Music: Supreme Sopranos

The bony-faced, roan-haired soprano who stepped onto the stage of Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera last week had already been honored in England as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In more colloquial Italy, she had been dubbed "La Stupenda." Roughly two hours after her appearance, the Commander sank to the stage singing the words: "Al giunger tuo soltanto fia bello il del per me!" (Though only when you join me can heaven be heaven to me)—and was rewarded with a special American accolade, a sustained roar that lasted for twelve minutes and through ten curtain calls. Never, confessed the Commander later, had she "heard such sound from the throats of an audience"—and rarely had a modern audience heard such sound from a singer. In her triumphant Met debut—in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor—Soprano Joan Sutherland demonstrated even to the doubters that she is the most accomplished technician in all opera.

Sutherland is not necessarily the best singer or the most compelling actress. Her distinction, in an emergent age of great sopranos, lies in a stunning vocal technique that in the last three years has lifted her into the haughty company of the world's finest. Standing there beside her are five singers, whose achievement challenges the memory of some of opera's most hallowed names. The other five: Ma ria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, Eileen Farrell, Birgit Nilsson, Leontyne Price.

No two of the group come to the public equipped with the same technique or bearing the same musical gifts. The Sutherland fans fortunate enough to crowd into the Met last week heard and witnessed the best modern demonstration of bel canto singing—which has come to mean the florid, highly ornamented vocal style that almost became extinct a century ago. Sutherland, 35, has brought new life to bel canto. Says she, in her breezy Australian style: "I love all those demented old dames of the old operas." The attraction is understandable, for Sutherland has just the voice to do the old dames justice. Crystalline, open-throated, reflex-quick, her voice can shower feathery trills on an audience or take perilous leaps with agility and astonishing accuracy. It can trace graceful arabesques of passion or float from note to note with liquid ease. Most remarkable, it does not thin out, as do most coloratura voices, into shrill parody in the upper register. Indeed, Sutherland's upper register is her best: she can soar in full voice to a high E-flat, a fact that she demonstrated brilliantly last week in the Mad Scene from Lucia.

Curiously, Sutherland came to Donizetti and Bellini from a background in Wagner, a reversal of the process that usually finds a singer moving from lighter to heavier roles. Sydney-born, the daughter of a tailor, she concentrated at first on Wagnerian roles because "I had the build for it" (she stood 5 ft. 9 in., weighed 224 Ibs., now weighs 170). Eventually, on the advice of her husband, Australian Pianist Richard Bonynge, she decided that the bel canto repertory was where she belonged. She put in seven years at Covent Garden while developing the voice that would lead her to the Met.

The Met stage has also witnessed some of the finest triumphs of the other five great sopranos: