Britain and Bel Canto
How Britain became bel canto's second stage
the stars it made, the diva it mourned, the method it turned into science, and the revival it launched.
Britain is usually written out of the bel canto story, cast as a mere export market: the Italians made the art, and the British bought tickets. The truth is richer and stranger. Britain was bel canto's great second stage — the place where its singers became international celebrities, where the largest fees were paid, where one of its supreme divas died young and passed into legend, where its method was codified and first turned into science, and where, a century later, it was brought roaring back to life. If Italy supplied the voices, Britain supplied the money, the mania, the codification, and, in time, the science. London was to bel canto something like what it would later be to popular music: not the birthplace, but the place that made it global — and that kept it alive after its homeland had moved on.
Opera as a British subject
The connection runs deeper than reception, and it begins before bel canto proper. Handel's London years, from 1711, made the city a European capital of Italian opera, and the London opera of the Handel era drew the greatest castrati of the age — Senesino, and later Farinelli — at fees that scandalised the press. The technique those singers embodied is the direct ancestor of the falsettone, the pharyngeal voice reconstructed in my own doctoral work; the line from Senesino to Rubini to the modern studio is real, not rhetorical.
Frederick James Smyth, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
There is a second irony in the repertoire itself. Again and again, Italian composers set British history and literature to their own vocal style: Donizetti's trilogy on the Tudor queens — Anne Boleyn, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I — Rossini's Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra, his countryman's setting of Walter Scott in Lucia di Lammermoor, and Bellini's I puritani, set in a Puritan fortress near Plymouth during the Civil War. The Italians were singing British history back to the British, in a foreign tongue and an alien vocal art.
The stage of fame
When the bel canto era reached its height, London was where its stars were made. The famous "Puritani Quartet" — Giulia Grisi, Giovanni Battista Rubini, Antonio Tamburini and Luigi Lablache, for whom Bellini wrote his last opera — were fixtures at the King's Theatre, and their London seasons made them wealthy. Grisi and the tenor Mario were the celebrity couple of the age, effectively domestic stars in London for decades; Giuditta Pasta, the first Norma, sang her great seasons here. Bellini himself spent the spring of 1833 in London before leaving for Paris, where he would compose I puritani for that very quartet. Italy gave the voices; Britain gave them the world.
The native voices
Britain did not only host the Italian stars; it produced singers of its own who trained in the same tradition, and whom the great composers wrote for. The line reaches back to John Beard, Handel's principal English tenor in the eighteenth century. A generation later the Dublin-born Michael Kelly sang with the Italian company in Vienna, where Mozart wrote the roles of Don Basilio and Don Curzio in Le nozze di Figaro for him. The London tenor John Braham, trained by the castrato Venanzio Rauzzini, became one of Europe's leading opera stars across a career of some forty years. And the Scottish tenor John Sinclair studied in Paris and Milan and sang for Rossini at Naples in 1821 — after which Rossini wrote the role of Idreno in Semiramide expressly for him. Sinclair was admired for an unusually fine upper extension, a falsetto reaching to high F — precisely the light, high tenor quality this studio's research seeks to recover. That an Italian master should write for a British tenor, as Mozart had written for an Irish one, is among the clearest signs that the tradition had taken root in native singers.
Maria Malibran
At the centre of the British story stands its most tragic figure. Maria Malibran — daughter of the elder Manuel García, and sister to García II and Pauline Viardot — made her London debut in 1825, at seventeen, and was living in England from 1834. In May 1836 she created the leading role in Michael Balfe's The Maid of Artois, written expressly for her, at Drury Lane. That summer she was thrown from a horse in Regent's Park; she refused care, and kept singing. In September, at the Manchester Festival, urged by rivalry to repeat an encore, she collapsed, and died days later, at twenty-eight. Some fifty thousand people followed her cortège. Spanish by blood and Parisian by training, she was no English rose — yet she gave her last performances on British ground, and it was here that the last great bloom of the bel canto rose fell.
Britain as the laboratory
Britain's deepest contribution, though, was not as a stage but as a laboratory. Manuel García II — Malibran's brother — settled in London and taught at the Royal Academy of Music for forty-seven years, from 1848 to 1895. His pupils included Jenny Lind, Charles Santley, Julius Stockhausen and, most consequentially, Mathilde Marchesi, through whom the line runs on to Melba, Calvé and Eames. The most systematic codification of the bel canto method happened in London, and from London it seeded the next two generations of singers.
It was in London, too, that García turned singing into a science. In 1854 he became the first to observe the living, functioning larynx in the very act of singing — his own — and communicated his findings to the Royal Society the following year. The pedagogical and the scientific revolutions in singing both, remarkably, have a London address — which is, in effect, the larger thesis of my own research. That the method took root in native singers, and did not merely pass through, is shown by García's pupil Charles Santley, the foremost British baritone of the century.
Britain's own voice
Nor did Britain only receive. Michael Balfe, an Irish composer and singer, absorbed Italian bel canto at its source — he sang in Italy, knew Rossini, and performed alongside Malibran — and brought it home to create opera in English in the bel canto mould; his The Bohemian Girl (1843) became an international success. That Malibran chose to create one of his roles speaks to the regard in which the Italian establishment held him. Bel canto did not merely visit these islands; it hybridised here into a native, English-language form.
The return
And it was on British ground that bel canto came back. After decades in which this repertoire had languished, the Australian soprano Joan Sutherland sang her first Lucia di Lammermoor at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in February 1959, and made the bel canto revival a global phenomenon; the following year she recorded, on the same stage, the Bellini opera Malibran had been singing as she died. The art that fell on British soil was also raised again there.
From the castrati of Handel's London to the science of García's, and from Malibran's fall to Sutherland's return, Britain is woven through the whole history of bel canto — not as its audience, but as one of its true homes.