Joan Sutherland – A Vocal Phenomemon

One of the world’s greatest sopranos, Joan Sutherland, turned 80 last year. And this seems as perfectly good a time as any to celebrate her achievements.

So, what were Sutherland’s achievements?

In a performance art in which vocal achievement is the prime criterion of greatness, Sutherland’s greatness can be measured by one simple criterion: She still has no successor to fill her shoes, 14 years after her retirement. Indeed, throughout the years of her career’s ascendancy, from 1959 to 1980, she had no peer. By this, I mean not that there were no other excellent sopranos, but that none possessed all the attributes that she did.

First, Sutherland’s voice was a spinto voice, a rarer category of soprano voice because it is more powerful than the average soprano voice.

Secondly, the timbre of her voice was of an unusual quality - round, full, limpid, as far removed from the stereotype of a thin-voiced screechy soprano as you could get. The voice appears to ebb and flow, and to glow luminously, as she sings. This luminous quality is most evident in the early years, in the early 1960s, when her voice was astonishingly beautiful. It also had what the Italians call ‘squillo’, or a ‘ping’ in English – that bright resonant edge to the voice that seems to ping on your ears, as in the difference you hear between a metal object dropping onto a marble floor and on a wooden one.

Thirdly, Sutherland had an extraordinary upper range that is usually beyond the reach of voices of the spinto type – she commanded two whole tones above the usual limit for a spinto soprano, reaching an E in alt, ie, two and a half octaves above middle C.

And finally, the ultimate clincher that helped to make her the single true vocal phenomenon in Italian opera of the second half of the 20th century: her extraordinary ability for florid singing. She was, by my reckoning, together with Beverly Sills, among the handful of truly outstanding coloratura sopranos of all time.

All these vocal attributes were harnessed for their apogee on that historic evening of 15 February 1959, when the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden launched Sutherland (one of their stalwart house sopranos) on her sensational international career in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. Sutherland’s triumph on that evening has been documented elsewhere. Suffice it to say that, on purely vocal terms, there has never been, to this moment of writing, a Lucia like Joan Sutherland. To hear for yourself why the opera world went wild, listen to Sutherland’s first recording of the two major arias made in the same year (1959), a recording even better than her first complete recording of the opera in 1961 (her second complete recording in 1973 with Pavarotti, however, found her in puzzlingly unattractive voice with neither glow nor ping to be heard anywhere).

The Joan Sutherland of this first phase of her vocal estate is nowhere more thrillingly heard than in her recording of famous soprano arias called The Art of the Prima Donna.

Soon after this, however, Sutherland deliberately found a different placement for her voice in order to take on the repertoire of Bel Canto operas, aiming to produce a fuller sound in the middle voice to serve the favoured range in which these operas were written. The middle voice became more substantial to the ears, more opaque and more covered, but at the expense of the young, fresh sound of her first phase. This second phase of her vocal evolution lasted roughly from 1962 to 1982.

In the final phase of Sutherland’s vocal development, from 1982 to 1992, the voice no longer had ‘squillo’ in the top range, but the middle voice was remarkably sensual in sound – oozing like melted chocolate. It was also an extraordinary sound. And it is hard to say which phase of Sutherland’s voice is the most attractive, for all three phases have their own claims to stake.

Joan Sutherland’s achievements sat squarely in the mainstream of the grand tradition of operatic vocalism, and she represents, in those four markers of her brilliance, the apogee of the art of singing. This art is in danger of having its importance increasingly diminished as modern audiences and critics approach opera as if they were watching merely a piece of theatre. For this reason, it is perfectly timely to re-affirm what Sutherland represented. Despite the constant harping by critics on her deficiencies during her singing years – her poor diction, her limited acting ability, her un-girlish physical build in roles which demand romantic heroines – Joan Sutherland was, quite simply, an absolute balm to the ears. In opera, hers is the voice that every aspiring soprano secretly dreams about. In the entire history of opera, hers is the voice among only a handful that is able to cope with the demands of any soprano role ever written.

And that is why the term ‘vocal phenomenon’ is not a term of approbation but a simple statement of fact.

[For more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Sutherland]