Karniol was nothing like Chagy. Karniol was a bass who developed a contra-tenor like sound, Chagy was a fluke. technically he was a tenor, but his vioce defies real categorazation. Karniol, and to a lesser degree Yeshayeh Meisels represented the end of the pre-Sulzer free style chazzanut, and the transition to more symmetrically laid out compositions. By the time chagy came on the scene, some sixty or seventy years later, Orthodox cantorial music had moved from the Sulzer styled set compositions of, say, Gerowitsch, Rovner, Baruch Schorr and Minkowsky to the style the defined the “golden age.” That style was melismatic and resemlbed free style chazzanut, but was in fact organized and metered. Additionally, like his music, Karniol did not pay much attention to textual issues like punctuation or syntax. Sulzer restored those considerations, and after him, no cantor could ever ignore them. Glantz and others like Alter and Leibush Miller then added the layer of using the music to interpret the text.
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