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-minute Met ovation in 1961, the Time magazine rivalry with Beverly Sills, the persistent complaints about her mushy consonants, her championing of a young Luciano Pavarotti, her boycott of the Met, and her pride in the soprano-killing Esclarmonde all lead to a 1990 farewell at the Sydney Opera House. The episode also addresses the 1994 passport remarks that complicated her legacy before her death in Switzerland in 2010.

• Why teachers who heard the roar of her voice assumed she had to be a dramatic soprano and missed the machinery underneath
• How relative pitch and muscle memory allowed Bonynge to trick her into singing notes she believed impossible
• What bel canto, coloratura, and staccato demand mechanically from the vocal cords
• Why she deliberately sacrificed consonants for an unbroken legato line of molten honey tone
• How historians hold the voice of the century and her exclusionary later comments as two competing truths