A Bel Canto Celebration

Notes on the Program

by Steven Blier

“Bel canto”--the words evoke an era of operatic splendor at the beginning of the nineteenth century, romantic music of intense sweetness,  flights of vocal virtuosity, deliciously unstable heroines, mezzo-soprano heroes in tunics and moustaches.  The world stands still as a singer bares his soul in sublime cantilena or dazzles the crowd with brilliant coloratura.  Modern audiences, weaned on the powerful music theater of Verdi, Wagner, Strauss, and Britten, may think of bel canto works as frivolous and ornamental music for thrill-seekers.  If they do, they will have missed the point.  Of course, the music is full of thrills--these composers knew how to play on the human nervous system.  Rossini’s propulsive rhythmic groove, similar (if less repetitive) to that of Minimalists Glass and Adams, is still capable of driving audiences into a frenzy of excitement.  But the “bel canto” composers intended to glorify the human voice as a means of distilling emotion.  Their goal was to portray the heights of human feeling--passion, delirium, ecstasy, madness, grief--and to recreate those feelings within the listener.  Bellini summed up this spirit when he wrote to his librettist Pepoli: “Engrave upon your mind in adamantine letters: ‘Opera must make people weep, shudder, and die through singing.’”

Once you touch the Aladdin’s lamp of bel canto, you will certainly bring forth its three resident genies, Gioacchino Rossini and his two younger colleagues Vincenzo Bellini and Gaetano Donizetti.  But the beauty and influence of the bel canto style did not stop with these composers, nor was it purely an Italian phenomenon.  Tonight we’ll travel throughout Europe to hear how its influence permeated musical traditions in Russia, Austria, France, Spain, and Ireland--and how it became transformed as each musical culture absorbed it. 

The complete notes are now available for purchase.