Coloratura

In singing, a coloratura (from the Latin color = "color, coloring") is a rapid succession of notes with short note values, often of equal length. Coloraturas are melismatic, i.e. several notes fall together on the vowel of a text syllable. They can be tied or staccato.

The principle of ornamentation playing around the melody had already been developed since the Middle Ages and found its first peak in the practice of diminution in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, for example in composers such as Luzzasco Luzzaschi or Giulio Caccini. Up to this point, coloratura was a form of improvisation, but it remained essential well into the 19th century. Coloratura is an important part of the vocal technique of bel canto and opera music from Claudio Monteverdi to Giuseppe Verdi, and was particularly part of opera seria in the 18th century.

The virtuosity of coloratura increased in the late Baroque, when the most virtuosic singers were increasingly required not only to perform runs, but also leaps and broken chords, as was fashionable in violin and keyboard music. An important role in this development was played by famous castrati such as Farinelli or Carestini, as well as prima donnas such as Faustina Bordoni, Caterina Gabrielli, Lucrezia Agujari, etc. The tonal range was also extended in the 18th century and already reached its upper limit in the Classical era (the most famous example of this is the arias of the Queen of the Night in Mozart's Magic Flute). In the early Romantic operas of the so-called bel canto in Italy between 1810 and about 1850, especially with Gioachino Rossini, coloratura singing experienced a last great peak and was pushed to the limit - now also in opera buffa. Already with Rossini's younger colleagues Bellini and Donizetti, drama played an ever greater role and the coloraturas gradually became fewer and simpler. While until about 1830 all voice parts in Italian opera still sang coloratura, these disappeared first from the male voices, until in the second half of the 19th century only the coloratura sopranos remained.

Since Carl Maria von Weber, German opera has used almost no coloratura, which is partly due to the development of a German national style, but also to the fact that German singers (with exceptions such as Gertrud Elisabeth Mara or Henriette Sontag) usually did not possess the spectacular coloratura technique of the Italians. Then, in the course of the 19th century, the demand for drama gained more and more weight, and coloratura singing was displaced in Italy, too, from about 1855 with Verdi, because it was regarded by the Romantics as increasingly old-fashioned and artificial. After 1860 virtuoso coloraturas for high sopranos were still occasionally used for cheerful, flirtatious, or witty effects, e.g., by Jacques Offenbach in the aria of the doll Olympia in Les Contes d'Hoffmann (1881) or in the Frühlingsstimmenwalzer (1883) by Johann Strauss. Arias with numerous coloraturas are also called coloratura arias.

In the works of Richard Wagner, Giacomo Puccini and other composers, coloratura no longer played any role at all; it was no longer compatible with the naturalistic expressive demands of through-composed opera.

See also

• Bel canto
• coloratura soprano
• Trill