The great Irish tenor lends his beautiful voice and immaculate diction to this classic tenor aria. Many tenors rely on devices of one kind or another to navigate the tessiture of this aria, especially the exposed high C, which has been the death, on stage, of many a tenor. These tricks include a barely noticeable modulation in chord progression in the early part of the aria, or the use of a reasonably substantial head voice. McCormack simply sings the aria transposed one half tone down. It is still a lovely piece of singing, even if the transposition throughout the piece can lead to a certain sleepy kind of tenderness of which Gounod would probably have disapproved. He would, I suspect, simply have recommended taking the C in head voice, which was the tradition in France at that time. Techniques aside, McCormack sings it beautifully, which is all the audience then or now would really care about.
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