![]() ![]() ![]() Welcome to my world.) The ne plus ultra of the high-C tradition, the opera that sealed Pavarotti’s American fame as “King of the High C’s” in 1972, is Donizetti’s “The Daughter of the Regiment,” which Javier Camarena has recently made his own at the Met, overturning decades of company tradition by actually giving encores (most recently last month). (You can also, on YouTube, find more than one video comparing different tenors’ renditions of this same note, over and over this is what opera-lovers do for fun. To get an idea of the contrast, listen to Pavarotti’s gorgeous falsetto high F in “I Puritani” (toward the end of the ensemble “Credeasi misera”) and compare it to the full-voiced take of someone like Nicolai Gedda, also far from shabby, in the same piece. Nonetheless, the note caught on and Duprez’s style displaced an established bel canto tradition, to the point that we expect full-voiced high notes. Ultimately, it is the terrorist strike that does more to promote foreign relations than anyone could have hoped to achieve with the party. ![]() In the heyday of bel canto, tenors tackled most notes above a B as falsettos, like a crooner when the tenor Gilbert-Louis Duprez first tried a full-voiced high C, in Rossini’s “William Tell” in 1831, Rossini compared the sound to the squawk of a capon being strangled. As for the high C: The kind of C you hear today is a relatively recent development. ![]()
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