Giuditta Pasta

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Giuditta Pasta

Giuditta Pasta (née Negri; October 26, 1797 - April 1, 1865), born in Saronno, Italy, was a soprano considered among the greatest of opera singers.

She studied in Milan but her appearances in Brescia in 1815 and London in 1817, were both failures. Further studies with Scappa were followed by a successful debut in Venice in 1819. She caused a sensation in Paris in 1821-22, where the immense range of her voice and her dramatic gifts were matched by poignancy of expression. She sang regularly in London, Paris, Milan and Naples between 1824 and 1837. She created Donizetti's Anna Bolena in Milan (Teatro Carcano) in 1830 and Amina in Bellini's La sonnambula and Norma (both in Milan in 1831). She died in Blevio, a town in the province of Como.

"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 me 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 they would say in Italy (i.e. 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." (Ibid., p. 374)