If you have read the gossip corner, you may remember the story of the hapless
baritone trying to lug the ample Pagliughi to the river bank at the end of the
opera. Her size and lack of pizazz probably limited her stage success, but
Pagliughi had a very successful recording career. She was one of the last of
the true coloratura sopranos.
Lina Pagliughi seems to have been a very kind woman. She was born to poor Italian immigrant parents in New York in 1907, and the family moved to San Fransisco a year and a half later. Pagliughi was “born singing”; at age seven she was already giving recitals. Tetrazzini heard the seven year old Pagliughi sing in San Francisco and encouraged her to study; Pagliughi’s parents and mentors decided that since she had a naturally produced voice, she should study piano, which she did, graduating from the conservatory before moving to Italy at age 15. When Pagliughi moved to Italy to study with Manlio Bavagnoli, she and Tetrazzini became very close. Years later, after Tetrazzini had died from a stroke, Pagliughi recalled her fondly, comparing Tetrazzini’s kindness, professionalism and general class to the nasty rantings of la divina, Maria Callas. (See the newest addition to the Gossip Corner for a wonderful Callas tale.)
Pagliughi made her debut at the age of 17 as Gilda at the Nazionale in Milan and was soon replacing Toti dal Monte in the “extra” performances at La Scala. Unlike many present-day coloraturas, Pagliughi never took on the lyric soprano roles, preferring to maintain her true coloratura.
We tend today to think of the coloratura soprano as a sweet-voiced girl with more or less secure high notes, and with agility and fluency enough to get through the arias of Zerbinetta and the Queen of the Night. But there have always been sopranos who could do more than that, women who had the passages and the coloratura, who could ascend to the high E or F without resorting to a detached, tricky head voice, and who, in lyrical and dramatic passages, could sing persuasively and beautifully. The line is easy to trace: Sontag, Lind, Patti, Sembrich, Melba, Tetrazzini, Galli-Curci and Lina Pagliughi. Sopranos of this admirable type have not been favored in the present century by the evolution of the repertoire. The Rossini-Donizetti-Bellini-Meyerbeer roles best suited to their capabilities have given way to meatier and supposedly more substantial fare.It is important to distinguish between the numerous high-note singers who, today, are called coloratura sopranos and the very few who can sing true coloratura. The former, as students, have been the despair of landladies. As performing artists they have made the coloratura soprano a ridiculous figure. They have given florid song a bad name. The latter have sustained the glory of the singer’s art, and the best of them have been the most admired of all singers. . . . they had beautiful voices that were lighter, more girlish, more virginal — even childlike — than the type of voice fashionable among sopranos today, and a special communicative quality suggesting a kind of sublimated and eternally youthful feminity.
The singular girlish sweetness and purity that characterized the voices of the great nineteenth-century coloratura sopranos may be attributable to the fact that so many of them started so young. It seems a reasonable speculation that they simply sustained into their maturity the sound which had never failed to delight their listeners at the outset of their careers.
— Henry Pleasants
Until recently, the only recordings I had of Pagliughi were from the 1927-28 Rigoletto. When I saw one of her recordings offered recently at auction, I successfully bid on it, adding it to my collection. The first time I played it, the singing knocked my socks off. The girlish 20 year old in the Rigoletto recording blossomed into a full-throated coloratura soprano. This is some of the most exciting singing I’ve heard—and remember, these recordings, unlike today’s CDs, were the real thing, no patching, fixing, enhancing. Pagliughi in this recording is simply electrifying!