Soprano Pappano's Classical Voices

There are seven billion people on our planet.

Every one of us has a voice that is unique and an expression of us.

And it's the only musical instrument that comes built-in.

I'm Antonio Pappano

and as a conductor, I've had the great good fortune to work with

some of the best singers in the business.

I'm on the stage of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden -

my musical home - and home to all the great operatic stars,

past and present.

HE SINGS NESSUN DORMA

In this series, I'll be looking at some of the finest singers

there have been since recording and moving pictures began.

What unique qualities put them on their pedestals?

What new insights did they bring to the classic roles?

And what made them stand the test of time?

Soprano, mezzo-soprano,

tenor, countertenor,

baritone, bass -

which one of these vocal categories do you fit in?

Well, yes, you do fit into one of these.

Imagine them as colours - as the composers would -

matching the colour of the voice to the role.

These voices express, and reflect back to us,

all shades of our humanity.

I'll be talking to some of the great singers of today,

working with them, in fact, to find out some of the tricks of the trade.

-Sing a bit.

-Get off!

-Let me feel that.

How does the throat work? How does the breathing work?

The body? The soul?

SOPRANO SINGS ARIA

The soprano is the highest female voice, her thrilling top notes

amongst the most exciting sounds in opera and song.

But also expressing every facet of femininity.

I think the soprano voice is perhaps the most flexible voice of all.

It comes in all shapes and sizes.

Music that is sweetly lyrical and poetic,

to gutsy and dramatic.

Loving, suffering and usually dying -

there's a soprano at the heart of practically every opera.

From fearsome warriors...

..to feisty servant girls.

To murderous divas...

..and scheming wives.

To sing one of the classic soprano roles you'd better bring

something new to the table -

and something YOU.

Lady Macbeth is kind of harsh.

-It's very...

-SHE GRUNTS

it's very focused, it's very aggressive singing.

When I'm preparing something, I'm listening to 20 different

versions of the role

and then I'm finding the one which is closer to me.

I think the personality is so much an important part

of you as an artist.

-Contrast is so important to avoid monotony.

-Absolutely.

That's why some of the singers are geniuses

and you're listening to them and you don't understand why I like

so much this singer, why I listen to this again and again.

And why another one has a beautiful voice and I don't like it.

I think because of that, some of them can find these colours and

make the whole palette of the music and the others are just plain.

-Miss Callas? Miss Callas?

-I'm sorry, I'm in a terrible hurry.

-Miss Callas.

-Sorry.

I have no thoughts, except I'm catching a plane.

Our modern idea of the soprano was stamped by La Divina, Maria Callas.

The most famous soprano and possibly the most controversial soprano

of the 20th century.

Miss Callas, have we dismayed you with the intensity of our journalistic welcome, today?

-Well, I would much rather you let me go in and out as I please without any attention!

-OK.

Callas's genius made her a one woman cult -

idolised by her legions of fans.

I consider myself privileged because I have been capable of...

How can I say it? ..giving it to the public

and being received by the public. Not everybody can do that.

SHE SINGS IN ITALIAN

It's rare that a singer's interpretation of a role transcends

its underlying quality.

Finding more meaning, more nuance,

more drama than the composer

perhaps even imagined.

Maria Callas raised the bar for all singers.

SHE SINGS IN ITALIAN

Such was the intensity of Callas's powers, as both singer

and actress, that her fame spread far beyond the opera house.

The very symbol of soprano as diva.

She was intimidating, in a way, because of her clarity

of what she wanted and what she represented.

I remember, one day I was in the elevator and she came in and the

doors closed and she turned to me and said, "Well, it's Willard White.

"Hello, Willard. How are you?"

And the elevator's going up and then the elevator stopped

and I'm going...

VOICELESS

..I never actually...

"Goodbye, Willard," and she was out!

Callas could be difficult - her tantrums were gleefully reported.

But her high-handedness, she once said, was a form of self-protection

for timid people.

She was commanding onstage,

a bundle of anxieties off it.

She was one of the most nervous performers I've ever come across.

She needed support all the time.

And I had it here with...particularly with Gertie, her dresser.

When Gertie used to say, "Look at what she's done to me,

"I've got bruises all the way up my arm," and this was Maria clutching.

Increasingly, Callas lived her life - not least her love life -

in the public gaze.

The lines between woman and performer became blurred.

But whatever her private fortunes, her honesty, conviction

and seriousness shone through on stage.

You can't persuade the public of a preposterous thing.

Give it the most credibility possible.

And to persuade the public,

I try to find truth in the music.

She was a great actress.

And that voice - how do you describe that voice?

Unconventional in every sense.

Dark, light, alluring, disturbing.

Nowhere did artist and woman collide more poignantly

than in the role of the diva, Tosca.

Confronted with the choice of sleeping with the brutal

chief of police, Scarpia, or seeing her lover die, she appeals to God.

Many saw this as her personal testament.

She creates pathos. She's totally into herself.

When you want to find how to act on stage,

all you have to do is listen to the music.

If you take the trouble to really listen, with your soul

and with your ears, you will find every gesture there.

She has her eyes shut most of the time, as you notice.

There seems to be a growing intensity in this aria.

Even though here she pulls back the voice,

almost sounding like a young girl.

It's a very intelligent use of the dynamics - of loud, soft.

But let's go back in time.

CHORAL CHANTING

In the church, there was a totally different tradition

with regards to the soprano voice.

But it wasn't the soprano we think of today.

Its soaring, keening intensity has been exploited by composers

since the early Middle Ages.

CHURCH CHOIR SINGS

The soprano voice would have been heard in this guise.

But they're not females. They are young boys

singing the soprano parts.

A voice that is particularly angelic, pure...

..and free of extraneous vibrato.

YOUNG BOY SINGS SOPRANO

Thanks to St Paul, women were banned from singing in church

and singing in public for money was seen as disreputable.

But in late 16th century royal courts,

bona fide professional female singers began to emerge.

# In darkness let me dwell

# The ground, the ground shall sorrow, sorrow be... #

Now, in a love song, a distinctively female sensibility

could colour the emotions.

This was new.

# The roof despair, to bar all, all cheerful light from me. #

-There is nothing quite like that.

-It's an amazing song.

I think it's one of the great songs ever written.

-But you're using vibrato and non- vibrato...

-Yeah.

..for expressive purposes.

Now vibrato is the natural undulation of the voice.

But what does it do to the expression?

SHE SINGS VIBRATO

# In darkness... #

Hear the undulation.

# ..Let me dwell... #

Now, it's not unattractive, it's very natural, it's very beautiful.

Warm, even, I would say.

Now show me non-vibrato and how it colours the text.

SHE SINGS NON-VIBRATO

# In darkness... #

See, the voice is straight.

# ..Let me dwell... #

Now, I've spoken to many singers and they keep bringing up the word colour.

What does colouring mean?

Colouring is the way we choose to say the word,

to sing the word, the sound.

Whether I sing...

-SHE SINGS RICHLY

-# In darkness... #

..you can really go WUGH...

-SHE SINGS LIGHTLY

-# In darkness... #

-..and they just have a different effect.

-Exactly.

Once a female soprano singing in public became socially

acceptable - femininity, in all its guises - seduced male composers.

SHE SINGS IN ENGLISH

By the time of Handel, the rise of the soprano gave composers

the chance to write bravura arias to convey - what they thought, at least -

were definitive feminine traits.

Such as vanity, in this instance, with the mythological Semele.

You have fantastic flexibility in your voice,

you have amazing coloratura.

Coloratura means when the notes are quickly following each other.

So florid writing for the voice.

-Quick notes, if you like, the simplest.

-Yeah. It's just having this...

SHE SINGS SCALES IN COLORATURA

-..and it's just such a joy!

-Now go up to the high note!

SHE SINGS IN COLORATURA

The female soprano expanded music's emotional range.

By the end of the 18th century, the term prima donna

had entered the English language.

Soon to mean more than just a soprano's role.

APPLAUSE

In 1951, a gutsy Australian set sail from Sydney Harbour

for Tilbury Docks.

After a six-week voyage, she arrives in London with only one

thing in her sight...

..the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

'I knew that I would probably end up doing secretarial work and I didn't

'start to really sing professionally until I was about 19.'

But that was my one ambition, I had nothing further, that was it.

I just wanted to sing in Covent Garden.

The feeling wasn't mutual. Joan Sutherland failed two auditions.

I had no background of being on the stage at all and I couldn't relax.

My inability to feel free, to move easily,

tended to inhibit my singing, it sort of tied me in knots.

I felt, shall we say, rather large,

and very much out of place on the stage.

Because there were a few relatives who thought it was rather shocking,

if you can believe that!

Over six foot tall, uncomfortable in her own skin as an actress -

the odds were against Sutherland.

But she and pianist and conductor Richard Bonynge,

whom she later married, persevered.

This time they put her on the main stage and she decides to sing

repertoire where she has an opportunity to use uncommon ornamentation...

..and decoration...

..and flash, if you like!

Three auditions must have meant something - I don't know what -

but I found myself with a contract and I was delighted!

Sutherland's breakthrough came because Richard Bonynge had

encouraged her to switch from the music of Verdi to an earlier,

lighter-voiced repertoire.

I do believe that all singers should learn the classics.

And when I say the classics, I mean the great vocal classics.

Rossini, Bellini...

So, the bel canto school.

The bel canto. If you can sing bel canto properly,

which very few people can, you can sing anything.

The vocal music of early 19th-century composers,

such as Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti - nowadays referred

to as bel canto - is characterised by purity of tone and agility

and replete with mad scenes.

Here, for example, the mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor.

Lucia, forced into a political marriage,

murders her husband on their wedding night.

The demands of the singer in this repertoire are enormous.

Now, in this section, the expectations were that the singer

would use their art, their imagination,

to ornament this simple melody.

-So what was...

-HE PLAYS THE MELODY

..becomes - and I'm not going to give it all away

because I want you to hear her do it, but...

HE PLAYS MELODY WITH FLOURISHES

Do you hear that little, that little scale?

Another time she'll do this...

..with a little staccato. So the whole panoply of vocal techniques.

Born just three years after Callas,

down to earth, rather than highly strung, different in vocal texture,

Joan Sutherland was christened La Stupenda.

'Your celebrated nickname, La Stupenda.

'Surely, that must have knocked you headways, mustn't it?'

It was very flattering - and it still is actually.

I was never quite sure which way they meant it.

Whether it was either the sound, or the size of me!

SHE GIGGLES

SHE SINGS SCALES

To sing in a big opera house without a microphone,

takes the kind of training and dedication that an Olympic athlete puts in.

Fail to train and nurture your voice

and you will fail as an opera singer.

It's very early in the morning,

so the sound still needs to be woken up.

The whole upper half of our body is involved in singing.

The power source is the lungs, so you have to have strong chest

and stomach muscles to control the breath you push out.

What makes the sound worth listening to is

then down to the singer's throat.

We have Anna Siminska in an MRI scanner

and she is going to be singing

while being scanned.

I can't tell you how curious I am, I've been looking forward to this.

It's just something really, really crazy. But here we go!

SHE SINGS

-That's great, Anna. But isn't it higher than that?

-Oh, much higher!

THEY LAUGH

Whether on stage or in an MRI scanner,

the Queen of the Night's famous aria needs a vocal acrobat.

The muscles in the larynx involved in producing sound

are the smallest in the whole body.

The vocal cords themselves are only around 15 millimetres in length.

We've taken a section just through the middle,

so we've included the parts of the oral cavities - so the mouth -

the back of the throat and the laryngeal structures - the voice box.

As the breath travels up through the larynx, it passes through

the tiny vocal cords, which then vibrate to produce the sound.

The higher the note,

the more the vibration - up to around 1,000 times a second.

You need to create as much space as possible in the mouth

and the back of the throat, so the sound is amplified.

The soft palate, tongue and lips shape the notes.

Wow! OK. So, this is a short segment.

The lips are parting, the oral cavity is nice and wide

and the tongue is pushed to the back of the throat to control all

of that movement of air.

And the number of muscles that are involved in all of that is just phenomenal.

And in the larynx alone, you've got about 20 muscles that

are just controlling the intrinsic movement of the vocal cords.

I'm just amazed how it looks. When I sing, I'm so concentrated on the thing I'm doing,

I had no idea I moved so many muscles I use.

Wow. That's amazing, really.

Now let's move on to a vocal heavyweight.

A soprano needs stamina to tackle the music of Richard Wagner.

She competes with a huge orchestra, often singing for long stretches.

She needs a big, resonant voice. And a personality to match.

SHE WHISTLES

Ah, ooh.

Born in 1918, the dramatic soprano Birgit Nilsson grew up

on a farm in rural Sweden.

She was required to milk the ten cows even before

her audition at the Swedish Royal Academy of Music.

Well, she got in.

My parents, they thought I should, you know, being a practical girl,

I should take over the farm, I should marry a farmer.

MUSIC: Aspakerspolska by Wilhelm Peterson-Berger

I sang before I could walk, they told me.

I walked very late, I was rather heavy.

My father always had me to sing at parties

and we had a lot of people coming to our house.

And sometimes I was singing six, seven, eight hours a day, you know,

and they said, "You are killing the girl

"because, you know, she will ruin her vocal cords."

But finally, I think it made it...

Instead of ruining them, it made them strong.

Nilsson's supercharged vocal cords made her

perfect for the commanding, dramatic roles.

The voice, fire and ice,

like a knife, cutting through the texture of the orchestra.

Listen to her approach to the high notes now.

Absolutely direct and fearless.

You see how clean and what a gleam on that sound.

Now, common wisdom would say that you should join

the lower note to the higher note.

HE PLAYS LOW AND HIGH NOTES

But no, she stops in between...

# Quelle...qui... #

And it really does pin you to the back of your seat, believe me.

People have told me who have heard her live

and said, "My goodness, this was an event."

LAUGHTER

Oh, wonderful. Whose cat is it?

Birgit Nilsson played

larger-than-life characters ON stage.

Off it, she was pretty formidable too.

An intimidating force

if she felt she was battling an immovable object.

Do you regard yourself as temperamental?

I know I have a very strong temperament.

And when I get people which, you know, don't care so much,

then I can be very difficult.

Well, I expected that you would install a spotlight for me tomorrow.

Was this no good? It's very important.

I don't like people - conductors, singers, stage directors - who...

..always, in their back head, try to bring through their egos, you know?

An artist who cannot forget themselves in the moment

when they are creating art, they are no artist.

One must always consider what the Wagnerian singer is up against

when it comes to the size of the orchestra.

You have to find the maximum resonance without shouting

because, by shouting, you will just become hoarse

and the orchestra will win every time.

In Gotterdammerung,

a soprano has to contend with a hundred-piece orchestra.

Nilsson rises defiantly to the challenge.

Now, those gleaming high notes we expect from her

but if you listen to the middle of the voice,

it's as if the middle voice is as projected as the high notes are.

They say in a studio, when you sing a high note,

go three steps back...

SHE SINGS A HIGH NOTE

..and when you sing a low note, take one step to the microphone.

SHE SINGS A LOW NOTE

You have to have a certain stamina for Wagner

but I think I was born with that.

I felt very strong when I was singing.

And when I started to take lessons, I felt really like

some sort of boxer or a wrestler or something like that.

So it must have been in my nature.

With such command, force and vocal heft,

Birgit Nilsson defines exactly what is the dramatic soprano.

But at the other end of the spectrum is the light, lyric soprano.

Now, these voices played characters who were lovely,

often down to earth,

witty and certainly loquacious,

as in the operas of our beloved Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

The Bavarian soprano Diana Damrau has a voice ideally suited

to Mozart's sparkling, knowing heroines.

When we go back to Mozart, timewise,

the orchestra was much smaller, the orchestration was smaller,

that means members of the orchestra were less,

so the voice has to adapt to all this.

You are far more exposed, you can't relax yourself on top of

a beautiful and full orchestra sound,

where you can hide a lot of things.

In singing Mozart, you're almost always accompanied

by a solo wind instrument.

It's a wonderful device but requires the singer, therefore,

to have an instrumental quality of their own, a purity of tone.

The intonation, the pitch, must be just so.

You always think, "Yeah, the most power we need is for a high note."

No.

I think you need as much power for a pianississimo note...

..floating somewhere.

Mozart singing, you need all the colours, all the technique,

all the flexibility but you have to have the control

and then Mozart's music can take you anywhere.

Our visitor tonight is a famous American singer -

the brilliant soprano Leontyne Price.

# Sometimes I feel like a motherless child

# Sometimes I feel like a motherless child... #

Leontyne Price faced more than just a musical challenge

to get to the top.

She was born in 1927 in Mississippi,

a racially segregated state.

# ..A long way from home... #

There were millions of things that were negative

but it didn't get in the way.

And I had nothing else on my mind except to be the best.

# From home... #

And she made it,

her talent nurtured and encouraged by her family

and the local Methodist church choir.

Mother and Daddy told my brother and myself,

"Achievement has nothing except what it's supposed to be.

"It has no colour, it has no religion, it has you,

"and your God-given talent."

# In the scented bud

# Of the morning, oh

# When the windy grass

# Went rippling far

# I saw my dear one walking slow

# In the field where the daisies are

# We did not laugh and we did not speak

# As we wandered happily to and fro

# I kissed my dear on either cheek

# In the bud of the morning, oh... #

Her voice, well, she captured and kept your attention

through the sheer seamlessness of her legato -

a creamy, silken texture

that...though able to express vulnerability,

it was the sheer majesty

and regal nature of her performances that impressed you the most.

Leontyne Price made a speciality of singing

the tragic heroines of Verdi.

She made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1961

as Leonora.

APPLAUSE

It was obvious to everyone present that a star was born.

She received a 40-minute standing ovation.

I can't even put that into words.

I still see all of us marching from the wings of this great opera house.

I felt that I had conquered the world that night

and I will never ever, ever forget it.

I sang in London, I sang in Berlin, I sang in La Scala.

The word was out, here's a voice that may not be too bad.

Leontyne Price's signature role was Verdi's Aida.

Now, for a big voice,

it's perhaps the most exposed role there is.

It requires simply perfect singing.

It's an unusual soprano lead - an enslaved African princess.

Aida may be my operatic legacy because my skin was my costume.

It was the way I felt as a human being,

the way I was as a person,

merged with me as a singer.

This aria features one of the most difficult high Cs to achieve.

Verdi had a way of approaching high notes stepwise, in other words,

note by note by note, instead of a big jump to the note.

This, for a singer, is like seeing impending doom

instead of launching to the goal.

Ah, Leontyne Price.

For me, I literally sat on the subway

when I was a Juilliard student and said,

"I'm channelling her high C.

"Please, God, let me have that high C."

My big buddy, Giuseppi Verdi,

fixed it so in the aria that I,

shall we say, delivered, it was as if being anointed by him.

That's the kind of fun I had.

APPLAUSE

Modern composers utilise a very different soundscape

to that of Verdi, to say the least.

LAUGHTER

But the underlying vocal techniques are the same.

This is the American soprano Barbara Hannigan, singing

and conducting a piece by Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti, from 1992.

Barbara, you've sung all kinds of music, but it's

in the contemporary repertoire where you've almost lived.

You've done 80 - 80! - new pieces.

-Yeah.

-Why?!

"Why?" It's my safe space, you know?

I was intimidated by convention and tradition. I found it scary.

But somehow the contemporary music, for me, was freeing.

A lot of the music that I've heard you sing had a lot of staccato

or detached notes.

# Ba-ba-ba, bi-bi-bap. #

Mm-hmm. It doesn't come from here.

The staccato does not come from here.

The mouth is just open, it doesn't open and close and open and close.

But what I think of is, you know when you had the little

electricity set when you were a kid and you connected the thing

that made the light bulb go on and the light bulb went,

"Wah, wah, wah"?

So there's like...

SHE SINGS A SCALE

I feel like I'm singing a continuous line.

-Here's the line and the notes just go, "Wah, wah, wah, wah..."

-Ah!

They're like little stars.

Here's Joan Sutherland using the exact same technique.

I think composers in today's world are looking for new ways

to go beyond the traditional,

so one of the things that is thrown at you

in contemporary repertoire is this extreme vocality.

Going from very low, to very high.

Well, let's go to something that was written for you.

# Nothing I

# Ever eat

# Nothing I drink... #

A soprano needs to use the resonances created

by different parts of her body to go from high...

SHE SINGS A HIGH NOTE

..to low.

From the head voice to the chest voice.

# Out of this body. #

Wow.

Now, what does chest voice mean to you?

It's voce di petto, it's like, "Ugh," Ethel Merman, you know,

that Broadway kind of...

# There's no business like show business. #

You know, that's chest voice.

And as you make the transition into the higher register you can't

carry it up.

But what we opera people do

is we try to make the transition very beautiful.

Otherwise we'd be yodelling.

SHE YODELS

You heard it here, ladies and gentlemen!

But anyway, the transition is something

that we try to make very smooth,

so we can mix the two.

It's like making a salad dressing, you know?

You don't want the oil and vinegar to be separate,

you want to emulsify.

And that's what we do, we make really good salad dressing.

This is Mimi, the TB-stricken seamstress in Puccini's La Boheme.

The opera is so popular that the role can often become cloying,

unless you're a great artist, like this one.

Renata Tebaldi had what I would call a glorious voice.

But that's easy to say.

It's this constant stream of pure tone

that she was able to conjure up.

Tebaldi shot to fame in the '40s.

Only one year older, she became the main rival of Maria Callas,

as far as the press were concerned, at least.

But their voices and choice of roles were quite different.

Puccini requires this sweetness in the tone, this dolcezza

and this Tebaldi does like no-one else.

Her phrasing, too, is very personal.

Listen to how she delivers this with such a natural

and disarming quality.

It's a popular perception that opera is stuck in the past,

that opera houses are museums, blah, blah, blah. Rubbish!

I think opera is extraordinary because it has the ability

to reinvent itself and it does move with the times.

Contemporary operas are doing what operas have always done -

laying bare our prejudices, assumptions, and hypocrisies.

# I wanna blow you all... #

LAUGHTER

# Blow you all

# A kiss... #

Anna Nicole is an operatic riff on the outwardly tacky life

of former Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith.

Infamous for her curves, her marriage

to an octogenarian multi-millionaire

and her early death.

Dutch soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek sings the title role.

Nowadays, the stage director demands far more of sopranos

than just their voices.

# Facts, facts, facts, facts

# Lah-di-dah di-blah-di-blah

# Facts, fact, facts, facts

# Well, here's where it all began

# I was young, I was single

# Flat-chested and intact... #

In past years, opera was mainly a stand-and-sing affair.

It's changed considerably

and I think the demands made on you as Anna Nicole...

-There was the costume, the...

-I had sleepless nights.

-..the boobs...

-I've never had more friends in my life, to be honest.

The blonde hair and the boobs.

I really love doing this diversity of things.

And I love trying to get to the truth of everything,

the truth of the text and the expression and the music, whatever.

Just to really work, work, work on that.

# You can fight

# You can beg

# You can plead, you can cry

# But you need a little luck, girls

# You need a little luck... #

How do you write an opera, a modern subject, and use a singer who

-sings Wagner and who sings Puccini...?

-I know it sounds

a strange thing to say

but it really helped that she wasn't English.

I've got a slight problem with posh English sung.

But it's also to do with the quality of the voice because she has this

warmth about her, it comes through in her singing but not just in

the acting but in her as a person, I think she has this magnetism.

These are real dramatic-soprano notes

sung with an operatic technique.

Most of the music is in a pop idiom,

you have to drawl in American, Texas twang.

-Singing those vowels must have been a nightmare...

-That was hard.

..because you were constantly trying to find the right place,

-where to put the voice.

-I personally always think

that you have to have a sort of a roundness to your mouth.

# I can drink you under the ocean

# I'm dressed up to get messed up

# And when I'm done I will just pass out

# You've got to know your limits... #

Anna Nicole is a modern morality tale.

She rises from obscurity to celebrity, falls victim to

addiction and depression and loses both her husband and her son.

She was so charismatic, sensationally beautiful.

And then to see her from that turn into this sort of...

What she became in the end, it's just one of the saddest things.

# Time now, Danny

# Mama's nearly there

# Nothing left for me

# I guess I kind of blew it... #

This opera now is so important

because this is how we are with each other now, you know?

How we are with famous people, that we want to see

their cellulite and their divorces and their...

You know, we all want to see the... We all want see them, ugh...

-The grime.

-Yeah.

And it's horrible.

# I want to blow you all

# Blow you all

# A kiss. #

Sopranos have thrilled us for five centuries.

They've vocally defined woman in all her varieties,

making a specialty of the mad scene and the inevitable death.

Vocal heft, lightness of touch, grace, power -

the star sopranos have given us their supreme voices

and their own personalities have shared their art.

Next time, we take to the high Cs - the world of the tenor.

MUSIC: Nessun Dorma by Giacomo Puccini

From romantic lead to tragic hero and all the shades in between.

The glamour boys of opera.