# Maria Cebotari: leggiero soprano sings spinto/dramatic rep



## BalalaikaBoy (Sep 25, 2014)

(for some reason, most of the recordings of her are in German despite her being a Romanian singer)

as you can tell from this clip, we are dealing with a true coloratura soprano in the same vein as Tetrazzini, Melba or de Hidalgo. 





but then she goes and does this





and this





...and THIS





As a fan of strong voices, I'm always happy to hear a coloratura soprano with a bit of meat in the voice. There isn't a weak note in her entire range. She actually sounds like a _natural human voice_ rather than a canary or squeaking kitten.


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## MAS (Apr 15, 2015)

Amazing range - I heard her on records a few decades ago and was amazed.


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## BalalaikaBoy (Sep 25, 2014)

MAS said:


> Amazing range - I heard her on records a few decades ago and was amazed.


I'm less amazed by the range itself and more amazed by how well developed it is from top to bottom. Like, what a coloratura is supposed to sound like when they actually sing with their full voice.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Here we go, faching around again. Cebotari is surely a singer who defies categorization. Given the breadth of the repertoire in which she was enormously successful, why call her a "coloratura"? Plenty of singers have fine coloratura technique, even if they don't often sing music that calls for it. It's pretty stunning to hear Jon Vickers negotiate Handel's "Ev'ry valley" with ease and brilliance, and it was even a surprise to me to hear Bidu Sayao give as exciting a rendition of Rossini's "Bel raggio" as I - and, I imagine, anyone - could ever hope to hear. 

Our vocal categories - "fachs" - often end up being merely ways of identifying singer's limitations. Calling Cebotari by any of these names certainly suggests limitations she doesn't exhibit.


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## BalalaikaBoy (Sep 25, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> Here we go, faching around again. Cebotari is surely a singer who defies categorization. Given the breadth of the repertoire in which she was enormously successful, why call her a "coloratura"? Plenty of singers have fine coloratura technique, even if they don't often sing music that calls for it. It's pretty stunning to hear Jon Vickers negotiate Handel's "Ev'ry valley" with ease and brilliance, and it was even a surprise to me to hear Bidu Sayao give as exciting a rendition of Rossini's "Bel raggio" as I - and, I imagine, anyone - could ever hope to hear.
> 
> Our vocal categories - "fachs" - often end up being merely ways of identifying singer's limitations. Calling Cebotari by any of these names certainly suggests limitations she doesn't exhibit.


If the point of voice type labels (fach or otherwise) is about "limitation" to you, I suppose that makes sense, but it isn't to me.

Admittedly, you're right about "coloratura". I've even contemplated making a thread called "coloratura isn't a voice type.", I'll even extend this and say there is a troubling trend of saying "you are this fach because you have this ability (that every well trained voice as the potential to develop)". For example, it would be pretty ridiculous to call Maria Callas a "portamento soprano". Trouble is, for now, there isn't really a better word in common usage.

However, the problem that comes when you go too far in the other direction is a sort of "every voice is unique" obscurantism. General categories are necessary for us to compare one singer to another, and grouping similar things together is as important to listening (either critically or just for enjoyment) as it is to any other activity humans think about. Comparison is how we get things like context, proportion, how common/rare something is, etc.


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## Becca (Feb 5, 2015)

There are two types of people in the world, those who divide the people in the world into two types [fachs], and those who don't.
No matter how you do it or rationalize it, once you start dividing, you are limiting, discriminating, misleading.
There are two types of people in the world, those who can see this and those who can't. :lol:


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

BalalaikaBoy said:


> If the point of voice type labels (fach or otherwise) is about "limitation" to you, I suppose that makes sense, but it isn't to me.
> 
> Admittedly, you're right about "coloratura". I've even contemplated making a thread called "coloratura isn't a voice type.", I'll even extend this and say there is a troubling trend of saying "you are this fach because you have this ability (that every well trained voice as the potential to develop)". For example, it would be pretty ridiculous to call Maria Callas a "portamento soprano". Trouble is, for now, there isn't really a better word in common usage.
> 
> However, the problem that comes when you go too far in the other direction is a sort of "every voice is unique" obscurantism. General categories are necessary for us to compare one singer to another, and grouping similar things together is as important to listening (either critically or just for enjoyment) as it is to any other activity humans think about. Comparison is how we get things like context, proportion, how common/rare something is, etc.


I didn't say that the point of voice type labeling was "about limitation." I said that, quoting me, "our vocal categories - 'fachs' - often end up being merely ways of identifying singer's limitations." "Coloratura" is a good example: it tends to describe sopranos who haven't the vocal richness or heft to do much more than chirp. The point here is that "coloratura" is a falsely limiting descriptor when applied to Cebotari. Apparently you actually agree with this.

It's more or less true that every voice is unique, but I don't think anyone has suggested banning labels that help to identify differences in what voices can do, or do best. It's merely necessary to recognize the limitations of labels and to avoid applying them too crudely, exclusively and definitively. Fachs are not a form of biological taxonomy, but even in biology there are transitional species that we give certain names mainly in order to talk about them. Is this bird a duck or a goose? Does it matter? If we can discuss singers adequately without assigning them a fach, there isn't much point in labeling them, much less in arguing about which category they "really" belong in. Cebotari is a wonderful demonstration of the futility of overzealous faching.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Becca said:


> There are two types of people in the world, those who divide the people in the world into two types [fachs], and those who don't.
> No matter how you do it or rationalize it, once you start dividing, you are limiting, discriminating, misleading.
> There are two types of people in the world, those who can see this and those who can't. :lol:


:tiphat: ...........................


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## Yotam1703 (Apr 26, 2021)

I don’t think I agree with you, for two reasons. 

One, the true intention of the fach system is not to put in a box, to limit or to categorize singers, but marketing. 
See, when trying to cast the perfect Lakme, one just can get away with reading the description of every singer on the planet looking for descriptors such as “agile”, “light” and “high-pitched” (Montserrat Caballé has had very decent agility but she would never think of singing Olympia, say). It instead was much more helpful for every singer to put on a simple label that would group some of these descriptors, for both brevity and convenience. 

Second, the Coloratura Soprano fach is not the fach of all singers that can perform complex fioriturae - much like a Dramatic Soprano is not simply a very loud soprano. 
Again, fachs group together many related descriptors of weight, size, color and more: a Coloratura is the lightest, highest and most agile of sopranos, and the Dramatic is the heaviest and darkest. 
Can a coloratura have a darker voice? Sure! Anna Moffo’s timbre was quite smokey while singing that highest-and-lightest repertoire. Can she have heft to her voice? Yes, but we should probably give her another micro-label like “Dramatic Coloratura” and there is a whole page of repertoire that requires singers of this voice type. 
In the same vein, a Dramatic soprano can get quite agile (like Ghena Dimitrova singing Abogaille), or stiff (like Birgit Nilsson singing the same piece...). 

All in all, the fach system being used as an exercise in decision making algorithms is quite annoying. It should be used as a general guideline for casting purposes. Any discussion more nuanced than “dramatic coloratura or regular coloratura” should abolish the fach talk and just get to describing. In my opinion, of course


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## Becca (Feb 5, 2015)

Yotam1703 said:


> All in all, the fach system being used as an exercise in decision making algorithms is quite annoying. It should be used as a general guideline for casting purposes. Any discussion more nuanced than "dramatic coloratura or regular coloratura" should abolish the fach talk and just get to describing. In my opinion, of course


Please ... what is "a general guideline for casting purposes" if not "an exercise in decision making"??
Personally I would do away with any general voice type labels (yes, even soprano, tenor etc.) as there are probably more that don't neatly fit into categories as there are those which do - the human voice (humans in general) is not a quantizable function.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Becca said:


> Personally I would do away with any general voice type labels (yes, even soprano, tenor etc.) as there are probably more that don't neatly fit into categories as there are those which do - the human voice (humans in general) is not a quantizable function.


Strictly speaking, this is true. We label things for convenience, but we need always to keep context in mind, and labels may change as context changes. The primary context here is a singer's comfort zone, and in what music they can make the best effect. During my singing years I called myself a tenor. What did that mean? Mainly it meant that I sang the tenor part in choral music. My voice wasn't high and had a rather dark quality; when I sang songs I used the edition for "middle voice." Some people thought I was "really" a baritone. Should I have sung the bass part? Choral basses were a dime a dozen; everyone needed tenors, and my dark, smooth sound had a nice way of taking the grating edge off tenor sections consisting of young singers with thin, boyish voices. The tenor tessitura was sometimes taxing for me (try singing the _Missa Solemnis_ sometime), but bass parts would have had me groveling at times below my effective range. I might have identified as a mezzo-tenor (we have mezzo-sopranos, don't we?), but what for? What I really was was a musician who sang, and I sang whatever music was comfortable for me and whatever music people needed me to sing. They seemed to like what they heard, and I even got paid to do solos and to lead (and sometimes be the sole occupant of) the tenor section at a church, where one nice old lady exclaimed "A mellow tenor! It's refreshing!" I could tell she thought I was cute too; all the old ladies (and at least one old man) did. Those were the days... But I digress.

I don't think it's different for opera singers. Humanity, wanting things to be simple and clear-cut, has decided that there are tall people and short people, beautiful people and homely people, high voices and low voices, "lyric" voices and "dramatic" voices. Accordingly, composers tend to write music that favors those divisions and emphasizes the contrast between types. But, in some cases, they don't: roles such as Carmen and Santuzza are sung by both higher and lower voices, and among opera composers Wagner in particular created a number of major roles - Venus, Ortrud, Brangaene, Kundry, Siegmund, Wotan - that resist easy categorization and appeal to singers such as Christa Ludwig, Ramon Vinay and Hans Hotter, who in the course of successful careers crossed conventional boundaries regularly.

Really, there are plenty of "short sopranos," "sopranoish mezzos," "baritonal tenors," "high basses" and other similar cases, and if we need to label these singers for convenience we should do so, not according to some notion of what they "are" intrinsically, but simply according to the range and repertoire in which they normally sing and sound best. The same principle applies to classifications such as "lyric" and "dramatic." When people debate, for example, whether Joan Sutherland could have been a "dramatic soprano," the question really should be translated to mean "would she have been effective in such roles as Medea, Gioconda, Aida, Minnie, Elektra, or Brunnhilde, and is there other repertoire in which she was decidedly more effective?" Undoubtedly Sutherland could have sung these roles and been audible doing so, but if we think that she would have lacked something in verbal acuity, declamatory force, timbral incisiveness, and fulness and power in the lower and lower mid-range (all of which I would hold to be the case), then it would be reasonable to point out that she would not make the best effect in music calling for these qualities, that her strengths were better displayed in other repertoire, and that she should not, therefore, be called "dramatic." There's room for disagreement even here, though - maybe Sutherland possesses enough of the above qualities to satisfy you and you're looking forward to hearing her Elektra - and it all demonstrates the limited usefulness of labels.


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## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

Becca said:


> There are two types of people in the world, those who divide the people in the world into two types [fachs], and those who don't.
> No matter how you do it or rationalize it, once you start dividing, you are limiting, discriminating, misleading.
> There are two types of people in the world, those who can see this and those who can't. :lol:


So you disagree with the following no doubt?

Category one - Soprano/Mezzo/Contralto
Category two - Tenor/Baritone/Bass

:devil:

It's not so much whether one puts things into categories or not, or even where you draw the lines, but whether you use categories religiously or whether you see them as loose guidelines where rules can be broken.

We all put things into categories of one sort or another as there is simply too much information in the world for us to navigate it without shortcuts. I think part of the issue with the "fach" debate here is that we can end up talking at cross purposes due to not stating whether we are talking about populations or individuals and the use and usefulness of categorisation is quite different depending on which of the two of those you are dealing with.

N.


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## Becca (Feb 5, 2015)

The Conte said:


> So you disagree with the following no doubt?
> 
> Category one - Soprano/Mezzo/Contralto
> Category two - Tenor/Baritone/Bass


Yes ... don't you? 

P.S. Hint ... countertenor


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## Seattleoperafan (Mar 24, 2013)

Woodduck said:


> Strictly speaking, this is true. We label things for convenience, but we need always to keep context in mind, and labels may change as context changes. The primary context here is a singer's comfort zone, and in what music they can make the best effect. During my singing years I called myself a tenor. What did that mean? Mainly it meant that I sang the tenor part in choral music. My voice wasn't high and had a rather dark quality; when I sang songs I used the edition for "middle voice." Some people thought I was "really" a baritone. Should I have sung the bass part? Choral basses were a dime a dozen; everyone needed tenors, and my dark, smooth sound had a nice way of taking the grating edge off tenor sections consisting of young singers with thin, boyish voices. The tenor tessitura was sometimes taxing for me (try singing the _Missa Solemnis_ sometime), but bass parts would have had me groveling at times below my effective range. I might have identified as a mezzo-tenor (we have mezzo-sopranos, don't we?), but what for? What I really was was a musician who sang, and I sang whatever music was comfortable for me and whatever music people needed me to sing. They seemed to like what they heard, and I even got paid to do solos and to lead (and sometimes be the sole occupant of) the tenor section at a church, where one nice old lady exclaimed "A mellow tenor! It's refreshing!" I could tell she thought I was cute too; all the old ladies (and at least one old man) did. Those were the days... But I digress.
> 
> I don't think it's different for opera singers. Humanity, wanting things to be simple and clear-cut, has decided that there are tall people and short people, beautiful people and homely people, high voices and low voices, "lyric" voices and "dramatic" voices. Accordingly, composers tend to write music that favors those divisions and emphasizes the contrast between types. But, in some cases, they don't: roles such as Carmen and Santuzza are sung by both higher and lower voices, and among opera composers Wagner in particular created a number of major roles - Venus, Ortrud, Brangaene, Kundry, Siegmund, Wotan - that resist easy categorization and appeal to singers such as Christa Ludwig, Ramon Vinay and Hans Hotter, who in the course of successful careers crossed conventional boundaries regularly.
> 
> Really, there are plenty of "short sopranos," "sopranoish mezzos," "baritonal tenors," "high basses" and other similar cases, and if we need to label these singers for convenience we should do so, not according to some notion of what they "are" intrinsically, but simply according to the range and repertoire in which they normally sing and sound best. The same principle applies to classifications such as "lyric" and "dramatic." When people debate, for example, whether Joan Sutherland could have been a "dramatic soprano," the question really should be translated to mean "would she have been effective in such roles as Medea, Gioconda, Aida, Minnie, Elektra, or Brunnhilde, and is there other repertoire in which she was decidedly more effective?" Undoubtedly Sutherland could have sung these roles and been audible doing so, but if we think that she would have lacked something in verbal acuity, declamatory force, timbral incisiveness, and fulness and power in the lower and lower mid-range (all of which I would hold to be the case), then it would be reasonable to point out that she would not make the best effect in music calling for these qualities, that her strengths were better displayed in other repertoire, and that she should not, therefore, be called "dramatic." There's room for disagreement even here, though - maybe Sutherland possesses enough of the above qualities to satisfy you and you're looking forward to hearing her Elektra - and it all demonstrates the limited usefulness of labels.


I like this. I think repertoire has a lot to do with one's labeling. What repertoire was a singer successful in. Leonie Rysanek was a very successful soprano, but I think you could also say she is a mezzo later in her career as she was a really great Klytemnestra. Same situation for Flagstad and Varnay later on. It is harder for the great dramatic soprano Dimitrova who was an amazing Amneris at the same time. Personally I would call Sutherland not a dramatic soprano but a dramatic coloratura soprano which I think is a different beast. She was very successful as Norma and Esclarmonde, which requires that type of voice. Ponselle could have been very effective as a mezzo/ contralto but she is still considered one of the very best interpreters of many soprano roles, so a soprano label is appropriate. Verrett sang both mezzo and soprano roles, but although she was a great Norma, I still think of her primarily as a mezzo as her voice was it's most distinctive in that range.


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## Tsaraslondon (Nov 7, 2013)

The French gave rise to two different categories, the baryton-martin and the Falcon, both named after actual singers. The role of Pelléas, which has been sung by both tenors and baritones is the perfect example of the former, though Jean-Blaise Martin was actually active from the mid eighteenth to early nineteenth century. He was described as a deep-voiced, dark tenor. The Falcon is somehwhere between a mezzo and soprano and was named after Cornélie Falcon, who created the roles of Valentine in *Les Huguenots* and Rachel in *La Juive*. And what about Maria Malibran, who has variously been described as a contralto, a mezzo-soprano and a soprano? It seems there have always been voices that have defied categorisation, which evidently bothered people less in earlier times than it does now.


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## Concertantek364 (Mar 13, 2021)

Should we bring the balance of the discussion back to the soprano in question, Maria Cebotari?

She has quite an impressive resume (though understandably some may frown upon her role in the cultural life of Nazi Germany) and died tragically young. Her personal life is the kind of stuff that provide good material for a film:

http://www.cantabile-subito.de/Sopranos/Cebotari__Maria/cebotari__maria.html

As said, she was extraordinarily versatile and sang a wide range of roles, among which was her Violetta. Here're highlights from La Traviata in a German radio broadcast from 1942 with Helge Roswaenger as Alfredo Germont and Heinrich Schlusnus as Germont père:






(Sung in German)


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Concertantek364 said:


> Should we bring the balance of the discussion back to the soprano in question, Maria Cebotari?
> 
> She has quite an impressive resume (though understandably some may frown upon her role in the cultural life of Nazi Germany) and died tragically young. Her personal life is the kind of stuff that provide good material for a film:
> 
> ...


This is weirdly fascinating. Between the German language fitting so oddly with Verdi's musical phraseology (almost as strange-sounding as Italian with Wagner's, or maybe more so), Helge Roswaenge's strenuous, expressionistic vocal style, and Cebotari's very bright, very vibrant tone, I recognize this opera only intermittently. Having made as much of a mental adjustment as I can, I can appreciate the excellent singing of Cebotari and Schlusnus. Roswaenge, though, sounds as if he should be singing _Freischutz_ or _Zigeunerbaron._


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