But all this, I am well aware, is the bel canto of love, and although I have always liked to think that it was to the bel canto and to that alone that I listened, I know well enough that it was not.

His bel canto style gave the performance a special distinction.

A few of Rossini's operas remained popular throughout his lifetime and continuously since his demise ; others were resurrected from semi-obscurity in the last half of the 20th century, during the so-called " bel canto revival.

The first third of the 19th century saw the highpoint of the bel canto style, with Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini all creating works that are still performed today.

Literally " beautiful singing ", bel canto opera derives from the Italian stylistic singing school of the same name.

Following the bel canto era, a more direct, forceful style was rapidly popularized by Giuseppe Verdi, beginning with his biblical opera Nabucco.

Carl Maria von Weber established German Romantic opera in opposition to the dominance of Italian bel canto.

By the 1820s, Gluckian influence in France had given way to a taste for Italian bel canto, especially after the arrival of Rossini in Paris.

Many of the most challenging tenor roles in the repertory were written during the bel canto era, such as Donizetti's sequence of 9 Cs above middle C during La fille du régiment.

The prolonged, climatic coloratura mad scene for Lucia in Donizetti's 1835 bel canto opera Lucia di Lammermoor is based on what in the novel were just a few bland sentences.

Known for his long-flowing melodic lines, for which he was named " the Swan of Catania ", Bellini was the quintessential composer of bel canto opera.

Along with Vincenzo Bellini and Gioachino Rossini, he was a leading composer of bel canto opera.

It became his most famous opera, and one of the high points of the bel canto tradition, reaching stature similar to Bellini's Norma.

After Rossini moved to Paris in 1824, Pacini and his contemporaries ( Giacomo Meyerbeer, Nicola Vaccai, Michele Carafa, Carlo Coccia, Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, the brothers Federico and Luigi Ricci, and Saverio Mercadante ) collectively began to change the nature of Italian opera and took bel canto singing in a new direction.

Both of them featured bel canto works, dating from Rubini's day, in their operatic repertoires, and both of them can be heard on recordings which faithfully capture the distinct shimmer inherent in their timbre.

The bel canto style of vocalism which arose in Italy in the early 19th century supplanted the castrato-dominated opera seria of the previous century.

The principal composers of bel canto opera are considered to be:

Commentators praised his voice for its beauty, flexibility and smooth tonal emission, which are the hallmarks of a bel canto singer.

Chernov followed in the footsteps of such richly endowed East European baritones as Ippolit Pryanishnikov ( a favorite of Tchaikovski's ), Joachim Tartakov ( an Everardi pupil ), Oskar Kamionsky ( an exceptional bel canto singer nicknamed the " Russian Battistini "), Waclaw Brzezinski ( known as the " Polish Battistini "), Georges Baklanoff ( a powerful singing actor ), and, during a career lasting from 1935 to 1966, the Bolshoi's Pavel Lisitsian.

She possessed a brilliant bel canto technique and was considered a rival to the Victorian era's most famous diva, Adelina Patti.

* Domenico Reina ( 1796 – 1843 ), Swiss bel canto tenor

* 1984: British Pop impresario Malcolm McLaren wrote and performed a UK hit single, " Madame Butterfly ( Un bel dì vedremo )", produced by Stephen Hague, based on the opera and featuring the famous aria.

The terms were later adopted within bel canto, the Italian opera singing method, where chest voice was identified as the lowest and head voice the highest of three vocal registers: the chest, passagio and head registers.

Unlike many opera stars today who sing can belto not bel canto, Gigli had the power of a truly great tenor coupled to a melting falsetto and tingling pianissimo.

The themes in the operas produced by Gluck's collaborations with Calzabigi continue throughout the operas of Carl Maria von Weber, until Wagner, rejecting both the Italian bel canto tradition and the French " spectacle opera ", developed his union of music, drama, theatrical effects, and occasionally dance.

In Italy, many opera singers became Verismo acolytes — rejecting the traditional tenets of elegant, 19th century bel canto in the process.

Fry's most notable composition was the opera Leonora, which received mixed reviews upon its opening and was criticized for its debt to Vincenzo Bellini's bel canto style.

La sonnambula ( The Sleepwalker ) is an opera semiseria in two acts, with music in the bel canto tradition by Vincenzo Bellini to an Italian libretto by Felice Romani, based on a scenario for a ballet-pantomime by Eugène Scribe and Jean-Pierre Aumer called La somnambule, ou L ' arrivée d ' un nouveau seigneur.

Although best known for her bel canto and opera seria roles, Horne also sang much American music, both contemporary music by composers such as William Bolcom, and traditional popular songs.

Interestingly enough, with one notable exception, Tamagno largely eschewed verismo opera, considering it to be an uncomfortable fit with his stylistic training in the bel canto tradition.

In addition to four arias and ariosos for the principal tenor ( Un di all ' azzuro spazio ; Io non amato ancor ; Si, fui soldato ; and, Come un bel di di maggio ), the opera contains a well-known aria ( La mamma morta ) for the soprano heroine, which was featured in the film Philadelphia ( the Maria Callas version is used on the soundtrack ).

The term was later adopted within bel canto, the Italian opera singing method, where it was identified as the highest of three vocal registers: the chest, passagio and head registers.

Renée Fleming ( born February 14, 1959 ) is an American soprano whose repertoire encompasses Richard Strauss, Mozart, Handel, bel canto, lieder, French opera and chansons, jazz and indie rock.

While this was her first engagement in a bel canto opera and she had to learn the role in less than one month, her performance made her famous throughout the opera world.

In her early career she won considerable success in bel canto roles such as Lucia di Lammermoor, ( Gilda ) in Rigoletto, ( Elvira ) in I Puritani, and the title role in Linda di Chamounix, and lighter lyric roles such as Massenet's (" Manon ") and ( Marguerite ) in Gounod's Faust.

In 2007 / 08 Bartoli devoted her time to studying and recording the early 19th century repertoire – the era of Italian Romanticism and bel canto – and especially the legendary singer Maria Malibran, the 200th anniversary of whose birth was celebrated in March 2008.

From the 1960s until the early 1970s, his speciality was music of 18th and early 19th century, mostly in bel canto repertoire of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti.

Known as " La Diva Turca " ( The Turkish Diva ) and " La Regina " ( The Queen ) in the opera world, Gencer was a notable bel canto soprano who spent most of her career in Italy, from the early 1950s through the mid-1980s, and had a repertoire encompassing more than seventy roles.

She was still singing leading roles in her early sixties and was considered one of the leading bel canto sopranos of her day.

To complicate matters further, German musicology in the early 20th century invented its own historical application for " bel canto ", using the term to denote the simple lyricism that came to the fore in Venetian opera and the Roman cantata during the 1630s and ' 40s ( the era of composers Antonio Cesti, Giacomo Carissimi and Luigi Rossi ) as a reaction against the earlier, text-dominated " stilo rappresentativo ".

Musicologists occasionally apply the label bel canto technique to the arsenal of virtuosic vocal accomplishments and concepts imparted by singing teachers to their students during the late 18th century and the early 19th century.