It thus became unnecessary to secure longer duration to the voices of boys, especially as these were never able to attain to the peculiar grace of the female voice, and so this class of singers gradually died out. But still in the first half of the present century there were many of them living and sought for as teachers of singing. _To the disappearance of this kind of singers, Rossini thinks the decline of vocal art is to be mainly ascribed._
The art of singing rose in the course of the seventeenth century to an extraordinary height of cultivation, and was diffused more and more by means of the opera, then blooming, as we have said, into beauty. But in that brilliant springtime of vocal art, it was not mere externals, such as beauty of tone, flexibility, etc., that were striven for, but, above all, the correct expression of the feeling intended in the composition. This rendered necessary to the singer the most thorough æsthetic culture, going hand in hand with the culture of the vocal organ. For only thus could he succeed in acting upon the souls of his hearers, in moving them and carrying them along with him in the emotions which the music awakened in his own mind. The dramatic singer was now strongly tempted to neglect the externals of his art for the æsthetic, purely inward conception of the music. Certain, at least, it is that to the neglect of the training of the voice (_Tonbildung_), and to the style of writing of our modern composers--a style unsuited to the art of singing, and looking only to its spiritual element--the decline of this art is in part to be traced. _Mannstein_ says that, with the disappearance of those great masters, power and beauty of tone have fallen more and more into contempt, and at the present day it is scarcely known what is meant by them. True it is, that a beautiful tone of voice (_Gesangston_), which must be considered the foundation and first requisition of fine singing, is more and more rare among our singers, male and female, and yet it is just as important in music as perfect form in the creations of the sculptor.
But the complete technical education of the earlier singers misled many of them into various unnatural artifices, in order to obtain notice and distinction. The applause of the public caused such trickeries to become the fashion among artists. The multitude, accustomed to such effects, began to mistake them for art. By the gradual disappearance of the male sopranists, instruction in singing fell into the hands of tenor singers, who usually cultivated the female voice in accordance with their own voices, which could not be otherwise than injurious in the uncertainty existing as to the limits in compass and the difference between the male and female organs of voice.