This chapter shows how a singer could “rescue” a work in canonic terms. Whereas Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice (1774) had not been performed in Paris since 1833, Pauline Viardot took a key role in re-solidifying not only the opera but also Gluck’s reputation generally; by the same token, Gluck’s music, in turn, helped Viardot leave a legacy in the history of great singers. The new version of Orphée, premiered at the Théâtre-Lyrique on 18 November 1859, featured Viardot in the title role, a performance that stunned Parisian audiences and critics alike. While the scope of singers’ authority had diminished somewhat, important opportunities arose to shape a canon as it evolved and expanded, and Viardot certainly did so in the case of Gluck. This chapter is paired with Kimberly White’s “Setting the standard: Singers, theater practices, and the opera canon in nineteenth-century France.”

The title of Robert Toft's book is accurate, if bland; one might have hoped for something a little racier. So You Think You Can Sing Bel Canto? comes to mind, for such a title would have evoked the challenges presented on every page of Bel Canto: A Performer's Guide. Specifically, Toft seeks to understand how modern singers might emulate the art of bel canto singing, a style that reigned supreme in Italian theaters, concert halls, and churches throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries but which today represents a lost tradition. Toft's attempts to define "bel canto," and, more importantly, to rediscover its techniques and recreate its sonic atmospheres, are by no means exceptional. Indeed, the question "What is bel canto?" arises frequently in studies of Italian opera, and there exists a small body of work devoted entirely to this enquiry: Rodolfo Celletti's classic Storia del belcanto 1 and Lucie Manén's less familiar but no less interesting Bel Canto: The Teaching of the Classical Italian Song-Schools 2 are two of the most important. Unlike these previous studies, however, which lay out a history of opera through the voice and its literature and engage only occasionally with questions of performance, Toft's book is wholly dedicated to an exploration of how today's singers might recreate the vocal ethos that their predecessors once produced.

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Shortly following the premiere of Lucia di Lammermoor in 1835, performances of this opera often featured a strange substitution: sopranos performed the rondò-finale from one of Donizetti's earlier operas, Fausta, in place of the now-famous mad scene aria. At least four productions were affected and this alteration was performed by some of the most famous sopranos of the time. This article explores the brief tradition of altering the mad scene by looking carefully at its origin and subsequent appearances, discussing its effects on the experience of hearing Lucia di Lammermoor as a whole, and investigating the possible reasons why this substitution lasted only for a brief period of time.