Coloratura

'coloring', from Latin colorare 'to color')[1] is an elaborate melody with runs, trills, wide leaps, or similar virtuoso-like material,[1][2] or a passage of such music.

The term coloratura was first defined in several early non-Italian music dictionaries: Michael Praetorius's Syntagma musicum (1618); Sébastien de Brossard's Dictionaire de musique (1703); and Johann Gottfried Walther's Musicalisches Lexicon (1732).

[4] Christoph Bernhard (1628–1692) defined coloratura in two ways:[4] The term was never used in the most famous Italian texts on singing: Giulio Caccini's Le Nuove musiche (1601/2); Pier Francesco Tosi's, Opinioni de' cantori antichi e moderni (1723); Giovanni Battista Mancini's Pensieri, e riflessioni pratiche sopra il canto figurato (1774); Manuel García's Mémoire sur la voix humaine (1841), and Traité complet de l’art du chant (1840–47); nor was it used by the English authors Charles Burney (1726–1814) and Henry Fothergill Chorley (1808–1872), both of whom wrote at length about Italian singing of a period when ornamentation was essential.

[2] Despite its derivation from Latin colorare ("to color"), the term does not apply to the practice of "coloring" the voice, i.e. altering the quality or timbre of the voice for expressive purposes (for example, the technique of voix sombrée used by Gilbert Duprez in the 1830s).

This role, most famously typified by the Queen of the Night in Mozart's The Magic Flute,[5] has a high range and requires the singer to execute with great facility elaborate ornamentation and embellishment, including running passages, staccati, and trills.