Coloratura

Coloratura, syllabification col·or·a·tu·ra or col·o·ra·tur·a (ˌkələrə'to͝orə; alternatively, first syllable, ˌkäl-; alternatively, fourth syllable -'tu̇r- or -ˈtyu̇r-) refers to a passage of music, especially vocal operatic music, that is characterised by rapidity and elaborate embellishment or ornamentation that includes musical runs, trills, "or similar virtuoso-like material". The presence of coloratura in a musical piece typically obscures the melody within the passage.

More generally, coloratura can be understood to mean any music "with ornate figuration", and then connotations of coloratura broaden further still to include the operatic roles in which such vocal embellishment plays a large part, and then to its singers, in particular sopranos with a "light agile voice[s]" that specialise in singing such parts.

Such coloratura, for sopranos and otherwise, is often found in the vocal melodies of arias of the 18th and 19th centuries (appearing as aria di coloratura, aria di bravura, and Koloraturarie); an example cited as famous is the aria of the operatic character, the Queen of the Night, in Mozart's Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute).

However, despite the popular understanding associating the term with coloratura sopranos, the term is not formally restricted to a particular voice range, and any voice type might achieve mastery of coloratura techniques. Moreover, coloratura is not limited to particular musical genres, and use of the term has conflictingly also been applied to particular instrumental "ornamentation formulas" (e.g., for keyboard and lute of the 16th-century), where the term of Colorists (German Koloristen) coined by A.G. Ritter more specifically applies. (In instrumental music, such passages are more often called ornamentation.)

The origin of the term coloratura, in its application to vocal embellishment, is usually attributed to the Italian, of 17th century, for "coloring", and that from the Latin colōrātus, deriving from the verb "to color". Argument is made in a reliable source that, depite having been "attributed to Italian in German dictionaries since the 17th century", its apparent first appearance in a musical sense was in a German work, as Coloraturen, by Michael Praetorius, in his Syntagmatis musici tomus tertius in 1619.