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Giuditta Pasta, 2025
This Week in Classical Music: October 20, 2025. Giuditta Pasta. This week has many important anniversaries: Franz Liszt, Charles Ives, Georges Bizet, and Domenico Scarlatti had been all born this week. So had been three composers of the 20th century, Luciano Berio, Malcolm Arnold, and Ned Rorem. Georg Solti, a famend conductor, was born this week, and so was Giuditta Pasta, a celebrated Italian soprano. We’ve written about many of those composers and Solti, however by no means about Pasta. Typically, listening to the extremely troublesome bel canto roles within the operas of Rossini, Donizetti, or Bellini, we puzzle, who did they write these roles for, who had been these wonderful singers able to pulling it off? Giuditta Pasta was considered one of them.
Pasta was born Giuditta Negri on October 26th of 1797, right into a Jewish household. The Negri lived in Saronno, close to Milan, and he or she studied within the metropolis. In 1816, she married Giuseppe Pasta, a fellow singer, and took his title. By 1818, she had sung in all the principle Italian opera homes; in 1821, she triumphed in Paris, singing the function of Desdemona in Rossini’s Otello. She then sang the principle roles within the Paris premiere of Rossini’s Tancredi, a mezzo function, and Elisabetta in his Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, a soprano function. That made Pasta Rossini’s favourite singer, and within the following decade, she grew to become acknowledged as the best soprano of the time. She sang in London, in Paris, Milan, and Naples’s San Carlo, creating main roles within the operas of Rossini, Meyerbeer, and Paisiello. In 1830, she sang the primary Bellini function, that of Imogene in Il Pirata. One 12 months later, Bellini wrote La sonnambula with Giuditta Pasta in thoughts. She sang Amina, a soprano sfogato function, with the diapason stretching from the mezzo to coloratura soprano registers. There have been few soprano sfogato singers within the 19th century (the good Maria Malibran was one), and never many extra within the 20th century, the perfect – and finest identified – being Maria Callas. Additionally in 1831, in La Scala, Pasta premiered what’s probably the last word bel canto function, Norma.
The third bel canto composer, Gaetano Donizetti, additionally created a job for Pasta in Anna Bolena. Previous sang the function of Anna on the premiere in Milan in 1830, apparently to overwhelming success. Two years later, Donizetti wrote one other opera for Pasta, Ugo, conte di Parigi.
Giuditta Pasta retired in 1835, simply 38 years of age. She taught singing later in her life and died on the age of 67. Clearly, we don’t have the aural report of her singing, however we do have the recordings made by the “Giuditta Pasta of the 20th century,” Maria Callas. Right here are the ultimate moments of La sonnambula, the arias Ah, non credea mirarti and Ah! non giunge. On this 1957 recording, Callas is accompanied by the orchestra and refrain of La Scala, Antonio Votto conducting. If Giuditta Pasta was actually pretty much as good, then we’d perceive all of the accolades she obtained from her admirers, from the common operagoers to the French author Stendhal, a buddy and admirer, who noticed her dozens of instances and heaped reward in lots of his writings.
