Although the year 1791 saw the death of Mozart – and his final appearance singing as an alto – it is not for this reason that it makes a useful demarcation point in the history of the high male voice. A number of references from this year suggest that the old method of deploying modal and falsetto techniques, which we have traced from medieval times to the Renaissance world of Zacconi and then Tosi, was now on the wane. Not, of course, that 1791 represents any kind of sudden break. We should bear in mind that as far back as 1752 Quantz had written that at least in France the falsetto and modal voices were not commonly united by singers. And in due course we will read the astonishment of Rossini at hearing, in 1831, one of his tenor parts sung in this new, purely modal manner. The seismic rifting of old and new vocal styles rumbled on for decades, then, but we can place its epicentre at the end of the eighteenth century.

The Choral Alto in the Age of Haydn

Changes in performance practice are bound up in compositional developments, and they, in turn, tend to reflect changes in society. We should hardly be surprised, then, that around the time of the French Revolution we begin to sense a significant wind of change in the way that men sang high.