Coloratura is highly ornamented vocal music featuring rapid runs, trills, and elaborate decorative passages.
Coloratura — Italian for 'colouring' — describes vocal writing that decorates a melodic line with rapid scales, leaps, trills, and runs. The style flourished in Baroque opera, where Handel's heroines and heroes were expected to ornament da capo arias on every repeat. The 19th-century bel canto composers — Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti — wrote written-out coloratura of breathtaking difficulty, designed for specific singers like Maria Malibran and Giulia Grisi. The most famous coloratura passage in all opera is the Queen of the Night's 'Der Hölle Rache' from Mozart's 'Die Zauberflöte' (1791), with its stratospheric high F's. Today singers like Edita Gruberová, Diana Damrau, and Lisette Oropesa keep the tradition alive. Coloratura is not mere decoration; in the right hands it externalises a character's brilliance, madness, or rage.