#bel canto

[opera-ghosts]

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚 "𝐋𝐚 𝐅𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐚" 𝐛𝐲 𝐆𝐚𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐨 𝐃𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐳𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐢 𝐨𝐧 𝐚 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐝.

[qvotable]

It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.

Ann Patchett; Bel Canto

[sunsetquotes]

It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.

Ann Patchett; Bel Canto

[rafikecoyote]

Tenoch Huerta as Comandante Benjamin in Bel Canto (2018)

[tenoch-hq]

I’m a guy with a lot of knowledge, I’m a people person, that’s my way of being, Being a leader, I learned it from my father, He said “I want to see you ready for anything.” Tenoch Huerta talks about his Father in Voices Rising: The Music from Wakanda Forever | Episode 2

[the-tenth-arcanum]

Opera Stream: Maria Stuarda 👑

When: Sunday 5th October, 7:30pm CET / 6:30pm UK time (UTC+1)

Where: kosmi

Production: 2025 Salzburg Festival

Language: Italian (English subs)

Duration: 2h 20min

Cast:

Kate Lindsey — Elisabetta

Lisette Oropesa — Maria Stuarda

Bekhzod Davronov — Roberto, Count of Leicester

Aleksei Kulagin — Giorgio Talbot

Thomas Lehman — Lord Guglielmo Cecil

Nino Gotoshia — Anna Kennedy

What's the story? 1587. Mary Stewart, queen of Scotland, has been held prisoner for several years by her cousin Elizabeth, Queen of England. Robert, Earl of Leicester, with whom Elizabeth is secretly in love, wants to help Mary, to whom he declares his love and proposes marriage to her. He advises Mary to be conciliatory towards her powerful cousin. But the two queens face off at a meeting whose violence leads Elizabeth to sign the death warrant for Mary.

Anyone welcome. Join/leave any time, I'll stream to the end even if it's just me :)

[notthatitreallymatters]

She prayed while standing near the priest in hopes it would give her request extra credibility. What she prayed for was nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone.

Bel Canto - Ann Pachett

[soprano-sfogato]

Let’s talk about Christine’s singing technique

Opera in the 19th century was different from today, mostly because the singing technique was different. If you wanted to be an opera singer back then, you would be trained in the bel canto technique, which means no placement or in-the-mask singing. This technique is on the opposite side of the spectrum from the technique used by opera singers nowadays. You have to develop not only your head voice but also your chest voice - the combination of the two is crucial, not just for your low notes but throughout your whole range.

In Gaston Leroux’s novel, Christine told Raoul on the rooftop what exactly had changed in her voice:

I’m not very strong physically and that to begin with my voice had very little character. My low notes were naturally under-developed, the high notes were frankly quite harsh and my middle register cloudy. It was these deficiencies that papa had striven to correct and he had succeeded up to a point. But it was the Voice which finally overcame them. Gradually, I was able to increase the volume of my whole range to an extent I could never have hoped to achieve given that it was never strong to start with. I learned to deepen my breathing but crucially the Voice taught me the secret of developing the chest notes of the soprano voice.

It means that Christine had a problem with an undeveloped chest voice. Because of that, she had weak low notes (which are naturally more chesty), a cloudy middle register (you must have a well-developed chest voice to sing in your middle with ease), and harsh high notes (it’s hard to sing high without having a core in your voice). Once Christine finally developed her chest voice, her voice became more mature and more colourful, which helped her make the transition to singing Marguerite - a part that requires a more dramatic sound than Siebel (which at that time was a role for a soprano who still hadn’t fully developed her voice).

(By the way this quote shows that Leroux knew something about singing technique. Wow!)

Also, as we all know, the character of Christine was based on a real opera singer, Christine Nilsson (1843 - 1921). Unfortunately, there is no recording of Nilsson’s voice, but we can be sure that she sang with a bel canto technique. It was the one and only proper technique in the 19th century, and you couldn’t be an opera star without learning it.

So yeah, Christine’s voice wasn’t a miracle - it was a well-developed chest voice and a proper bel canto technique. It doesn’t mean her singing wasn’t splendid, because undoubtedly it was! Otherwise, she wouldn’t have knocked the Paris audience’s socks off! I just wanted to say that proper technique is the most important thing, and if you learn it, you can be a brilliant opera singer.