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Belcanto. Never the word linked to the voice had more vast echo in human history. Always synonymous with euphonic singing, good singing, in the twentieth century, slowly becomes tout court synonymous with opera, theatrical singing.
In reality, the word Belcanto identifies two very precise realities:
- The coded singing methodology between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries based on the mechanism of the thyroid tilt, and the consequent fusion of primary mechanics, and on the cost-toraco-diaphragmatic breathing. These two fundamental muscle attitudes guide the voice to an always clear, tied, soft, extensive, homogeneous, capable of nuance and embellishment tool, including an absolute control of the vibrate.
- The compositional style dedicated to the aforementioned vocality in vogue as early as the 17th century, and destined to disappear in the first half of the 19th century. The date of the death of Belcanto is traditionally identified, by great tribute to the Catania swan, with the year of Vincenzo Bellini's death (1835). The Belcantistic compositional style, known as singing singing, happens to the recitar singing of a seventeenth -century memory and precedes the declaimed singing, great protagonist of the verism and of the whole twentieth century Italian and international opera.
Who do we need to "invention" and the coding of Belcanto?
It was the offended singers, the castrate, ("great masters", "good among the good" cit. Rossini) that perfect the vocal methodology of Belcanto, primarily Tosi and Mancini, two champions of eighteenth -century theatrical vocality, whose opinions and thoughts They also find themselves in the first coding of Belcanto, the method of the newly reservoir of Paris, edited by Bernardo Mengozzi and then still in the definitive complete treatise of the art of the song of Manuel García son.
The death of Belcanto
In a conversation with the German composer Richard Wagner, in 1860, Gioacchino Rossini says that by now Belcanto is definitively dead and that in the Italian conservatives "of Belcanto it is no longer preserved a good".
Rossini attributes this very serious loss to the disappearance of the castrates who do not find a place in the new romantic aesthetic, supplanted in heroic roles by the "new" tenor vocality and outclassed in theatrical language by the progressive idea of verisimilitude, which draws more to real life than to idealized stories of Great heroes of the past, and which will have a definitive consecration in verism, when they staged themselves with blood made by the real black chronicle, like in the straws of Leoncavallo.
The castrates and their school, in the 19th century, survive, like ancient caryatids forgotten in the dusty Vatican attics, only in the pontifical chapel.
The second half of the twentieth century will see a progressive methodological rebirth of the vocal Belcanto and a exhumation of immortal masterpieces by Bellini, Rossini and Donizetti, as well as all over the 18th century, thanks to the contribution of great directors and Belcantistic divinities such as Maria Callas, Joan Sutherland , Montserrat Caballé.
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