[JohnBovenmyer]

Anacreon seems to have been a popular tune to use back in the day, for all the modern gripes about its range. Keyes had explicitly used the tune before to set an earlier poem, celebrating earlier battles in a current war, albeit according to Pasha Obama, not a real war.

[JohnBovenmyer]

Oops, failed to fill in my link to the earlier poem

[chajin]

Anacreon seems to have been a popular tune to use back in the day, for all the modern gripes about its range.

Only a drunk, a coloratura, or a castrato would want to sing the range of a twelfth, and the castrati had gone out of fashion when opera switched from Handel to Cherubini and Mozart (which I think was a good thing, but that's a separate issue).

One of the reasons the late Whitney Houston was able to pull it off so effectively was that she had stretched her mezzo voice down to low Bb, essentially contralto range, and then was able to seamlessly switch to falsetto for the high Eb and F; lots of Houston wannabes have tried since, but no one has pulled it off as well IMHO.