The German soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient had a profound influence on aesthetic ideals regarding vocal delivery and emergent genres for German commentators from Ludwig Tieck to Rellstab and Wagner. With a focus on contemporary biographical sources and reception, this chapter contextualises her reception within the German states as irreducibly hybrid, as a voice that dissolved aesthetic boundaries, most clearly between speech and song. The shifting role of bel canto vis-à-vis contemporary sopranos (Henrietta Sontag / Maria Malibran), and the emergence of new genres characterise her complex reception, all of which is set against Wagner’s own claims for her artistry, following her creation of the roles Adriano (Rienzi), Senta (Holländer), and Venus (Tannhäuser).

Pauline Anna Milder (1785–1838) undertook the cross-dressing role of Leonore in all three version of Beethoven’s Fidelio. In this detailed study of Milder’s career, the author examines the nature of Milder’s voice (as reported extensively by commentators), the expressive and dramatic consequence of cross-dressing and, more broadly, the development of a recognizably ‘German’ soprano voice, one that was promoted by the most canonical German opera of the time, Beethoven’s Fidelio.