Voice
Giuditta Pasta's voice was what could be called a soprano sfogato:
Madame Pasta's voice has a considerable range. She can achieve perfect resonance on a note as low as bottom A, and can rise as high as C#, or even to a slightly sharpened D; and she possesses the rare ability to be able to sing contralto as easily as she can sing soprano. I would suggest ... that the true designation of her voice is mezzo-soprano, and any composer who writes for her should use the mezzo-soprano range for the thematic material of his music, while still exploiting, as it were incidentally and from time to time, notes which lie within the more peripheral areas of this remarkably rich voice. Many notes of this last category are not only extremely fine in themselves, but have the ability to produce a kind of resonant and magnetic vibration, which, through some still unexplained combination of physical phenomena, exercises an instantaneous and hypnotic effect upon the soul of the spectator. This leads to the consideration of one of the most uncommon features of Madame Pasta's voice: it is not all moulded from the same metallo, as it is said in Italy (which is to say that it possesses more than one timbre); and this fundamental variety of tone produced by a single voice affords one of the richest veins of musical expression which the artistry of a great cantatrice is able to exploit."
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Famous quotes containing the word voice:
“There was neither voice nor crested image,
No chorister, nor priest. There was
Only the great height of the rock
And the two of them standing still to rest.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)
“I’m tired of earning my own living, paying my own bills, raising my own child. I’m tired of the sound of my own voice crying out in the wilderness, raving on about equality and justice and a new social order.... Self-sufficiency is exhausting. Autonomy is lonely. It’s so hard to be a feminist if you are a woman.”
—Jane O’Reilly, U.S. feminist and humorist. The Girl I Left Behind, ch. 7 (1980)