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La Scala

Bel Canto Technique: The Historical Method

When musicologists speak of "bel canto technique," they mean the body of vocal accomplishments and concepts that the great Italian masters imparted to their pupils from the early eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. It was never a single doctrine fixed in a textbook. It was a living craft, transmitted from teacher to student and set down piecemeal in a series of treatises whose authors were often describing an art they had themselves been taught to perform. Two of the most important — Pier Francesco Tosi, whose Opinioni de' cantori antichi e moderni appeared in Bologna in 1723, and Giambattista Mancini, whose Pensieri e riflessioni pratiche sopra il canto figurato followed in 1774 — were themselves castrati, writing from inside the tradition they codified. To read the treatises in sequence, from Tosi to Manuel García II in the later nineteenth century, is to watch a coherent method come slowly into focus.

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For all their differences of emphasis, the writers return to the same small set of concerns: how the breath is managed, how the registers of the voice are equalised, how the sound is resonated, and how successive notes are bound into a singing line. These are the foundations of the historical technique, and they remain the foundations of the work done in this studio.

Manuel Garcia II

The breath: Appoggio

 

The old masters did not analyse breathing with the anatomical precision modern teachers expect, but they agreed on its centrality and gave the principle a name: appoggio, from the Italian appoggiare, "to lean." The most celebrated formulation belongs to Francesco Lamperti, who in his Treatise on the Art of Singing described a sustained contest between the muscles of inhalation and those of exhalation. "To sustain a given note," he wrote, "the air should be expelled slowly; to attain this end, the respiratory [inspiratory] muscles, by continuing their action, strive to retain the air in the lungs, and oppose their action to that of the expiratory muscles … which is called lotta vocale, or vocal struggle. On the retention of this equilibrium depends the just emission of the voice." The aim of that balance is not to drive the voice with pressure but the reverse: to meter the breath so finely that it is released slowly and evenly and the tone is never forced. Lamperti elsewhere defined singing appoggiata as producing every note "by a column of air over which the singer has perfect command, by holding back the breath, and not permitting more air than is absolutely necessary for the formation of the note to escape." His son Giovanni Battista Lamperti distilled the same idea into a maxim recorded by his assistant William Earl Brown in Vocal Wisdom (1931): "You do not hold your tone, you spin it." The historical ideal is an economy of air, in which the voice is sustained by management rather than effort.

Registration: Registers and their Union

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The central technical problem of the old method was registration. Tosi, his German translator and annotator Johann Friedrich Agricola (whose expanded Anleitung zur Singkunst appeared in 1757), and Mancini all worked from a two-register theory. Mancini states it plainly: "The voice in its natural state is ordinarily divided into two registers, one of which is called the chest, the other the head or falsetto. I say ordinarily, because there are rare examples in which one has received from nature the most unusual gift of being able to execute everything in the chest voice." Tosi's translator Galliard glossed the terms for English readers: the voce di petto (chest voice) is "a full voice, which comes from the breast by strength, and is the most sonorous"; the voce di testa (head voice) "comes more from the throat than from the breast" and has greater agility.

 

The whole art lay in disguising the division between them. Tosi is the first recorded vocal pedagogue to advocate uniting and blending the chest and head registers — earlier writers such as Lodovico Zacconi (Prattica di musica, 1592) and Giulio Caccini (Le nuove musiche, 1602) had held that singers should use only the "natural voice." A "diligent Master," Tosi insists, knowing that a singer without the upper register "is constrained to sing within the narrow Compass of a few Notes," must "leave no Means untried, so to unite the feigned and the natural Voice, that they may not be distinguished; for if they do not perfectly unite, the Voice will be of divers Registers, and must consequently lose its Beauty." Mancini, two generations later, holds that the worth of a voice "will always depend upon its evenness of quality throughout the whole register," counselling that the singer strengthen the weaker head tones and hold back the heavier chest so that the scale becomes even.

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(A note of caution is due here. The modern teaching shorthand that Mancini's counsel to "press" at the join means a firmer closure of the glottis is an interpretation, not his literal text: Mancini's own words speak of holding back the chest and lightening toward the head, and the precise vocabulary of glottal closure belongs to the later, post-laryngoscope language of García rather than to Mancini himself.)

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A generation after Mancini, the connective tissue of this blending acquired a name: the feigned voice. Domenico Corri — a pupil of Nicola Porpora, and thus a direct link to the great eighteenth-century school — treated the registers and their joining in his Singer's Preceptor (1810). It was Isaac Nathan, however, in Musurgia Vocalis (1836), who gave the idea its fullest statement. "There is a break, more or less, in the voices of both sexes," Nathan wrote, "but more particularly in that of the male, between the Voce di petto and falsetto: that precise part of the vocal organ where the Voce di petto forms this juncture with the falsetto is by the Italians called Il Ponticello, 'the little bridge.'" The singer's object, he continued, must be "to blend the two qualities of tone, at their junction, in such a manner, that the transition from one to the other may not be perceptible to the ear." For Nathan the bridge is built by a third quality, distinct from both ordinary falsetto and head voice: "the falsetto is considered a feigned voice — but the quality of the sound to which I allude is not that which is produced in the throat, and already distinguished under the name falsetto; nor is it the voce di testa." This union, he insisted, "cannot be accomplished without the aid of the feigned voice, which may be justly considered the only medium or vehicle by which the falsetto can be carried into the voce di petto."

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This idea of a third, mixed quality — neither pure chest nor pure falsetto — is the historical seed of what later writers called the mixed voice or voix mixte, and it lies at the heart of my own research into the tenor voice. The lineage runs from Tosi's "feigned and natural Voice" united, through Corri and Nathan's "little bridge," to García, who in his Traité complet de l'art du chant (1840/1847) placed a "falsetto" or medium register between chest and head and defined the very word register with new rigour: "a series of consecutive and homogeneous sounds produced by the same mechanical means, and differing from … sounds originating in mechanical means of a different kind."

Resonance: the round timbre


If registration concerns how the tone is made at the larynx, resonance concerns what becomes of it in the vocal tract above. García's lasting contribution was to treat timbre as something the singer commands deliberately. "Every sound of the voice," he wrote in Hints on Singing (1894), "may assume an infinite variety of shades apart from intensity. Each of these is a timbre." He named two governing colours — the timbre clair (clear, open) and the timbre sombre (dark, covered) — and taught the singer to move between them at will for expressive ends. He located their source unambiguously: "The real mouth of a singer ought to be considered the pharynx, because it is in the pharynx that is found the causation of timbres." This scientific bent was no accident.

 

In September 1854 García conceived and used the laryngoscope, becoming the first person to view the functioning glottis in a living human; the findings were communicated to the Royal Society on his behalf by the physiologist William Sharpey on 24 May 1855. García later recalled the moment of invention: "One September day, in 1854, I was strolling in the Palais Royal … when suddenly I saw the two mirrors of the laryngoscope in their respective positions, as if actually present before my eyes." His celebrated coup de la glotte — the clean "stroke of the glottis" that gives a precise start to the tone — springs from the same observational turn of mind. The rounded, well-focused tone the Italians prized was named chiaroscuro, "light-dark"; Giovanni Battista Lamperti described it as a "dark-light tone, which unites all registers." What the old masters described through sensation and the shape of the mouth and palate can now be understood acoustically as well as felt.

Mathilde Marchesi

The singing line: legato, portamento, messa di voce

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Above the management of breath, registers, and resonance sits the purpose they all serve: a beautiful, flexible, seamless line. The graces that define bel canto are not ornaments added to a finished technique; they are the technique heard in action. Tosi taught the messa di voce at the very threshold of instruction. The master, he wrote, should "teach the Art to put forth the Voice, which consists in letting it swell by Degrees from the softest Piano to the loudest Forte, and from thence with the same Art return from the Forte to the Piano. A beautiful Messa di Voce … can never fail of having an exquisite Effect." Corri, a century later, called it simply "preparing the voice for a crescendo," and the device had long been the supreme test of a singer: Charles Burney recorded that "none of all Farinelli's excellencies … so far surpassed all other singers … as his messa di voce."

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The portamento — the carrying of the voice from one pitch to another through the intervening tones — García understood not as mere decoration but as a tool of unification. To "drag" or carry the notes, he wrote, "will assist in equalizing the registers, timbres and power of the voice": the act of binding the notes is also the act of unifying the instrument. Above all these sits legato, the unbroken thread; for García the elementary qualities of good vocalisation were "perfect intonation … equality of note-value … equality of strength … equality of degree of legato … and harmony of timbres."

The technique in living voices

 

These principles were not abstractions. They produced singers whose qualities the historical record describes in vivid detail, and none more important to the tenor tradition than Giovanni Battista Rubini (1794–1854), for whom Bellini wrote Gualtiero in Il pirata (1827) and Arturo in I puritani (1835). Contemporaries marvelled at a voice that reached, in the words of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians quoting Henry Chorley, "from E of the bass clef to B of the treble, in chest notes, besides commanding a falsetto register as far as F or even G above that" — the soft, high, mixed singing on which his fame rested. He "indulged too much in the use of head-voice," the same account allows, yet "so perfect is his art … that the transition from one register to the other is imperceptible to the hearer" — Tosi's two-century-old ideal made audible flesh. Chorley prized above all his seamless legato and his way of "blending his voice intimately with that of his partner," in which "he was unsurpassed." Rubini is also commonly credited with bringing the expressive vibrato into wide currency: Grove's article on "Tremolo" records that the vocal vibrato "is supposed to have had its origin in the vibrato of Rubini, first assuming formidable proportions in France, and thence quickly spreading throughout the musical world." Rubini is the living proof of the method: the treatises tell us what the masters intended; a singer like Rubini tells us what the intention sounded like when it was realised.

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Agility and ornament: the florid graces

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Bound up with the singing line is the florid art the Italians called fioritura and, more broadly, coloratura — the rapid, ornamented passagework in which bel canto displays its agility. This was no later indulgence but central to the tradition from the first. Tosi (1723) gives separate chapters to the appoggiatura, to divisions, and to the shake, or trill, which he held a singer could scarcely do without; Mancini classified the kinds of agility a voice must command; and García, in his Traité, set out the whole vocabulary of ornament with a systematist's care.

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That vocabulary is worth naming, since it recurs throughout the repertoire. There are the rapid scales and runs — roulades, or divisions; the trill, a swift alternation with the note above, and its relatives the mordent, a quick flick to the note below, and the turn or gruppetto, a small figure circling the main note. There are the grace-notes — the appoggiatura, an accented "leaning" note that resolves onto the principal one, and its fleeting cousin the acciaccatura, or "crushed" note — together with devices of attack and weight such as crisp staccato and emphatic marcato notes, wide leaps spanning two octaves or more, and the cadenza, the extended unaccompanied flourish that crowns a section. (The messa di voce and the portamento, often listed among the graces, are treated above as part of the singing line.)

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The decisive point is that this agility is not a natural gift but a trained coordination, and it rests directly on the work of the preceding sections: the breath that meters the air, the registration that keeps the scale even, and the resonance that lets the voice ring without pressure. García taught it in exactly this way — as a faculty built through patient, graduated exercise rather than assumed. When the foundations are secure, florid singing ceases to be display and becomes what the tradition always intended: the line itself set in motion, and the singer's most personal instrument of expression.

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From the tradition to the studio

 

This historical method is the ground on which the studio's teaching is built. How I bring it into the lesson — the language I use, the order in which the work unfolds, and the way these enduring principles are coordinated in practice — is a separate matter, and one I have set out on its own page describing my method and what it is like to work with me. The tradition is the inheritance; the method is how it is put to use.

Primary Sources & Further Reading

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Contemporary account & secondary grounding

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  • Henry F. Chorley, Thirty Years' Musical Recollections (London, 1862). — Internet Archive (archive.org/details/thirtyyearsmusic00chor).

  • James Stark, Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy (Toronto, 1999); Richard Miller, The Structure of Singing (1986); New Grove entries on bel canto, registration, Tosi, García, and Rubini.

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