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Chorus for mixed voices

Posted by DCA Theater on July 12, 2009 in Other, Summer Opera

Submitted by Stephen Raskauskas, Production Dramaturge

The five voice chorus of Handel’s Acis and Galatea , calls for a soprano, three tenors, and a bass.  Though today, SATB (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) choruses are most common, 5 part choruses were very common in Renaissance and baroque music.  Through the baroque period, a general trend shifted towards four voice choruses, with the melody in the soprano, a strong leading bass line, and two lines of harmony sandwiched between. 

Handel’s use of a 5 voice chorus would have sounded like somewhat of a throw back, even to people in 1718, when Acis and Galatea  debuted.  In addition to an uncommon scoring, Handel also makes heavy use of polyphonic, church-style counterpoint – usually choruses in baroque opera will sing in unison.  Because Acis and Galatea was performed at a private residence with its own chapel, Handel probably used singers whose main duties were to sing church music, and would have been familiar with this style of singing.  Since in polyphonic choruses, each singer sings different melodic ideas at the same time, the choristers in Acis and Galatea can imbue their line with their own individualized characters, rather than acting simply as a ‘park and bark’ group chorus.

In addition to the use of 5 voice choruses, baroque choruses also differed from modern ones in that they were often all-male, using boy sopranos to sing the upper parts.  The economics of supply-and-demand made boy sopranos a rare commodity, and some choristers were castrated to prevent their voices from developing and to retain their shimmering sopranos.  Nowadays, of course, that practice has been abolished.  In order to reproduce the timbre of a baroque chorus, conductors will often add men to an alto section or women to a tenor section.  Click “Read More” to read Caitlin McKechney’s thoughts on singing tenor in this 5 voice chorus:

And so, here I am, a woman singing a male part.  It’s actually common for mezzo-sopranos to take on male characters in opera, but singing in the male range itself doesn’t happen very often!  But this actually makes sense, since the demands on the tenor voice post-Baroque era has greatly changed, with high notes being sung with full voice as apposed to in a mix or falsetto.  The range of the tenor 1 line is not unlike the tessitura of the alto part in Messiah or Handel’s other choral works.  The only hurdle in the learning process has been transposing the music down an octave.  I used to do it in high school, since, like many choirs, our school choir lacked tenors.  But performance practice is an interesting thing…  I think that perhaps Handel would have approved of this modification, since the sound will be at least close to his original conception.