Italian musical term meaning "beautiful singing"
Bel canto
(
Italian
for 'beautiful singing' / 'beautiful song',
Italian:
[?b?l
?kanto]
)?with several similar constructions (
bellezze del canto
,
bell'arte del canto
, pronounced in English as
)?is a term with several meanings that relate to Italian singing.
[1]
The phrase was not associated with a "school" of singing until the middle of the 19th century, when writers in the early 1860s used it nostalgically to describe a manner of singing that had begun to wane around 1830.
Nonetheless, "neither musical nor general dictionaries saw fit to attempt [a] definition [of
bel canto
] until after 1900". The term remains vague and ambiguous in the 21st century and is often used to evoke a lost singing tradition.
[3]
History of the term and its various definitions
[
edit
]
As generally understood today, the term
bel canto
refers to the Italian-originated vocal style that prevailed throughout most of Europe during the 18th and early 19th centuries. Late 19th- and 20th-century sources "would lead us to believe that
bel canto
was restricted to beauty and evenness of tone,
legato
phrasing, and skill in executing highly florid passages, but contemporary documents [those of the late 18th and early 19th centuries] describe a multifaceted manner of performance far beyond these confines."
[4]
The main features of the
bel canto
style were:
[4]
- prosodic
singing (use of accent and emphasis)
- matching
register
and tonal quality of the voice to the emotional content of the words
- a highly articulated manner of
phrasing
based on the insertion of grammatical and rhetorical pauses
- a delivery varied by several types of
legato
and
staccato
- a liberal application of more than one type of
portamento
- messa di voce
as the principal source of expression (
Domenico Corri
called it the "soul of music" ?
The Singer's Preceptor
, 1810, vol. 1, p. 14)
- frequent alteration of tempo through rhythmic
rubato
and the quickening and slowing of the overall time
- the introduction of a wide variety of
graces
and
divisions
into both arias and recitatives
- gesture as a powerful tool for enhancing the effect of the vocal delivery
- vibrato
primarily reserved for heightening the expression of certain words and for gracing longer notes.
The
Harvard Dictionary of Music
by
Willi Apel
says that
bel canto
denotes "the Italian vocal technique of the 18th century, with its emphasis on beauty of sound and brilliance of performance rather than dramatic expression or romantic emotion. In spite of the repeated reactions against
bel canto
(or its abuses, such as display for its own sake;
Gluck
,
Wagner
) and the frequent exaggeration of its virtuoso element (
coloratura
), it must be considered as a highly artistic technique and the only proper one for Italian opera and for
Mozart
. Its early development is closely bound up with that of the Italian
opera seria
(
A. Scarlatti
,
N. Porpora
,
J. A. Hasse
,
N. Jommelli
,
N. Piccinni
)."
18th and early 19th centuries
[
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]
Since the
bel canto
style flourished in the 18th and early 19th centuries, the music of
Handel
and his contemporaries, as well as that of
Mozart
and
Rossini
, benefits from an application of
bel canto
principles. Operas received the most dramatic use of the techniques, but the
bel canto
style applies equally to oratorio, though in a somewhat less flamboyant way. The
da capo arias
these works contained provided challenges for singers, as the repeat of the opening section prevented the story line from progressing. Nonetheless, singers needed to keep the emotional drama moving forward, and so they used the principles of
bel canto
to help them render the repeated material in a new emotional guise. They also incorporated embellishments of all sorts (
Domenico Corri
said da capo arias were invented for that purpose [
The Singer's Preceptor
, vol. 1, p. 3]),
[6]
but not every singer was equipped to do this, some writers, notably Domenico Corri himself, suggesting that singing without ornamentation was an acceptable practice (see
The Singer's Preceptor
, vol. 1, p. 3). Singers regularly embellished both arias and recitatives, but did so by tailoring their embellishments to the prevailing sentiments of the piece.
Two famous 18th-century teachers of the style were
Antonio Bernacchi
(1685?1756) and
Nicola Porpora
(1686?1768), but many others existed. A number of these teachers were
castrati
. Singer/author John Potter declares in his book
Tenor: History of a Voice
that:
For much of the 18th century castrati defined the art of singing; it was the loss of their irrecoverable skills that in time created the myth of
bel canto
, a way of singing and conceptualizing singing that was entirely different from anything that the world had heard before or would hear again.
19th-century Italy and France
[
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]
In another application, the term
bel canto
is sometimes attached to Italian operas written by
Vincenzo Bellini
(1801?1835) and
Gaetano Donizetti
(1797?1848). These composers wrote
bravura
works for the stage during what musicologists sometimes call the "
bel canto
era". But the style of singing had started to change around 1830,
Michael Balfe
writing of the new method of teaching that was required for the music of Bellini and Donizetti (
A New Universal Method of Singing
, 1857, p. iii),
and so the operas of
Bellini
and Donizetti actually were the vehicles for a new era of singing. The last important opera role for a castrato was written in 1824 by
Giacomo Meyerbeer
(1791?1864).
[10]
The phrase "
bel canto
" was not commonly used until the latter part of the 19th century, when it was set in opposition to the development of a weightier, more powerful style of speech-inflected singing associated with German opera and, above all,
Richard Wagner
's revolutionary music dramas. Wagner (1813?1883) decried the Italian singing model, alleging that it was concerned merely with "whether that G or A will come out roundly". He advocated a new, Germanic school of singing that would draw "the spiritually energetic and profoundly passionate into the orbit of its matchless Expression."
French musicians and composers never embraced the more
florid
extremes of the 18th-century Italian
bel canto
style. They disliked the castrato voice and because they placed a premium on the clear enunciation of the texts of their vocal music, they objected to the sung word being obscured by excessive
fioritura
.
The popularity of the
bel canto
style as espoused by Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini faded in Italy during the mid-19th century. It was overtaken by a heavier, more ardent, less embroidered approach to singing that was necessary to perform the innovative works of
Giuseppe Verdi
(1813?1901) with maximum dramatic impact. Tenors, for instance, began to inflate their tone and deliver the
high C
(and even the high D) directly from the chest rather than resorting to a suave head voice/
falsetto
as they had done previously ? sacrificing vocal agility in the process. Sopranos and
baritones
reacted in a similar fashion to their tenor colleagues when confronted with Verdi's drama-filled compositions. They subjected the mechanics of their voice production to greater pressures and cultivated the exciting upper part of their respective ranges at the expense of their mellow but less penetrant lower notes. Initially at least, the singing techniques of 19th-century
contraltos
and
basses
were less affected by the musical innovations of Verdi, which were built upon by his successors
Amilcare Ponchielli
(1834?1886),
Arrigo Boito
(1842?1918) and
Alfredo Catalani
(1854?1893).
Detractors
[
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]
One reason for the eclipse of the old Italian singing model was the growing influence within the music world of
bel canto'
s detractors, who considered it to be outmoded and condemned it as vocalization devoid of content. To others, however,
bel canto
became the vanished art of elegant, refined, sweet-toned musical utterance. Rossini lamented in a conversation that took place in
Paris
in 1858 that: "Alas for us, we have lost our bel canto".
Similarly, the so-called German style was as derided as much as it was heralded. In the introduction to a collection of songs by Italian masters published in 1887 in Berlin under the title
Il bel canto
, Franz Sieber wrote: "In our time, when the most offensive shrieking under the extenuating device of 'dramatic singing' has spread everywhere, when the ignorant masses appear much more interested in how loud rather than how beautiful the singing is, a collection of songs will perhaps be welcome which ? as the title purports ? may assist in restoring bel canto to its rightful place."
[10]
In the late-19th century and early-20th century, the term
bel canto
was resurrected by singing teachers in Italy, among whom the retired Verdi baritone
Antonio Cotogni
(1831?1918) was a pre-eminent figure. Cotogni and his followers invoked it against an unprecedentedly vehement and vibrato-laden style of vocalism that singers increasingly used after around 1890 to meet the impassioned demands of
verismo
writing by composers such as
Giacomo Puccini
(1858?1924),
Ruggero Leoncavallo
(1857?1919),
Pietro Mascagni
(1863?1945),
Francesco Cilea
(1866?1950) and
Umberto Giordano
(1867?1948), as well as the auditory challenges posed by the non-Italianate stage works of
Richard Strauss
(1864?1949) and other late-romantic/early-modern era composers, with their strenuous and angular vocal lines and frequently dense orchestral textures.
During the 1890s, the directors of the
Bayreuth Festival
initiated a particularly forceful style of Wagnerian singing that was totally at odds with the Italian ideals of
bel canto
. Called "
Sprechgesang
" by its proponents (and dubbed the "Bayreuth bark" by some opponents), the new Wagnerian style prioritized articulation of the individual words of the composer's
libretti
over legato delivery. This text-based, anti-legato approach to vocalism spread across the German-speaking parts of Europe prior to
World War I
.
As a result of these many factors, the concept of
bel canto
became shrouded in mystique and confused by a plethora of individual notions and interpretations. To complicate matters further, German
musicology
in the early 20th century invented its own historical application for
bel canto
, using the term to denote the simple lyricism that came to the fore in
Venetian opera
and the Roman
cantata
during the 1630s and '40s (the era of composers
Antonio Cesti
,
Giacomo Carissimi
and
Luigi Rossi
) as a reaction against the earlier, text-dominated
stile rappresentativo
.
[1]
This anachronistic use of the term
bel canto
was given wide circulation in
Robert Haas
's
Die Musik des Barocks
[13]
and, later, in
Manfred Bukofzer
's
Music in the Baroque Era
.
[14]
Since the singing style of later 17th-century Italy did not differ in any marked way from that of the 18th century and early 19th century, a connection can be drawn; but, according to Jander, most musicologists agree that the term is best limited to its mid-19th-century use, designating a style of singing that emphasized beauty of tone and technical expertise in the delivery of music that was either highly florid or featured long, flowing and difficult-to-sustain passages of
cantilena
[
it
]
.
[10]
Revival
[
edit
]
In the 1950s, the phrase "
bel canto
revival" was coined to refer to a renewed interest in the operas of Donizetti, Rossini and Bellini. These composers had begun to go out of fashion during the latter years of the 19th century and their works, while never completely disappearing from the performance repertoire, were staged infrequently during the first half of the 20th century, when the operas of Wagner, Verdi and Puccini held sway. That situation changed significantly after
World War II
with the advent of a group of enterprising orchestral conductors and the emergence of a fresh generation of singers such as
Montserrat Caballe
,
Maria Callas
,
Leyla Gencer
,
Joan Sutherland
,
Beverly Sills
and
Marilyn Horne
, who had acquired
bel canto
techniques. These artists breathed new life into Donizetti, Rossini and Bellini's stage compositions, treating them seriously as music and re-popularizing them throughout Europe and America. Today, some of the world's most frequently performed operas, such as Rossini's
The Barber of Seville
and Donizetti's
Lucia di Lammermoor
, are from the
bel canto
era.
Many 18th-century operas that require adroit
bel canto
skills have also experienced post-war revivals, ranging from lesser-known Mozart and Haydn to extensive Baroque works by Handel, Vivaldi and others.
Teaching legacy
[
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]
Musicologists occasionally apply the label "
bel canto
technique" to the arsenal of virtuosic vocal accomplishments and concepts imparted by singing teachers to their students during the late 18th century and the early 19th century. Many of these teachers were castrati.
"All [their] pedagogical works follow the same structure, beginning with exercises on single notes and eventually progressing to scales and improvised embellishments" writes Potter
who continues, "The really creative ornamentation required for cadenzas, involving models and formulae that could generate newly improvised material, came towards the end of the process."
Today's pervasive idea that singers should refrain from improvising and always adhere strictly to the letter of a composer's published score is a comparatively recent phenomenon, promulgated during the first decades of the 20th century by dictatorial conductors such as
Arturo Toscanini
(1867?1957), who championed the dramatic operas of Verdi and Wagner and believed in keeping performers on a tight interpretive leash. This is noted by both Potter
and
Michael Scott
.
Potter notes, however, that as the 19th century unfurled:
The general tendency ... was for singers not to have been taught by castrati (there were few of them left) and for serious study to start later, often at one of the new conservatories rather than with a private teacher. The traditional techniques and pedagogy were still acknowledged, but the teaching was generally in the hands of tenors and baritones who were by then at least once removed from the tradition itself.
Early 19th-century teachers described the voice as being made up of three registers. The chest register was the lowest of the three and the head register the highest, with the
passaggio
in between. These registers needed to be smoothly blended and fully equalized before a trainee singer could acquire total command of his or her natural instrument, and the surest way to achieve this outcome was for the trainee to practise vocal exercises assiduously.
Bel canto
?era teachers were great believers in the benefits of
vocalise
and
solfeggio
. They strove to strengthen the respiratory muscles of their pupils and equip them with such time-honoured vocal attributes as "purity of tone, perfection of legato, phrasing informed by eloquent
portamento
, and exquisitely turned ornaments", as noted in the introduction to Volume 2 of Scott's
The Record of Singing
.
Major refinements occurred to the existing system of
voice classification
during the 19th century as the international operatic repertoire diversified, split into distinctive nationalist schools and expanded in size. Whole new categories of singers such as
mezzo-soprano
and Wagnerian
bass-baritone
arose towards the end of the 19th century, as did such new sub-categories as
lyric coloratura soprano
,
dramatic soprano
and
spinto
soprano, and various grades of tenor, stretching from lyric through spinto to heroic. These classificatory changes have had a lasting effect on how singing teachers designate voices and opera house managements cast productions.
There was, however, no across-the-board uniformity among 19th-century
bel canto
adherents in passing on their knowledge and instructing students. Each had their own training regimes and pet notions. Fundamentally, though, they all subscribed to the same set of
bel canto
precepts, and the exercises that they devised to enhance breath support, dexterity, range, and technical control remain valuable and, indeed, some teachers still use them.
[1]
Manuel Garcia
(1805?1906), author of the influential treatise
L'Art du chant
, was the most prominent of the group of pedagogues that perpetuated bel-canto principles in teachings and writings during the second half of the 19th century. His like-minded younger sister,
Pauline Viardot
(1821?1910), was also an important teacher of voice, as were Viardot's contemporaries
Mathilde Marchesi
,
Camille Everardi
,
Julius Stockhausen
,
Carlo Pedrotti
, Venceslao Persichini,
Giovanni Sbriglia
, Melchiorre Vidal and
Francesco Lamperti
(together with Francesco's son
Giovanni Battista Lamperti
). The voices of a number of their former students can be heard on acoustic recordings made in the first two decades of the 20th century and re-issued since on LP and CD. Some examples on disc of historically and artistically significant 19th-century singers whose vocal styles and techniques exemplify
bel canto
ideals include the following:
Sir
Charles Santley
(born 1834),
Gustav Walter
(born 1834),
Adelina Patti
(born 1843),
Marianne Brandt
(born 1842),
Lilli Lehmann
(born 1848), Jean Lassalle (born 1847),
Victor Maurel
(born 1848),
Marcella Sembrich
(born 1858),
Lillian Nordica
(born 1857),
Emma Calve
(born 1858),
Nellie Melba
(born 1861),
Francesco Tamagno
(born 1850),
Francesco Marconi
(born 1853),
Leon Escalais
(born 1859),
Mattia Battistini
(born 1856),
Mario Ancona
(born 1860),
Pol Plancon
(born 1851), and
Antonio Magini-Coletti
and Francesco Navarini (both born 1855).
Quotations
[
edit
]
- "There are no registers in the human singing voice, when it is accurately produced. According to natural laws the voice is made up of one register, which constitutes its entire range."
- "Bel-canto is not a school of sensuously pretty voice-production.
[19]
It has come to be a generally recognised thing that voice, pure and simple, by its very composition, or "placing", interferes with the organs of speech; making it impossible for a vocalist to preserve absolute purity of pronunciation in song as well as in speech. It is because of this view that the principle of "vocalising" words, instead of musically "saying" them, crept in, to the detriment of vocal art. This false position is due to the idea that the 'Arte del bel-canto' encouraged mere sensuous beauty of voice, rather than truth of expression."
[19]
- "
Bel-canto
(of which we read so much) meant, and means, versatility of tone; if a man wish to be called an
artist
, his voice must become the instrument of intelligent imagination. Perhaps there would be fewer cases of vocal-specialising if the modern craze for 'voice-production' (apart from linguistic truth) could be reduced. This wondrous pursuit is, as things stand, a notable instance of putting the cart before the horse. Voices are 'produced' and 'placed' in such wise that pupils are trained to 'vocalise' (to use technical jargon) the words;
i.e.
, they are taught to make a sound which is indeed
something like
but is not the word in its purity. 'Tone' or sound is what the average student seeks,
ab initio
, and not verbal purity. Hence the monotony of modern singing. When one hears an average singer in one role, one hears him in all."
- "Those who regard the art of singing as anything more than a means to an end, do not comprehend the true purpose of that art, much less can they hope ever to fulfil that purpose. The true purpose of singing is to give utterance to certain hidden depths in our nature which can be adequately expressed in no other way. The voice is the only vehicle perfectly adapted to this purpose; it alone can reveal to us our inmost feelings, because it is our only direct means of expression. If the voice, more than any language, more than any other instrument of expression, can reveal to us our own hidden depths, and convey those depths to other souls of men, it is because voice vibrates directly to the feeling itself, when it fulfils its 'natural' mission. By fulfilling its natural mission, I mean, when voice is not hindered from vibrating to the feeling by artificial methods of tone production, which methods include certain mental processes which are fatal to spontaneity. To sing should always mean to have some definite feeling to express."
- "The decline of Bel Canto may be attributed in part to Ferrein and
Garcia
who, with a dangerously small and historically premature knowledge of laryngeal function, abandoned the intuitive and emotional insight of the anatomically blind singers."
- "Voice Culture has not progressed [...]. Exactly the contrary has taken place. Before the introduction of mechanical methods every earnest vocal student was sure of learning to use his voice properly, and of developing the full measure of his natural endowments. Mechanical instruction has upset all this. Nowadays the successful vocal student is the exception."
See also
[
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]
References
[
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]
Notes
- ^
a
b
c
Stark 2003
, p.
[
page needed
]
- ^
Duey 1951
, p.
[
page needed
]
.
- ^
a
b
Toft 2013
, p. 4
- ^
Corri, Domenico (1811).
The singers preceptor, or Corri's treatise on vocal music. This treatise is expressly calculated to teach the art of singing and consists of establishing proper rules .
London, Chappell & Co.
- ^
a
b
c
Jander 1998
, pp. 380?381
- ^
Haas 1928
, p.
[
page needed
]
.
- ^
Bukofzer 1947
, p.
[
page needed
]
.
- ^
a
b
Ffrangcon-Davies 1907
, p. 16
Sources
- Apel, Willi
(2000).
Harvard Dictionary of Music
(2nd, revised and enlarged ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap.
- Bukofzer, Manfred
(1947).
Music in the Baroque Era
. New York: W. W. Norton.
ISBN
0-393-09745-5
.
- Duey, Philip A. (1951).
Bel canto in its Golden Age
. Da Capo Press.
ISBN
978-1-4067-5437-7
.
- Ffrangcon-Davies, David
(1907).
The Singing of the Future
(3rd ed.). London, New York: John Lane. p. 16.
- Fischer, Jens Malte
[in German]
(1993). "Sprechgesang oder Belcanto".
Große Stimmen
(in German). Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler.
ISBN
978-3-476-00893-0
.
- Haas, Robert
(1928).
Die Musik des Barocks
(in German).
- Jander, Owen (1998). "Bel canto". In
Stanley Sadie
(ed.).
The New Grove Dictionary of Opera
. Vol. 1. London: Macmillan.
ISBN
0-333-73432-7
.
- Marafioti, P. Mario (1922).
Caruso's Method of Voice Production: The Scientific Culture of the Voice
. New York/London: Appleton.
ISBN
9780486241807
.
- Newham, Paul
(1999).
'Using Voice and Song in Therapy: The Practical Application of Voice Movement Therapy
. Jessica Kingsley.
ISBN
9781853025907
.
- Osborne, Charles
(1994).
The Bel Canto Operas of Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini
. Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press.
ISBN
9780931340840
.
- Potter, John (2009).
Tenor: History of a Voice
. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.
ISBN
978-0-300-11873-5
.
- Rogers, Clara Kathleen
(1893).
The Philosophy Of Singing
. Harper & Brothers Publishers.
- Scott, Michael
(1977),
The Record of Singing
, Vols. 1 and 2. London: Duckworth.
ISBN
0-7156-1030-9
,
1-55553-163-6
- Stark, James (2003).
Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy
. University of Toronto Press.
ISBN
978-0-8020-8614-3
.
- Taylor, David C. (1917).
The Psychology of Singing; a rational method of voice culture based on a scientific analysis of all systems, ancient and modern
. New York: Macmillan.
- Toft, Robert (2013).
Bel Canto: A Performer's Guide
. Oxford University Press.
ISBN
978-0-19-983232-3
.
Further reading
[
edit
]
- Brown, M. Augusta (1894),
University of Pennsylvania "Extracts From Vocal Art"
in
The Congress of Women
, Mary Kavanaugh Oldham (ed.), Chicago: Monarch Book Company, p. 477.
- Celletti, Rodolfo
(1983),
Storia del belcanto
, Fiesole: Discanto (English edition, translated by Frederick Fuller (1991),
A History of Bel Canto
, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
ISBN
0-19-313209-5
)
- Coffin, Berton (2002),
Sounds of Singing
, Second Edition, Littlefield.
- Christiansen, Rupert
(15 March 2002),
"A tenor for the 21st century"
[
dead link
]
,
The Daily Telegraph
Accessed 3 November 2008.
- Juvarra, Antonio (2006)
I segreti del belcanto. Storia delle tecniche e dei metodi vocali dal '700 ai nostri giorni
, Curci, 2006
- Marchesi, Mathilde
(1970),
Bel Canto: A Theoretical and Practical Vocal Method
, Dover.
ISBN
0-486-22315-9
- Pleasants, Henry
(1983),
The Great Singers from the Dawn of Opera to Our Own Time
, London: Macmillan.
ISBN
0-333-34854-0
- Rosselli, John (1995),
Singers of Italian Opera: The History of a Profession
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ISBN
0-521-42697-9
- Rushmore, Robert (1971),
The Singing Voice
, London: Hamish Hamilton.
ISBN
9780241019474
- Somerset-Ward, Richard (2004),
Angels and Monsters: Male and Female Sopranos in the Story of Opera
, New Haven & London: Yale University Press.
ISBN
0-300-09968-1
- Reid, Cornelius L.
(1950),
Bel Canto: Principles and Practices
, Joseph Patelson Music House
ISBN
0-915282-01-1
- Rosenthal, Harold
; Ewan West (eds.) (1996),
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera
, London: Oxford University Press.
ISBN
0-19-311321-X
- Scalisi, Cecilia (November 10, 2003),
"Raul Gimenez, el maestro del bel canto"
,
La Nacion
. Accessed 3 November 2008.
- Traite complet de chant et de declamation lyrique
Enrico Delle Sedie (Paris, 1847)
fragment
Archived
2011-10-08 at the
Wayback Machine
External links
[
edit
]
Articles
Digitized material
- "Bel Canto"
Titles
from the
Internet Archive
(e.g. Lamperti, Giovanni Battista:
The Technics of Bel Canto
)
- Garcia, Manuel
; Garcia, Beata, (trans.) (1894).
Hints on Singing
, London: E. Ascherberg.
- Greene, Harry Plunket (1912),
Interpretation in Song
. New York: The Macmillan Company.
- Lehmann, Lilli
;
Aldrich, Richard
, (translated from
Meine Gesangskunst
, 1902) (1916),
How to Sing
, New York: Macmillan. (
Audiobook
),
Bel canto by Harvard
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