The soprano's curse
Seed magazine thank you! I’ve wondered about this for decades. Yes, I’ve been too lazy to research it. Frankly, I used to hate working with sopranos, i.e., composing music for them to sing. Why? Because you either get the sound you want or you can understand the words. You can’t have both. So why bother. Only a fantastic soprano can do both. But even they fail more often than they’d like to confess.
Jane Eaglen, a critically acclaimed soprano who has performed Wagner’s works in opera houses worldwide, explains that sopranos must try to find a balance between power and clarity. “It’s really about how you modify the vowels at the top of the voice so that the words are still understandable but so that you are also making the best sound that you can make,” she says.
What’s the fix?
Composers generally cope with this problem by writing lyrics for sopranos that are not essential to their operas’ plots. But Smith and Wolfe began to wonder whether some hadn’t found a better solution. They realized that composers could actually avoid the problem completely by pairing words with notes at which the vowel sounds resonated naturally in a singer’s mouth. Smith saw Wagner—a perfectionist notorious for writing long and demanding soprano roles—as an obvious candidate on which he and Wolfe could test their theory.
