Coloratura

Coloratura (, ) is 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).