Bel canto got its name only after the style had already faded
Beautiful singing sounds like a timeless ideal, yet nobody attached the phrase bel canto to a school of singing until the early 1860s, when writers looked back wistfully on a manner that had started declining around 1830. Dictionaries did not bother defining it until after 1900, and it remains slippery.
Today the label usually means the Italian vocal style that dominated much of Europe through the 18th and early 19th centuries. Later accounts reduced it to smooth tone, legato and dazzling runs, but period documents describe far more: accenting words like speech, colouring the voice to match emotion, pausing for grammar and rhetoric, sliding between notes, bending tempo with rubato, adding ornaments freely, using gesture, and saving vibrato for particular words or long notes. The swelling and fading of a held note, messa di voce, was prized above all; Domenico Corri called it the soul of music.
The music of Handel, Mozart and Rossini suits these principles, in oratorio as well as opera. Among its famous teachers were Antonio Bernacchi and Nicola Porpora, and several teachers were castrati. The singer and author John Potter argues that castrati defined the art for much of the 18th century, and that losing their irrecoverable skills is what turned bel canto into a myth. The phrase is also stuck to the operas of Bellini and Donizetti, the so-called bel canto era, even though singing was already changing by their time.
Opposition sharpened the term. Richard Wagner dismissed the Italian model, and his heavier, speech-driven style became its foil. French musicians had never liked the castrato voice or ornament that buried the words. In Italy, Verdi's dramas demanded a weightier sound, with tenors pushing up their tone, and in the 1890s Bayreuth's directors promoted a forceful declamation opponents nicknamed the Bayreuth bark.
Around the turn of the century Italian teachers such as the retired Verdi baritone Antonio Cotogni revived the phrase as a banner against increasingly vehement, vibrato-heavy singing. German musicologists then gave it yet another historical meaning, the plain lyricism of Venetian opera and the Roman cantata, and the confusion has lingered.
Source: Bel canto
