NY Times - In 1858 Gioachino Rossini, wealthy, well fed and, at 66, retired from
the opera business
for nearly 30 years, bemoaned the decline in the heritage of
Italian singing during a conversation with friends in Paris. “Alas for us,” he
is reported to have said, “we have lost our bel canto.” He was referring to the
art of singing as it flourished in Italy from the mid-1700s through the first
decades of the 19th century. He might also have been referring to the approach
to writing operas by the Italian composers who were steeped in the bel canto
singing tradition. It is not really clear. Quite a bit about the concept of bel
canto has long been open to interpretation, including the meaning of this loose
term itself, which literally translates as beautiful singing. (Or beautiful
song. See what I mean?) But one indisputable point is that the singing
tradition for which Rossini was waxing nostalgic was not known as bel canto
during the decades when it was supposedly thriving.
The term did not come into fashion until midway through the 19th
century. To speak of the bel canto era in opera is like referring to the Lost
Generation of young Americans, mostly creative types, who flocked to Paris
during the 1920s. Only after the fact, through the propaganda of Ernest
Hemingway, did those expatriates discover that they had been lost. Opera buffs
today use the term bel canto all the time. Yet we each seem to bring a
different set of assumptions to the concept.
So here is one opera lover’s attempt to explain bel canto as I
understand it, a primer of sorts, along with recommendations of a few
recordings for those who don’t want to wait for the presentations of bel canto
operas next year at the Metropolitan Opera to bone up. Mary Zimmerman’s
production of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” will be revived in late January
with Anna Netrebko in the title role, and Ms. Zimmermann’s new production of a
Bellini classic, “La Sonnambula,” opens in early March, starring the soprano
Natalie Dessay and the tenor Juan Diego Flórez, two leading exponents of bel
canto repertory. In its narrowest sense bel canto opera refers to the early
decades of 19th-century Italian opera, when Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti
dominated the field. But the overall concept of bel canto started much earlier,
with a consensus among opera enthusiasts that there was nothing more ravishing
than a beautiful voice singing a beautiful melodic line beautifully, especially
a melodic line driven by a sensitive musical setting of a poetic and singable
text.
The technique of singing that produced the desired results valued
smooth production, or legato, throughout the entire vocal range. Ideally, you
did not want to hear singers shifting gears as their voices moved from low to
middle to high registers. Also prized was the ability to execute effortlessly
all manner of embellishments — rapid-fire runs, trills and such — the better to
decorate vocal lines. So the use of a lighter yet penetrating sound in the
upper register was crucial to the style.
But as the Romantic movement took hold in the 19th century, the public
taste for operatic drama evolved. Composers started writing works that demanded
more intense and powerful singing. Voices grew weightier. A telling example of
the shift in fashion was the acclaimed tenor Gilbert Duprez, born in Paris in
1806. In his early days Duprez was a “tenore di grazia,” a light lyric tenor
with an agile and flexible voice, which he showed in roles like Almaviva in
Rossini’s “Barbiere di Siviglia.” But increasingly he displayed dramatic
intensity, notably in Rossini’s “Guillaume Tell” and later in operas by
Donizetti and Berlioz. He is believed to have been the first tenor to sing a
high C not with the lighter, ringing so-called head voice but with a full,
powerful chest voice. It drove crowds wild, but it drove Rossini crazy. He likened
the sound to “the squawk of a capon with its throat cut.”
A tenor’s high C’s can still drive audiences wild. Last season, though
Mr. Flórez was completely charming and sang beautifully as Tonio in the Met’s
production of Donizetti’s “Fille du Régiment,” he garnered excessive attention
for his dispatching of the tenor’s showpiece aria with its nine high C’s. When
Luciano Pavarotti sang this bel canto tour de force, he stunned his audiences
by tossing off those notes with astounding power. His voice was an uncanny
hybrid, combining the colorings and agility of a lyric tenor with an enormous
sound. When a light-voiced lyric tenor like Mr. Flórez sings the aria, it is
not all that hard. Still, Mr. Flórez is a gift to bel canto opera fans.
The other historical dimension of the bel canto era has to do with the
nature of the operas written for voices steeped in the practice. Since
beautiful singing carried the day in the bel canto tradition, it was natural to
compose music that would showcase such vocalism. For me the most fascinating
element of the practice has to do with the approach to writing melody.
The melodic line is everything in a bel canto opera, not just in the
arias but in the elaborate scenes that contain them. Those scenes offer long
stretches of lyrically enhanced recitative and extended spans of arioso, a
halfway station between full-out melody and conversational recitative.
Catchy tunes in all styles of music tend to have something in common:
they are laid out in symmetrical phrases with simple melodic riffs that are
repeated. Think of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Or the operatic equivalent
of a catchy tune, Figaro’s “Non più andrai” from Mozart’s “Nozze di Figaro.”
Such melodies are analogous to poetry written in symmetrical verses with lines
of equal length and repeated phrases. But the bel canto melodies that most
captivate me are those that spin out in long, elegant, endless lines that
almost disguise the phrase structure of the melody. For a modern equivalent,
think of the Beatles’ song “Yesterday,” with its elusive and haunting melody. A
prime example from bel canto would be Norma’s aria “Casta diva” from the
Bellini masterpiece that bears her name.
The elaborately ornamented phrases of “Casta diva” sensitively elongate
every syllable of the Italian text. But the result is a melody that seems to
hover wondrously above the undulant and respectful accompaniment pattern. It’s
easy to poke fun at those simple, some would say simplistic, accompaniment
patterns in a bel canto aria, or the oom-pah-pah’s in an early Verdi aria,
which Wagner mocked, likening Verdi’s orchestra to a big guitar. Verdi
understood, however, that when a melody was pure, strong and beguiling, it was
enough for an accompaniment to provide harmonic support and rhythmic lift.
Defending Verdi’s standard approach to aria writing, Stravinsky, no less, in
his “Poetics of Music,” wrote that “there is more substance and true invention
in the aria ‘La donna è mobile,’ for example, in which the elite saw nothing but
deplorable facility, than in the rhetoric and vociferations of the ‘Ring.’ ” As
every opera historian will say, the problem in talking about early-19th-century
bel canto opera is that no work from that era relied solely on creating
longspun phrases of ethereal melody. Bellini was probably the purest bel canto
master, but an opera like “Norma” is rich with declamatory vocal writing, fits
of Romantic passion, fearsome outbursts for the volatile tragic heroine in
which the soprano must summon chilling power and dispatch quick-paced lines
full of daring leaps.
The practice of bel canto in its purest form had enormous influence on
subsequent composers. Donizetti cleared the path that Verdi followed. Verdi
became a bold innovator later in his career, but early on he struggled to find
a balance between transcending the parameters of opera as it was practiced and
honoring the bel canto heritage to which he was beholden. It’s a wonder that
Chopin, born in 1810, never tried to write an opera, because he was completely
smitten with bel canto works, especially Bellini’s. Chopin’s melodies, like the
opening theme for the soloist in the Piano Concerto No. 1, composed in 1830,
sing with the long-lined, profoundly melancholic elegance of a bel canto
melody. Chopin and Bellini sometimes seem like distant composer cousins drawing
from the same creative well. Listen to the scene at the beginning of Act II of
“Norma,” which appeared the year after Chopin’s concerto. When the title
character, a druid priestess who has secretly violated her vows and given birth
to two children by an occupying Roman, contemplates killing them, she pours out
her anguish in a profoundly sad melody, “Teneri figli” (“Tender children”).
There are remarkable similarities.
Even Wagner was influenced by the principles of bel canto opera, though
he did not like to admit it. His early works, especially “Das Liebesverbot,”
have set-piece arias with florid melodies and chordal accompanimental patterns,
the whole works. Naturally, Wagner, who debunked just about everything,
described bel canto singing as blandly lyrical and obsessed with vocal
niceties. He called for a German school of singing that would bring spiritually
vibrant and profoundly passionate qualities into vocal artistry. For sure,
Wagner demanded new levels of vocal power and stamina from singers. Yet at
other times he supported the essential approach to singing that the bel canto
tradition espoused. Brünnhilde has extended passages of elegiac melodic lines.
Even in her trademark “Hojotojo!” battle cry, she must execute a long trill.
The German soprano Lilli Lehmann, who participated in the first complete “Ring”
production at Bayreuth in 1876, would later become renowned both as Brünnhilde and
as Norma and considered the roles complementary. More recently Jane Eaglen also
sang both prominently, though how well she handled Bellini’s florid vocal lines
was a hot topic among operagoers.
As for the bel canto approach to melodic construction, Bellini and his
generation were hardly the first to compose long, winding vocal lines. What
could be more melismatic and endlessly melodic than medieval chant? And in the
arias of his Passions and cantatas, Bach could spin a florid melodic line as
well as any bel canto master. Think of the artful pop songs of Rufus
Wainwright, who knows opera like an expert and is nearly finished writing one.
Or of Burt Bacharach’s dreamy melodies, like the quirky song “Alfie,” which
does its thing, complete with twists and turns, oblivious to phrase structure. And
though Stephen Sondheim has a love-hate attitude toward opera, many of his
melodic lines show its influence. In “No Place Like London” from “Sweeney
Todd,” the title character, an avenging barber, gives hints of his woeful story
to the sailor Anthony (“There was a barber and his wife”) through a slow
accretion of melodic phrases that grow increasingly prolonged and anguished.
Verdi could not have done it better. I would like to think that the practice of
writing free-roaming melodic lines, which continues, is in part a result of
early-19th-century Italian opera, which empowered composers to push the
practice to the hilt. Whatever you want to call it. But one thing about opera
hasn’t changed since the days of Rossini’s maturity. Buffs are always complaining
that singing was better in the old days.
NY Post - On 10/26/16 Ryan
Speedo Green sang the role of Colline, the philosopher, in the Metropolitan
Opera’s “La Bohème.” Hard to believe that in 1998 a 12-year-old Ryan was being
carted off to a juvenile detention center, having plotted to murder his family. As described in the new
biography of Green out Tuesday, Daniel Bergner’s “Sing for Your Life,” his
Virginia upbringing was steeped more in violence than in Verdi.
