The standard Italian song-composers of the first half of the last century were especially fond of using the middle register for tones expressive of peculiarly dramatic pathos, as well as for powerful final passages of arias.  Our differently tuned ear demands that these tones of passion shall, as a rule, be as high as possible.  The alto voice as a solo voice has almost entirely disappeared from the operas in which it formerly played so conspicuous a part.  The elevated tone of our whole inner man has deprived us of any ear for the alto.

In any case we have here reached an extreme which is contrary to the very construction of the human vocal organs.  Scarcely is moderate and natural compass of tone still permitted, even in a song.  In every age the song-composer had been allowed to construct his melodies out of the fewest possible tones.  While the elder Bach in his arias often chases the human voice in the most ruthless manner from one extreme to the other, his sons and pupils in their little German songs confine themselves to the most modest compass.  Most of the later composers proceeded in the same way up to the time of the Romanticists; then the bonds were snapped, even in this respect.  Schubert, on the one hand, could compose the most moderate songs, on the other, the most immoderate.  It often seems (and this is also the case with Beethoven) that his fantasy rebelled against the fact that a curb was placed upon it by the natural limitation of the human voice.

This natural limitation, however, is once for all not to be done away with, and it is ignored only at the expense of feasibility.  Some later Romanticists, therefore, such as Spohr and Mendelssohn, came back immediately to the comfortable middle register as the real vocal register of song.  The thirst for shrill sounds had made men entirely forget that a song must be easy to sing just because it must always be sung suggestively and never be delivered with full dramatic execution.  Do not our singers, who since Schubert’s time are so fond of making a song a dramatic scene, feel how ridiculous it would be if a reader should declaim a song at the top of his voice like the dialogue of a drama?

In the invaluable privilege of writing for a moderate compass, a song-composer, almost alone of all composers, is provided with a means of reacting gradually upon instrumental music and of tuning anew the ear of our generation, so that it shall no longer find satisfaction in the shrill tones of extreme voice registers and the euphony of strong, easily and comfortably attained middle tones shall again be universally perceived.  At the present moment our instrumental art has, in this particular, fallen under the tyranny of piano manufacturers and makers of wind instruments.  When the keyboard of the grand piano has been made longer by a few keys, the composers think they are remaining “behind the times” if they do not immediately introduce these new high treble tones into their next work, and when the wind instruments have been enriched by several new valves and regulators the scores immediately grow in proportion to these keys and pistons.  But does art feel no shame at having thus fallen under the dominion of trade!