Back to Bel Canto

Who do they think they are, these people who want to teach us our trade?

We know it ever so much better than they do. Let composers stick to their meetier and let us do ours! Composers who write out ornaments are just imi tating a dangerous foreign fashion, one which is unworthy of good Italians!

So wrote the famed castrato soprano Pier Francesco Tosi in his book Observations on the Florid Song, which was the basic handbook for opera singers during the 18th century. In those days singers freely ornamented composers' scores with their own improvised embellishments in a style known as bel canto (literally, "beautiful singing") To today's purists, who worshipfully preach note-for-note fidelity to the composer the style is strictly bellow canto. Nevertheless, performances in opera houses and on recordings are now being laced with so many variations on old arias that Tosi would sing for joy.

In the new London recording of Semiramide, for example, most of the dazzling trills and turns, runs and roulades sung by Joan Sutherland were not written by Rossini but by her husband Conductor Richard Bonynge. La Stupenda's enormous success with bel canto embroidery, now emulated by a long and impressive roster of young singers underscores the most significant change in opera singing in 150 years.

Slurs & Shakes. The history of bel canto and the reasons for its revival are chronicled in a lively new book by Musicologist Henry Pleasants, The Great Singers (Simon & Schuster; $7.50). The first prima donnas of bel canto were not donnas at all but male sopranos and contraltos. These castrati, who commanded the center stage of opera for more than 100 years, until the end of the 18th century, constituted about 70% of all male singers. They postured and strutted on the stage like peacocks improvising elaborate vocal filigrees, inserting grace notes or unaccompanied passages, some of which lasted as long as the aria itself. They combined the range of the female voice with the power of the male, interposing a dizzying array of appoggiaturas, mordents, cadenzas, slides, slurs, shakes, trills, turns and leaps. For tonal purity, flexibility precision and breath control, it was a display of vocal acrobatics that has never been equaled.

In 18th century Italy, reports Pleasants, women singers were considered hardly better than prostitutes and were banned throughout the Papal States. Thus most female roles were sung by castrati, who were paid four times as much as the other singers, up to 20 times as much as the composers. Some tenacious women singers masqueraded as castrati (which caused occasional --and embarrassing-- sexual complications). When women were finally accepted on all opera stages in the early 1800s, the vain castrati resented the competition. The result was some classic vocal jousts. Castrato Domenico Caffarelli, for instance, liked to fluster the sopranos during duets by spiraling off on melodic tangents that had no resemblance to the score; Soprano Angelica Catalan!, while singing in England, tried to hold her own by tossing in elaborate variations of God Save the King in every opera she sang.

Verdi's Veto. The inevitable revolt against such excesses came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when German composers such as Wagner and Strauss insisted on Werktreue-- allegiance to the printed score. At the end f his career, even Verdi was threatening to sue any opera house that permitted singers to change a single note of his music. The castrato vogue gradually faded, and as the size and interpretive importance of the orchestra multiplied, the composer became the dominant figure in opera. "The singer's margin of creative and imaginative freedom was inevitably inhibited," says Pleasants, "and he became a single element in a vast ensemble subject to the conductor's direct guidance and control."

And so it rigidly remained until the 950s, when Maria Callas set the opera world on its ear by reviving the bel canto operas of Donizetti, Bellini and Rossini, and demonstrated that bel canto embellishments could be used to impart new and exciting interpretations to a role. She has since been followed by Sutherland, and in the past few years virtually every major young singer to appear, including Teresa Berganza Marilyn Home and Montserrat Caballe' has performed in bel canto operas.

Chance to Get Away. It had to happen, says Pleasants, if only as an antidote to the dulling sameness of the note-perfect performances. A boldly outspoken theorist, Pleasants goes so far as to say that this straitjacket is so confining that some pop vocalists such as Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra, whose jazz improvisations are a direct counterpart of bel canto, are "technically better than most opera singers." The voice of Ella Fitzgerald, whom he regards as the prima donna of pop, "is so naturally placed that she can sing more in a week than most opera singers can in a month." The falsetto wailings of the Beach Boys and Beatle Paul McCartney all echo the early 19th century bel canto singers, he adds. Beyond their interpretive freedom, the major link between pop singers and the bel canto tradition is the microphone, which allows vocalists to sing more naturally, without straining to make them selves heard above a thundering opera house orchestra. To stay vital, says Pleasants, opera singers must look backward to bel canto because they have nothing to look forward to. He contends that the torturously difficult vocal writing of modern composers is so contrary to the melodic essence of song that it is beyond salvation. The futility, he says, is reflected in Basso Cesare Siepi's lament that "I have nothing against modern composers. But what have they got against me?" The only answer, concludes Pleasants, is for the singers "to go back to the old music.

They can have a lot of fun doing it, and we'll have a lot of fun listening to it."

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