Bel Canto Style

Perhaps one of the best ways to describe bel canto as musical and dramatic style is to compare it with its antithesis, verismo. Verismo uses natural realistic vocal coloration as a mode of expression, and often focused on the lives of the common place and vernacular as subject matter. Bel canto used refined musical idioms to express emotions rather than affective coloration, and focused instead on nobility and mythical gods and goddesses. Many bel canto idioms are considered corny by today's standards, mainly because they have been parodied so much in cartoons, and the exaggerated indicated gestures of silent movies reined in operatic theaters. The musical style of bel canto also required the technical execution of "beautiful singing" of which the messa di voce was the centerpiece and was executed with nobility and restraint of affective expression. It was about being elegant, classy and plaintively poignent. Verismo was about blood and guts and raking one's soul over the stage leaving it bloody. Chest voice in women was exploited very effectively in this style. Men's high chested notes were also exploited. Until Duprez, bel canto was all about mixing the voice. Then after that, some chested, some mixed. Chesting the upper end of chest voice is stylistically less appropriate for women in bel canto than for men. In this respect, men have more leeway in which manner they wish to sing. Bel Canto as a style began with Handel and ended with Verdi who used it intermittently. Early bel canto was written for improvisation, with composers writing ornamentation out more and more, until by Verdi's time everything was written out, leaving little room for improvisation. Verismo took music into a different place, just as the cinema began to be ascendant. You can hear a lot of wonderfully raunchy verismo in early cinema music, and the early cinema in the wonderfully vulgar verismo such as Cilea's "Adriana Lecouvrer." Then the split became irreparable. Movie music went one way, and classical music went another, and bel canto idioms found themselves parodied in Dudly Doright and Tom and Jerry, and opera in general became parodied in Bugs Bunny and the cinema. Those musical idioms were essential in the execution of the bel canto style, but now are engrained in the minds of people forever and will never lose the parodied nature and be considered corny. At one time is was considered very beautiful and expressive, and without sensitive treatment of these issues, much of serious bel canto suffers in it's execution. Comic bel canto has fared better in this respect.

Bel Canto

Bel Canto simply means beautiful singing, and a concept often associated with late 18th and early 19th century Italian vocal music. Although the term and practice originated in Italy (as did most things musical), it has to do not only with a period and nationality, but to a particular approach to vocal technique as applied to particularly melodic music performed in a relatively intimate setting. Although the style is especially suited to the nature of the Italian language, it has been easily adapted to other languages and musical styles. Simply put, it involves singing in a natural, unforced way, with the emphasis placed on clear, flowing vowels, minimally interrupted by consonants in order to produce a smooth, legato line and clarity of text--a tall order and not as simple as it may seem. There are several modern examples of this practice among singers from differing nationalities. An obvious Italian one would be Carlo Bergonzi, a Spanish one--Monserrat Caballe, a German one--Hans Hotter (in fact, as a teacher, he instructed his students to sing as if they were Italian, no matter what the actual language), a Russian one (Bulgarian to be precise)--Boris Christoff. These singers all have one thing in common--they sing in the manner described above. I could site other examples from the more distant past, when such singing was very much the norm as copared to the present, but this is a start. There is,of course, more to it than I have mentioned, but this is the easily recognizable basis. I know I am opening a can of worms as a result of my viewpoint, but this is OK. It makes for a fun discussion. Nice basic explanation. I would only add that there a host of practices thatrequire a finly trained instrument. I would mention the tapering of thephrases at both ends, etc. and the use of ornamentation that was requiredlearning for lll singers, trained in composition in the old days.J B Faure in his manual has long essays on various aspects of the art,Garcia thoroughly covered it as well in his manual.Nourrit was a belcanto singer, as was Kraus, Rocky Blake, Sutherland, andone of my favorites of all time, Zara Doluchanova, as well as Chaliapin,Schipa, Gigli, and so on.