This article is taken from the March 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Those who think the opera gang spends its time lounging about in some scented clubland Elysium nibbling on nightingales’ tongues and sipping ambrosia from chorus girls’ slippers will be sad to learn that — myself and a hand-picked cohort of acolytes apart, bien sûr — it mostly skulks in Edmonton bedsits and is riven by a bitter factionalism rarely seen outside a Trotskyist section meeting.

Thank God for the blessing of Twitter, say I, offering a glimpse into the maelstroms of loathing behind the blank faces of the warblers and scribblers who make up this obscure coterie. The highest of times, of course, was the Corbo meltdown, when the air was electric-blue with mousy academics flinging around accusations of fascism at their camp followers — largely well-meaning if not outstandingly bright mezzo-sopranos and similar — before relapsing into a years-long huff with only the cornucopia of Brexit to keep the boilers on the simmer.

This shy beastie would be wholly forgotten but for the prima donnas

And as with leftist ideology, so with opera: tastes are as viciously factious as any Spartista cellmates tearing each other to bits over bourgeois deviationism. The most implacable zealots, of course, are the Wagnerians (i.e. mostly people attracted to “strong leaders”) but there are others. There has, for instance, been a good showing lately for ever-so-slightly geeky Handelians, inflamed by the revival in the old dude’s fortunes that have seen many of his 40 virtually indistinguishable operas stagger back onstage after 300 dormant years, with their phalanxes of dotted rhythms and piping countertenors — the equivalent of those old-time capons whose re-emergence can only be a matter of time in these genital realignment surgery days.

There are others too (e.g. suburban voluptuaries devoted to Richard Strauss), but there is one little niche of the opera world that is simultaneously the most disparaged while in truth the most operatic, the least anything else: the brief day-lily of the so-called bel canto style, dreamed up by the young Rossini around 1820 and all done by 1846 when the poor, sweet Gaetano Donizetti followed many of his heroines into the loony-bin, and opera passed into the hands of Verdi and became something else entirely as it devolved towards the can belto of the late nineteenth century.

This shy beastie would be wholly forgotten but for the prima donnas — Maria Callas, Montserrat Caballé and Joan
Sutherland — who reanimated its greatest hits in the ’50s as the perfect vehicle for their miraculous voices. In the nature of things there are never many singers around with the nerve, instrument and technique for this stuff, but the real epicures hunt it down when it appears; and the admirable English Touring Opera is taking a couple of examples (Rossini’s Viaggio a Reims and Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia) around the country from now until late May.

In true bel canto, the only important thing is the voice, the song. This isn’t the genial juggler of The Barber of Seville, with woodwinds cavorting like dolphins messing about with beach-balls: the ideal accompaniment is a lazy string arpeggio (in harmonies as facile as a Marc Bolan song) while the singer unspools the dreamiest, longest, most unchained melody in the ether, with leisurely cartwheels and roulades like a slo-mo acrobat trampolining on clouds; it was Vincenzo Bellini who perfected this — think of “Casta diva” from Norma — but Rossini and Donizetti are no slouches.

What people probably can’t handle is the utter lack of anything besides this endless song: most yearn for idiotic stage business, an attempted rape or at least some dwarves to look at. The perfect bel canto strives instead for a kind of ideal stasis, the orchestra reduced to what Wagner disparaged as a “big guitar”, nothing happening in the room beyond the perfectly-controlled, vibrating column of air in the singer’s throat — a thing that, as Bellini said, must make the audience “weep, shudder, die …”

There are no concessions: the first act of Rossini’s Semiramide lasts two-and-a-half hours and bugger-all happens. It is the blessed antithesis of spoken theatre — that Exchange and Mart of petty-bourgeois banalities — as far from tawdry naturalism as could be, a heaven of absolute sound, skeins of pure imagination ensnaring us in the despair of another hapless damsel.

The voices bestowed on those damsels confirm this as the most feminist of arts

The voices bestowed on those damsels confirm this as the most feminist of arts. They are remarkably potent metaphors for all human tribulation — as well as agitators for Italian unity, on the agenda as popes and princelings crept out of the wreckage after 1815 to dismember the peninsula into a status quo-ante patchwork of satrapies.

The Italians took enthusiastically to Romanticism, with its cowled monks stalking bat-haunted Gothic cloisters, though it was hardly a natural fit for their sunlit humanist traditions, and wallowed happily in Byron, Scott and Schiller, enabling the somewhat spaced-out personnel of bel canto opera to speak.

These encoded operas, spreading their message through the human voice at its most hyper-trained and artificial, smuggled parables of religion, politics and liberation past the censors disguised as chronicles of old-time Scottish weddings that go tits-up (Lucia di Lammermoor) and Gauls on bonfires (Norma).

It might be a bit late for Il viaggio a Reims — written for the coronation of another King Charles, the unhappy X of
France — to knit the Union back together, but aspiring Mazzinis might want to brace audiences up to the struggle from Exeter to Durham this spring.