Dr Ken Querns-Langley at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden:
Insights on Bellini’s I puritani

Bel canto is not only a historical period but rather a culture of performance — a performance philosophy of singing that runs from Monteverdi to the present day. It is tempting to reduce it to "Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, plus beautiful tunes," but the term carries several distinct meanings that are easily confused: a period most conventionally attributed as the high bel canto, c.1810–1840; a melody-led and voice-centred compositional style associated most prominently with those listed above; a vocal technique cultivated around delivering on that compositional style; a vocal pedagogy to train that technique, etc. Because of these various and overlapping meanings, it is much more apt to consider bel canto as a wider performance culture. Collapsing these senses into one is the root of much of the confusion around the term.

What holds the whole arc together are two driving forces: beauty of tone and flexibility of expression. Every technique is a servant of those two ends. At its height — the compositional flowering of roughly 1810 to 1840 — bel canto is Romantic opera, and I puritani (1835) sits near the end of that period rather than at its centre.

Above all, it was a culture in which the singer was a creative partner rather than a vessel for the composer's genius; composers wrote for particular voices. The creative process began with the librettist and the composer and didn't end until the singer's last breath. The creativity that singers contributed included, but was not limited to, how they executed what the composer wrote: the vocal colours, textures and timbres; their ornaments, cadenzas and variations; the precise way they articulated any given tone or connected one to another through legato or portamento; rubati and tempo variation; intensity and dynamic shifts through crescendi, decrescendi, messa di voce, esclamazione, and the rest.

To understand bel canto, think approach, not epoch.