The lowest classical female voice keeps getting cast as witches and boys
Contraltos hold the deepest range among classical female voices, stretching roughly from the F below middle C to the F two octaves up. Real operatic contraltos are scarce, and composers wrote few parts for them, so they often end up playing sorceresses, schemers or young men in trousers.
The label belongs mainly to classical and operatic singing, since other traditions lack a comparable system of voice categories. It is reserved for women: a man working in almost exactly the same territory is called a countertenor. Contralto and alto are not strictly interchangeable either. Alto is a choral term describing range alone, ignoring timbre, vocal weight and tessitura, the zone where a voice sits most comfortably, although French choral composers such as Ravel and Poulenc sometimes marked ordinary alto parts as contralto. At the extremes, some contraltos can sink to the D below middle C or climb to the B flat near the top of the staff.
Three subtypes are generally recognised. The coloratura contralto is agile enough for ornate, florid runs and was a favourite of Rossini. The lyric contralto is lighter in colour and suits much French and English opera, including many Gilbert and Sullivan parts and Ma Moss in The Tender Land. The dramatic contralto is dark, deep and bold, the sound of much German repertoire, from Erda in Der Ring des Nibelungen to Gaea in Daphne.
The earliest major role for this kind of low female voice is usually credited to 1702, when Andre Campra wrote the Saracen princess Clorinde in his opera Tancrede for Julie d'Aubigny. Heroines do sometimes come a contralto's way, such as Angelina in La Cenerentola or Olga in Eugene Onegin. Far more often the parts are villainesses, trouser roles, or music first composed for castrati, which explains the rueful rhyme singers trade among themselves: they get to play witches, bitches or britches.
Some women go lower still, into tenor and baritone territory, with a timbre slightly different from a man's. The film actress Zarah Leander and the Iranian singer Hayedeh both specialised there. The Guinness World Record for the lowest note sung by a woman is a D2, held by Helen Leahey. Outside opera, Chrissie Hynde, singer and guitarist of The Pretenders, has a contralto range.
Source: Contralto
