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Twenty Favourite Italian Tenor Arias

Tenors have had a varied fate in operatic history and have not always had the heroic identities they now generally possess, with fathers and villains singing in a lower register, heroines as high-flying sopranos, and duennas, mothers, confidantes and nurses confined to mezzo-soprano or even contralto registers.

The tenor voice enjoyed early favour as opera developed, in the first years of the seventeenth century. By the 1640s, though, matters had started to change. Now the principal heroic rôles were allotted to castrato singers, male sopranos or male altos, while the tenor all too often took character parts, comic servants or even pantomime dame nurses. The fortunes of the voice began to revive in the eighteenth century, notably with the operas of Handel, while the French continued to use their own version of the high tenor, the haute-contre, with its tendency to falsetto in its highest r