertained his audiences by singing, _in one breath_, a chromatic
chain of trills up and down two octaves. Caffarelli was a pupil of the
famous vocal teacher Porpora, who wrote operas consisting chiefly of
monotonous successions of florid arias resembling the music that is
now written for flutes and violins." All very well for the day, no
doubt, but could Cuzzoni sing Isolde? Could Faustina sing Melisande?
And what modern parts would be allotted to the Julian Eltinges of the
Eighteenth Century?

When composers began to set dramatic texts to music trouble
immediately appeared at the door. For example, the contemporaries of
Sophie Arnould, the "creator" of _Iphigenie en Aulide_, are agreed
that she was greater as an actress than she was as a singer. David
Garrick, indeed, pronounced her a finer actress than Clairon. From
that day to this there has been a continual t