# Which singers would you say have the most beautiful voices/timbre per se?



## Baritenor (Dec 13, 2015)

Particularly interested in sopranos.


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## howlingfantods (Jul 27, 2015)

just off the top of my head--

Sopranos - Leontyne Price, Tebaldi, Janowitz, pre-diet Callas, Te Kanawa, Margaret Price, Angela Gheorghiu, early Netrebko, Fleming, Schwarzkopf, Elisabeth Schumann, Lisa Della Casa, Martina Arroyo, Elisabeth Grummer, Anna Moffo, Victoria de los Angeles, Hilde Gueden, Kathleen Battle, Irmgard Seefried

Mezzos/Altos-Christa Ludwig, von Stade, Shirley Verrett, Kathleen Ferrier, Janet Baker, Waltraud Meier

Tenors - Bjorling, Wunderlich, Domingo, Carrerras, Gigli, Kaufmann, Neil Shicoff, di Stefano, Heppner, Cesar Valletti, Ferruccio Tagliavini

Baritones - Bastianini, Bruson, Merrill, Cappuccilli, Peter Mattei, Giorgio Zancanaro, Gerard Souzay

Basses/Bass-Baritones - Jose Van Dam, Hans Hotter, Mark Reizen, Kurt Moll, Nicolai Ghiaurov, Roger Soyer, Tom Krause, Franz Crass


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## Baritenor (Dec 13, 2015)

howlingfantods said:


> just off the top of my head--
> 
> Sopranos - Leontyne Price, Tebaldi, Janowitz, pre-diet Callas, Te Kanawa, Margaret Price, Angela Gheorghiu, early Netrebko, Fleming, Schwarzkopf, Elisabeth Schumann, Lisa Della Casa, Martina Arroyo, Elisabeth Grummer, Anna Moffo, Victoria de los Angeles, Hilde Gueden, Kathleen Battle, Irmgard Seefried
> 
> ...


Callas' is beautiful per se? That's definitely an against the grain opinion


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## howlingfantods (Jul 27, 2015)

Baritenor said:


> Callas' is beautiful per se? That's definitely an against the grain opinion


pre-weight loss, I find her voice very beautiful, albeit pretty unusual. post-weight loss, she started exhibiting signs of unsteadiness, register breaks, raw high notes, the things that detractors mostly point to when arguing against Callas.


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## BalalaikaBoy (Sep 25, 2014)

soprano: Joan Sutherland, Kirsten Flagstad, Martina Arroyo, Ingaborg Hallstein, June Anderson, Montserrat Caballe, Elena Soliotis, Anna Moffo
mezzos: Elena Cernei, Tamara Sinyavskaya, Irene Menghini Cattaneo, Shirley Verrett, Elena Obraztsova, Jennifer Larmore
contraltos: Claramae Turner, Eula Beal**, Monica Sinclair

tenors: James King, Anatoly Solovyanenko, Franco Corelli, Set Svanholm, Lauritz Melchior, Jonas Kaufmann
baritones: Mykola Kondratyuk, Sherill Milnes, Robert Merrill, Hakan Hagegard, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Giorgio Tozzi, Cornel MacNeil
basses: Samuel Ramey, Boris Shtokolov, Willard White, Ilya Meleschenko, Nicolai Ghiaurov 

**I'm honestly more inclined to say she was a lyric mezzo, but the contraltos needed more members


outside of opera, my tastes would be like 80% mezzo and contralto


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## Dorsetmike (Sep 26, 2018)

I note no counter tenors in the lists, I would add Jaroussky, Bowman, Mera and Daniels.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

What is a beautiful voice divorced from style and artistry - divorced from fine musicianship and expression? It's rather like a beautiful face on a mannequin. Beauty, as they say, is more than skin - or timbre - deep. The way a singer uses her voice has a great influence on our impression of its beauty. But there are a few singers whose mere sound moves me, whether or not "beautiful" is the right word for it, and would probably do so even if they were singing scales. (I won't generally include singers whose voices we know only from pre-electrical recordings, with one unavoidable exception). Ones who come immediately to mind include Riccardo Stracciari, Enrico Caruso, Tito Schipa, Jussi Bjorling, Amelita Galli-Curci, Rosa Ponselle, Kirsten Flagstad, Elisabeth Schumann, and Anna Moffo.

Then there's Claudia Muzio, whose beauty of sound I find incredibly poignant and am helpless to distinguish from the emotion with which she sings. Really, what are we to make of singing like this?


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## silentio (Nov 10, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> Then there's Claudia Muzio, whose beauty of sound I find incredibly poignant and am helpless to distinguish from the emotion with which she sings. Really, what are we to make of singing like this?


Yes! Ponselle's and Flagstad's voices are beautiful, but Muzios' is painfully beautiful. Sometimes I don't even feel like she sings, more like crying, sighing and murmuring in an incredibly tasteful way.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

silentio said:


> Yes! Ponselle's and Flagstad's voices are beautiful, but Muzios' is painfully beautiful. Sometimes I don't even feel like she sings, more like crying, sighing and murmuring in an incredibly tasteful way.


Some singers of rare talents seem to transcend singing as we know it. I feel this way listening to a very different singer, Elisabeth Schumann, performing Lieder. The vocalism is impeccable, yet she seems to emit thoughts and feelings rather than notes, which are not so much deliberate formations as spontaneous phenomena arising from the singer's subconscious, just as intonations do in speech. Caruso could transcend the notes in this same way, seeming to pour the tone, glowing and bursting with feeling, through phrases in which separate notes occur almost incidentally, as elements of a scene are observed from a train not as objects in themselves but as signs of the impulse of power which propels us through the landscape. The effect is somehow more than music, and it isn't necessarily a product of an extraordinarily refined or sophisticated sensibility, yet it's a primal fulfillment of the musical impulse, which is to communicate, and it's a thing most musicians aspire to but rarely reach. These singers, whose voices respond to and transmit every shade and nuance of emotion, produce performances that simply can't be compared to those of others, no matter what artistic insights those others may bring to bear.


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## Seattleoperafan (Mar 24, 2013)

My esteemed colleagues have marvelous lists.
Currently the most beautiful voice is the countertenor David Hansen, IMHO.
The most beautiful tenors were Caruso, Bjorling, John Alexander ( seldom mentioned but a glorious voice) and Gilgi
The most beautiful sopranos are Ponselle,Flagstad, Traubel,Tebaldi, Leider, early L. Price, Sutherland, Battle, fat Norman, early Sills
Mezzos: Stignani, J. Larmore, Horne, Verrett
Contralto: Ferrier and Maureen Forrester


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## BalalaikaBoy (Sep 25, 2014)

Seattleoperafan said:


> My esteemed colleagues have marvelous lists.
> Currently the most beautiful voice is the countertenor David Hansen, IMHO.
> The most beautiful tenors were Caruso, Bjorling, *John Alexander* ( seldom mentioned but a glorious voice) and Gilgi
> The most beautiful sopranos are Ponselle,Flagstad, Traubel,Tebaldi, Leider, early L. Price, Sutherland, Battle, fat Norman, early Sills
> ...


he was supposed to be on my list! I shall edit him in


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## BalalaikaBoy (Sep 25, 2014)

BalalaikaBoy said:


> soprano: Joan Sutherland, Kirsten Flagstad, Martina Arroyo, Ingaborg Hallstein, June Anderson, Montserrat Caballe, Elena Soliotis, Anna Moffo
> mezzos: Elena Cernei, Tamara Sinyavskaya, Irene Menghini Cattaneo, Shirley Verrett, Elena Obraztsova, Jennifer Larmore
> contraltos: Claramae Turner, Eula Beal**, Monica Sinclair
> 
> ...


forgot to add John Alexander for tenors and Maureen Forester for contraltos. also, let's add Mary Costa for sopranos

hell, while I'm at it, let's through in a few boy sopranos: Aled Jones, Bobby Breene


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## Tsaraslondon (Nov 7, 2013)

I prefer singing that is beautifully expressed rather than merely beautiful, but one of my favourites is Fritz Wunderlich, who had a voice of such heady beauty, that he completely and throughly disarms me.


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