>Karen, you mentioned but two contemporary contraltos, Ewa Podles and Nathalie
>Stutzmann. Has the moniker "Contralto" hurt their careers? Just what was
>your teacher driving at ... that you should, perhaps, call yourself a
>contralto? How much did you discuss it with her, and did you present her
>with the same thoughts as you have the list? Back to the past: who besides
>Kathleen Ferrier was a true contralto? (I'm sure there were others; I'm just
>cognitively incoherent right now.) Were they barred from "mezzo" roles?
>What were their tops like?
In addition to Kathleen Ferrier, the "big name" historical contraltos of
the last century were Clara Butt, Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Louise Homer,
Sophie Braslau and Marian Anderson, and more recently Canadian contralto
Maureen Forrester. Some lesser-known 20th Century contraltos were Louise
Kirkby-Lunjn, Ottilie Metzger, Sabine Kalter, Edna Thornton, Gabriella
Besanzoni, Guerrina Fabri, Maria Gay, Suzanne Brohly, Marie Delna, Jeanne
Gerville-Reache, and others.
Interestingly, both Margarete Matzenauer and Olive Fremstad began their
careers as contraltos, but ended up singing dramatic soprano roles,
Fremstad changing her designation permanently, but Matzenauer continuing to
call herself a contralto or a mezzo-soprano, even though she sometimes sang
Isolde.
But I question how relevant these earlier contraltos are to today's
perceptions of what a real contralto is, only because the term
"mezzo-soprano" was seldom if ever used in the first decades of the 20th
Century. Thus, I think a large subset of the singers who called themselves
contraltos then would probably be classed as mezzo-sopranos now.
Karen
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