The cause of this will usually have been a desire to make progress too hastily in the earlier stages. They will not have devoted sufficient attention at the outset to practising slowly, and so ensuring absolutely just intonation and satisfactory tone quality. Therefore, it is emphatically a case here of “more haste less speed.” You cannot acquire velocity quickly. I will not repeat again the well-worn story of Porpora and Caffarelli. But that illustrates the point.
I cannot refrain from adding a few words while on this subject in defence of coloratura, which is so often contemptuously spoken of in these days by those who do not possess the power of singing it. We all know the kind of way in which it is referred to. Coloratura music is false, showy, superficial, unworthy, dramatically unreal, and so on. But what nonsense this is!
What is the difference in principle, I would ask, between the fioriture passages of the vocalist and those introduced as a matter of course in the most serious instrumental music? Why should a cadenza for the voice be reckoned less worthy than a similar passage for the violin or the ’cello? All the greatest masters have introduced florid passages in plenty in the noblest instrumental music. Yet the view is very generally adopted that these are inadmissible, or, at all events, belong to an inferior phase of the art when the instrument employed happens to be the voice.
No doubt the quality of the works more particularly identified with vocal music of this order has had something to do with the matter. Yet it is hardly necessary to recall that vocal fioriture is by no means confined to the music of Donizetti, Bellini, and the like.
Bach, for one, had no sort of prejudice on the point, as is demonstrated often enough even in his most solemn work, while Handel, again, revelled in coloratura, alike in the case of his operas, containing some of the most wonderful florid music ever written, and of his oratorios, to which no less applied.
That Mozart can be reckoned in the same category it is hardly necessary to recall, while even Beethoven did not disdain to utilise the arts of vocal decoration in many of the numbers of “Fidelio.” If, therefore, coloratura singing is sometimes spoken of disrespectfully, it is not from lack of distinguished names which can be cited in its defence.
Nor is it only among the ancients that such are to be found. In the modern Russian School we have Rimsky-Kosakoff’s “Hymn to the Sun” from “Coq d’Or.” And have we not also such an eminently serious master as Richard Strauss challenging comparison in our own time with the most extravagant productions of the past in this particular genre in the music of Zerbinetta in his “Ariadne”? One of his latest songs, “Amor,” is purely for coloratura singers.
As to the charge that coloratura in dramatic music is unnatural and undramatic, those who argue thus surely overlook the fact that all opera might with equal justice be disposed of in the same manner. People do not express themselves in song in real life, any more than they speak in blank verse, as they are made to do in Shakespearean drama.
Yet we are glad to have “Don Giovanni” and “King Lear” none the less! It is, indeed, truly straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel to condemn coloratura while accepting opera as a whole.
I go further than this, for I venture to say that coloratura can be not only delightful to the ear but also thoroughly appropriate and dramatically expressive. What could be more suitable to give expression to the madness of Lucia than the roulades which Donizetti gives to her? Or how could the joy of Marguérite be more exquisitely expressed than in the strains of Gounod’s “Jewel Song”?