I'm probably just prejudiced, I'm afraid. I'm not very keen on baritones singing the Schubert cycles either, let alone mezzos/sopranos (though I do own a CD, bought out of curiosity, of a boy treble singing Die Schone Mullerin - sorry, no umlauts) - in fact I'm not all that keen on baritones in general, though they do vary very much and I do admire Keenlyside.  The idea of transposition does worry me to some degree in itself, too. Keys have individual characters, I feel. It's the iconic orchestral cycles, Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings and Nocturne, that I feel really strongly about, so I was relieved to realise that what Ron says is true - it would be impossible in some cases. I fully understand people wanting to sing them - I've certainly had a go in the privacy of my own home, and Heather Harper said when she was a teenager she sang the Serenade "in unison with Peter" on the record. That might have been worth hearing!

I just can't imagine Winter Words sung by a mezzo - must think about that. My copy just says "For high voice". Britten was keen on getting his work performed, generally - as I'm sure you know. he allows for a mezzo to sing Oberon.

I don't feel strongly about that one, for some reason, probably because it doesn't have the "iconic status" for me, and I don't speak Russian - I think the Russian mezzos should probably have their chance, so long as the sopranos do it too.

I wonder if sopranos should do "A Charm of Lullabies"?

Good evening, Rei.

Sorry I'm fading in and out like the Cheshire Cat; I'm doing some audio editing at the moment, and can only flick across from time to time whilst rendering.

It isn't as much the range per se for singers as the fach i.e. where the vocal line predominantly lies within that given range, and how much of it is physically awkward for the particular singer: what was comfortable for Pears has created problems for many tenors since for this very reason, it's just plain uncomfortable for them. They can sing higher, and/or lower but find that what fitted his vocal chords like a glove ends up either flapping around theirs like a pillow case or else is too tight to get into properly. The 'break' in his voice (a technical term for the point at which the chest and head voices, the two constituent registers of all human vocal production meet, and thus the most difficult and troublesome place in the whole vocal range for any singer*) seems to have been in an unusual place for a tenor voice: lower, towards where a Baritone's might be.

*Apologies for this very simplified description

I don't know exactly, but I'm happy to hazard a guess that it was at least a tone lower than most other tenors. So far as I know, Britten never wrote anything above a B?for him - and then only at crucial moments ("And God have mercy upon me" in Act 2, sc. i of Grimes, the first note of the climactic second "straight as lust" during The Ride to Rome in Lucretia). (I'm having to rely on memory here, the scores are not to hand.) Similarly, the lowest note I'm aware of written for him is the cheeky bottom C at the end of the Spring Symphony ("And so, my friends, I cease.") which is admittedly a little weak, but certainly more than a growl on the two recordings Pears made. All of this starts to suggest a low-ish tenor voice, but I'm also aware from personal experience that apart from the high notes big stretches of Britten's writing for him sit comfortably within a baritone's range: much more so than, for example, the music that Tippett writes for tenors: it's all this which leads me to this break conclusion. Britten's writing for baritone I always found more uncomfortable, for some reason: Billy and the baritone parts written for D F-D (War Requiem, Cantata Misericordium, Songs and Proverbs of William Blake) actually seem to lie higher in their own range for longer periods than do the parts written for Pears. Britten's writing for basses is pretty cruel, too. Swallow, right at the beginning of Grimes, is an absolute pig to sing, exploiting the extremes of the range and demanding great agility from the word go (lengthy warm-up essential). Claggarts need hugely strong bottom registers, as do Danskers and Quinces: vocal casting for Britten operas must be an extremely demanding task.

Yes, Mary, Evans is Keene on the Britten Grimes recording, was to have been Balstrode on the first Davis recording, but was too unwell, and sung Mr Flint at the premiere of Budd. He was also an exponent of the role of Bottom in MND, of course, celebrated amongst other things for an apoplectic complaint in his broad Welsh accent to Sir David Webster after a well-known British counter-tenor had altered the words to "I know a bank" in rehearsals, "These... 'omosexuals is b*ggering about with Shakespeare....and....Britten!" A comment at least doubly ironic....

Oh, and what's the last "Go there!" at the start of Grimes Act 2 ii? That's pretty low, too; it's very hard for any singer to make the right dramatic emphasis down there, especially after the long melisma before it (and is the second note of that another Bb?)

Ron, I'll need the score for that one -

...the 'go there's cover from top Bb to bottom C in all.

Rei,

The only reason I brought the subject of Pears up on this thread was to open out thoughts on transposition. Even in his own lifetime there were singers who were able to his roles their own: Richard Lewis, a Covent Garden stalwart, creator of Tippett's Mark and Achilles, as well as Walton's Troilus (and Glyndebourne's first Poppea Nero to boot) was wonderful as Vere. Had Kenneth MacDonald not died so early, I'm sure he would have been a major successor to Pears (it was he, not Tear, who covered and alternated for Pears in Burning Fiery Furnace, and again he rather than Tear who was given Pears's original role of Flute, when the later moved across to play Lysander as one of what must have been the oldest quartets of lovers on records in the Decca set).

Whilst it's true that there have been very few singers who can tackle the full range of Pears's repertoire convincingly, it's only fair to point out that they and others may well venture into other areas of the tenor domain that Pears wouldn't (or couldn't) consider. Singing actors are as bound by their psyche and physicality as other actors, they just have the added super-selection of having to possess exactly the right voice as well. So yes, Vickers as Albert or Quint, let alone Flute would have been a no-no (and he'd almost certainly never have considered Aschenbach ). Graham Clark is great for Quint and Vere but possibly too small to make a convincing Peter. Philip Langridge seems to have been able to work through most of the canon successfully, and there are plenty more tenors of the last three decades who can certainly make some of Pears's parts their own. For me the problem lies more with whether they can emulate rather than replicate his astonishing ability to colour words and phrases (or even, in Andrew Kennedy's case, sing the words at all without mangling the vowel sounds to the point where one wonders whether he actually can be singing in his mother tongue - Peter Schreier did at least have that excuse.)