Epilogue

This brief closing section of the book explores how three recent examples of coloratura singing by the rising generation of singers reflects the relevance, importance, and power of the melismatic female singer. Rather than serving as a general sign of technical skill, decoration, or word painting, coloratura now also signals particular intensities, emotions, inflections, madness, and even death, depending on the performer and composer involved. And current coloraturas such as Natalie Dessay, Diana Damrau, Lisette Oropesa, Erin Morley, and so many more continue to revivify the power of the singing voice.

Carvalho, Gounod, and the Waltz

Between 1850 and 1867, Carvalho created coloratura roles in sixteen operas, including five by Gounod: Marguerite in Faust, Baucis in Philémon et Baucis, Sylvie in La Colombe, the title role in Mireille, and Juliette in Roméo et Juliette. This chapter focuses on Carvalho’s Gounod creations, examining a little-known aria that Gounod wrote for Carvalho, “Ah! Valse légère,” based on the waltz chorus, “Ainsi que la brise légère,” from Faust. The aria’s popularity spurred a vogue for the vertiginous waltz ariette and established Carvalho as a truly modern soprano who wielded authority because of her prodigious vocal virtuosity. Carvalho associated herself with this aria-type, catalyzed it as a new genre, and propagated its popularity and significance. Her use of coloratura resonates with the increasing opulence and ornament in Second Empire France and Carvalho’s contributions as a créatrice encourage us to reconsider this period of opera history.

Caroline Carvalho and Her World

By practicing and extending the art of coloratura singing, Caroline Carvalho (née Marie Félix-Miolan, 1827–1895) became the French soprano par excellence of the mid-nineteenth century. In her early career, the Parisian press compared her vocal prowess to the instrumental pyrotechnics of Paganini and Liszt. This chapter illustrates how engaging with Carvalho and her contemporaries uncovers interesting intersections between mid-nineteenth-century vocal and instrumental idioms. In the first half, I explore Carvalho’s watershed moment in her creation of the title role of Victor Massé’s La Reine Topaze, which was a product of a complex mixture of circumstance, shrewd role choices, and genre. I investigate how that moment led to two different kinds of competition: between the soprano’s vocal agility and instrumental virtuosity, and between Carvalho and her coloratura competitors. By claiming a vocalism at least equal to the virtuosity of instrumentalists, Carvalho carved out a new space for the coloratura soprano.

The New Franco-Italian School of Singing

The nineteenth-century web of teachers, singers, and teacher-singers suggests that coloratura can be examined from the perspective of treatises produced by vocal pedagogues. In addition to vocal instruction, the treatises provide clues as to interpretation, by recommending and describing vocal articulations and styles corresponding to melodic styles and role characterizations. This chapter examines pedagogical treatises in conjunction with musical scores and the careers of individual singers, attempting to trace ideas of coloratura articulation and florid-lyrical expression. The Paris Conservatoire endorsed certain teacher-singer lineages and sought to merge French and Italian traditions into a new school of singing led by three pedagogues: Laure Cinti-Damoreau, Gilbert-Louis Duprez, and Manuel Garcia II. The study reveals a bifurcation between singing styles that carries over from vocal pedagogy to the operatic stage. This division between agile, florid singing and declamatory, sustained singing heralded our modern, more familiar vocal categories, such as the coloratura soprano.

Vestiges of Virtuosity

The specificity of late coloratura’s function in arias has its roots in operatic writing before mid-century. Examining the role pairings in Meyerbeer’s popular nineteenth-century repertory opera, Les Huguenots, serves as a starting point for understanding the transition from coloratura as a normative singing style to one that functions as an uncommon and conspicuous gesture in operas like Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Delibes’ Lakmé, and Massenet’s Manon. The soprano roles in these operas hark back to the zenith of coloratura singing at mid-century, when high notes and melismas were an aural analogue to the ornamental decadence of Second Empire Paris. Coloratura arias in these operas are the late-century exceptions that prove the rule; they are echoes of the virtuosic vocality of the mid-century examples explored in the book. And they help codify the establishment of the modern French coloratura soprano.

Introduction

The Introduction sets forth a brief history of coloratura singing and identifies historical questions, issues, and contexts in scholarly literature. From opera’s origins, composers employed melismatic text treatment to highlight a singer’s agility, range, and the character’s emotional intensity, as well as for frequent moments of word painting. This tradition of solo singing was still prominent during the “bel canto” period of the early nineteenth century when composers employed coloratura vocal writing as part of normal melodic text treatment. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, coloratura was a rare feature in operatic vocal writing. Coloratura also shifted to the domain of female singers, and often particular sopranos. In providing a historical context for the study of singing, gender, and nineteenth-century opera, the author proposes that the increasing specificity of coloratura led to its eventual identity as a voice-type, becoming an indicator of the modern.

Melismatic Madness and Technology

By the mid nineteenth-century, coloratura had become stylized to the point that it could represent hysterical cries. If we consider technology in its original sense as a “practical art” that extends the body’s abilities, then coloratura—an art that features the extended agility and range of the voice—is perhaps the most striking technology employed to mark and empower the operatic madwoman. This chapter explores mid-century mad scenes and related technologies: Giacomo Meyerbeer’s L’Étoile du nord and Le Pardon de Ploërmel, as well as Ophélie’s mad scene in Ambroise Thomas’ Hamlet. These operas also feature sopranos who embody a particular, aestheticized view of femininity at mid-century as stylized, objectified icons of hysteria. Exploring the aural impact of these scenes, the sopranos who originally portrayed the mad heroines, the original staging manuals, and the historical context of emerging psychiatry highlights the importance of the visual in thinking about this phenomenon.

Verdi and the End of Italian Coloratura

Verdi’s compositional influence and emphatic involvement in promoting his operas in Paris make him an important force, with an operatic oeuvre that includes works that can be labeled “French” because of his use of French literary sources and musical forms. During his career, Verdi’s use of coloratura changed greatly, but key examples are still found in his middle-period operas, in Rigoletto, La traviata, and Les Vêpres siciliennes. This chapter examines how these moments of coloratura signify much more than their apparently straightforward melismatic text treatment might suggest. Arias such as “Caro nome” employ coloratura to suggest a dramatic subtext, uncovering the inner psychological voice of the character. Close readings of these arias suggest that Verdi’s use of coloratura serves as an omen, foreshadowing tragedy for the character singing. With these mid-century examples, we see that Verdi as a modern composer in a sense writes coloratura out of Italian opera.