Soprano is High female singing voice

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Desdemona and Salome, the Queen of Shamakhan and Yaroslavna, Aida and Cio-Cio-San, as well as many other opera parts are written for soprano vocalists. This is the highest singing female voice, the range of which is two to three octaves. However, it is so different! Let's try to figure out what this high female voice is like and its features.

What are female singing voices?

The main types of female voices are:

• contr alto;
• mezzo-soprano;
• soprano.

Their main difference is the range of sound, as well as timbre coloring, which includes such properties as saturation, lightness and power of voice, individual for each performer.

So, a soprano is a high voice with a sound range of at least two octaves, from C1 to F3.

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In the traditions of the Russian music school, it is customary to distinguish the following three main varieties of soprano voices:

• coloratura;
• dramatic;
• lyric.

Besides, there are two intermediate types of soprano - lyric-coloratura and lyric-dramatic. Let's understand what is the difference between all these species.

Voice with decorations

This is what you can call the highest female voice - coloratura soprano. It got its name due to the ability to easily perform coloratura - special vocal decorations. An example of coloratura performance is Alyabyev's romance "The Nightingale", where they beat the main theme of the work.

Thanks to the coloratura soprano, such wayward and playful images appear on the stage, like Zerlina in Mozart's Don Giovanni or Lyudmila from Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila. The extraordinary possibilities of this voice are often used to create fabulous and fantastic characters, such as the Swan Princess, the Snow Maiden and the Queen of Shamakhan in the operas by N. Rimsky-Korsakov or Dolls from Jacques Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann. The disadvantage of such a soprano voice is that the vocalists cannot perform choral parts. The most prominent owners of such vocals are Diana Damrau, Kristina Deitekom, Cecilia Bartoli, Svetlana Feodulova, Olga Pudova.

Dramatic soprano

A very rare voice, highly valued in the music world, as singers can perform almost any repertoire - from coloratura to mezzo-soprano. The voice is strong, "huge" in volume and richness of overtones, which allows it to easily break through the choir andorchestra. An ignorant person can easily confuse him with a mezzo-soprano. The downside of this beautiful and rich voice is that not all performers get lyrical images and works (because of the tragic coloring of the voice). You can hear the dramatic soprano in these opera parts:

• Abigaille from Nabucco by G. Verdi;
• Aida and Traviata from operas of the same name;
• Yaroslavna from "Prince Igor" Borodin and others.

The amazing Maria Callas had such a voice, as well as such famous opera primas as Anita Cerkvetti, Astrid Varnay, Jessie Norman, Gena Dimitrova.

Today, dramatic soprano can be heard performed by Galina Gorchakova, Maria Guleghina, Anna Shafazhinskaya, Irina Gordey, Eva Marton, Leontyn Price, Eva Genser.

Lyric soprano

This soft-sounding voice is more compact and mobile than a dramatic soprano. They use the lyric soprano in opera parts where it is necessary to show warmth, affection and tenderness, for example, in the part of Natasha Rostova from Prokofiev's "War and Peace" or Tatyana Larina from "Eugene Onegin" by P. Tchaikovsky. Kiri Te Kanawa, Tarja Turunen, Rene Fleming, Danielle DeNise, Amanda Roocroft, Cullen Esperian have this gentle timbre.

Lyric-coloratura soprano is a voice with a working range from C to the first to F of the third octave, characterized by transparency of the timbre. Unlike the coloratura, this soprano has a denser sound, whichcan be heard in the part of Princess Volkhova from Rimsky-Korsakov's "Sadko" or Antonina from Glinka's "Ivan Susanin". Performers with such a voice are given the roles of cheerful and playful young heroines, since dramatic “colors” are practically inaccessible to them and they express grief, pain, suffering or cruelty by lyrical means. Antonina Nezhdanova, Diana Petrinenko, Elizaveta Shumskaya, Galina Oleynichenko, Lyudmila Zlatova were famous for their lyric-coloratura soprano. Today Montserat Caballe, Dilber Yunus, Elena Terentyeva, A. Solenkova perform parts for this voice.

Lyric-dramatic soprano, depending on the personal data of the performer, can be both dramatic and lyrical. The images embodied on stage by singers with such voices, as a rule, are overflowing with passions and deep feelings. As a rule, these are young women or girls whose breadth of character can be shown by the powerful voice of the vocalist, such as Kuma from Tchaikovsky's The Enchantress or Tamara from Rubinstein's The Demon. Quite rarely, the lyric-dramatic soprano is used to create images of older women or character-comic roles. Rayna Kabaivanska, Galina Gorchakova, Teresa Stratas, Lidia Abramova and others have this type of voice.