instrumental music? Obviously because, as Richard Wagner remarks, "the
human voice is the oldest, the most genuine, and the most beautiful
organ of music--the organ to which alone our music owes its
existence." And not only is the sound or quality of the human voice
more beautiful than that of any artificial instrument, but it is
capable of greater variation. Although a good artist can produce
various shades of tone on his instrument, yet every instrument has a
well-defined characteristic _timbre_, which justifies us in speaking,
for instance, of the majestic, solemn trombone, the serene flute, the
amorous violoncello, the lugubrious bassoon, and so on. The human
voice, on the other hand, is much less limited in its powers of tonal
and emotional coloring. It is not dependent for its resonance on a
rigid tube, like the flute, or an unchangeable sounding-board, like
the violin or the piano, but on the cavity of the mouth, which can be
enlarged and altered at will by the movements of the lower jaw, and
the soft parts--the tongue and the glottis. These movements change the
overtones, of which the vowels are made up, and hence it is that the
human voice is capable of an infinite variety of tone-color, compared
with which Wagner admits that even "the most manifold imaginable
mixture of orchestral colors must appear insignificant."

Notwithstanding that the superiority of the voice is thus conceded,
even by the greatest magician of the orchestra, we daily hear the
complaint that the good old times of artistic singing are gone by, and
have been superseded by an instrumental era, in which the voice merely
plays the part of the second fiddle and is maltreated by composers,
who do not understand its real nature. So far is this opinion from the
truth that it must be said, contrariwise, that it is only within the
last century--I might almost say the last half century--that composers
have begun fully to recognize the true function of the human voice and