Fuente:

Jander, O., & Harris, E. (2001). Bel canto. Grove Music Online.Retrieved 11 Jul. 2018,
from
http:////www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.00
1.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000002551.

Bel canto (It.: ‘beautiful singing’)

 Owen Jander and Ellen T. Harris

 https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.02551
 Published in print: 20 January 2001
 Published online: 2001

The phrase ‘bel canto’, along with a number of similar constructions (‘bellezze
del canto’, ‘bell’arte del canto’), has been used without specific meaning and with
widely varying subjective interpretations. It did not take on special meaning as a term
until the mid-19th century: ‘neither musical nor general dictionaries saw fit to attempt
definition until after 1900’ (Duey). Even so, the term remains ambiguous and is often
used nostalgically in its application to a lost tradition.
Generally understood, the term ‘bel canto’ refers to the Italian vocal style of the 18th
and early 19th centuries, the qualities of which include perfect legato production
throughout the range, the use of a light tone in the higher registers and agile and
flexible delivery. More narrowly, it is sometimes applied exclusively to Italian opera of
the time of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti. In either case, ‘bel canto’ is usually set in
opposition to the development of a weightier, more powerful and speech-inflected style
associated with German opera and Wagner in particular. Wagner himself decried the
Italian singing model that was concerned merely with ‘whether that G or A♭ will come
out roundly’ and proposed a German school of singing that would draw ‘the spiritually
energetic and profoundly passionate into the orbit of its matchless Expression’ (Prose
Works; Eng. trans., London 1894, iii, 202; iv, 238).
While to some, therefore, bel canto became the lost art of beautiful singing – so that in a
conversation that took place in Paris in 1858, Rossini is reported to have inveighed
against the decline of the traditional Italian singing with the words, ‘Alas for us, we have
lost our bel canto’ – to others (e.g. J. Hey, Deutscher Gesangunterricht, Mainz, 1885) it
took on the pejorative meaning of vocalization devoid of content. Similarly, the so-
called German style was both heralded and derided. In a collection of songs by Italian
masters published under the title Il bel canto (Berlin, 1887), F. 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 belcanto to
its rightful place’.
The term ‘bel canto’ rapidly became a battle cry in the vocabulary of Italian singing
teachers (e.g. Ricci), and the concept became clouded by mystique and confused by a
plethora of individual interpretations. To complicate the matter further, German
musicology in the early 20th century devised its own historical application for ‘belcanto’,
using the term to refer to the simple lyricism that came to the fore in Venetian opera
and the Roman cantata during the 1630s and 40s (the era of Cesti, Carissimi and Luigi
Rossi) as a reaction against the earlier, text-dominated stilo rappresentativo. This
anachronistic use of the term was given wide circulation in Robert Haas’s Die Musik des
 Barocks (Potsdam, 1928) and, later, in Manfred Bukofzer’s Music in the Baroque Era(New
York, 1947, pp. 118ff). Since the singing style of 17th-century Italy did not differ in any
marked way from that of the 18th and early 19th centuries, a connection can be drawn;
but the term is best limited to its 19th-century use as a style of singing that emphasized
beauty of tone in the delivery of highly florid music.

Bibliography
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 P.A. Duey: Bel canto in its Golden Age (New York, 1951/R)
 V. Fuchs: The Art of Singing (London, 1963)
 A. Michotte: ‘An Evening chez Rossini, 1858’, Opera, 18 (1967), 952–62
 F. Thomas: Bel canto: die Lehre des Kunstgesanges nach der altitalienischen Schule (Berlin,
1968)
 M. Amstad: ‘Das berühmte Notenblatt des Porpora: Die Fundamentalübungen der
Belcanto Schule’, Musica, 23/5 (1969), 453–5
 C. Reid: Bel canto: Principles and Practices (New York, 1971/R)
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 W. Crutchfield: ‘The bel canto Connection’, ON, 62/1 (1997), 30–35, 51