Imagine Niagara Falls stopping on a dime and fluttering like a hummingbird. That physical contradiction is the story of Joan Sutherland, the Australian soprano the Italians named La Stupenda, whose enormous voice somehow possessed the rapid-fire agility normally reserved for light, bird-like instruments. This episode follows her from a Sydney childhood spent imitating her mezzo-soprano mother, through late-starting formal study at 18, wins at Australia's biggest competitions, the Royal College of Music, and a 1952 Covent Garden debut that placed her alongside Maria Callas.

We examine how idolizing Kirsten Flagstad steered her into exhausting Wagnerian training, and how her husband Richard Bonynge secretly transposed her exercises higher and higher to reveal a stratospheric top she never knew she had. Her 1959 Lucia di Lammermoor, the 12-min ...