"Bel Canto: A Performer’s Guide" by Robert Toft

Abstract

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.