Vaccai

To keep active during the Covid-19 shutdown of live performances, Teatro Nuovo has produced its first full-length video presentation, Bel Canto in Thirty Minutes, the first-ever professional recording of Nicola Vaccai’s Practical Method of Italian Singing. TN’s Artistic Director Will Crutchfield has written the following article to accompany the video.

Teatro Nuovo asked twenty-two singers to record one arietta each from Vaccai's classic Practical Method of Italian Singing ("Metodo pratico di canto italiano...

Nicola Vaccai and his Metodo di Canto

Who was Vaccai?

First a note on spelling, since the name turns up in two forms: Vaccaj or Vaccai? Answer: they are the same thing. The letter “j” in the Italian alphabet is called “i lunga,” or “long i,” and is not used in modern spelling - but proper names are sometimes left in their old form and sometimes not. Vaccai is the plural of vaccaio (cowboy).

Nicola Vaccai was born on 15 March 1790 at Tolentino in the province of Macerata, into a family that settled in Pesaro seven years later. The youngster was inclined towards music, and must have crossed paths with young Rossini, born in the same city in 1792, but perhaps their contacts were limited; the Rossinis were a family of musicians, and Nicola’s father was a physician who intended his sons to become doctors and lawyers. They would have occasion for ample contact in adulthood.

Nicola was sent to Rome at 17 to study jurisprudence, but music quickly got the upper hand and he soon moved on to Naples to study with Giovanni Paisiello. There, in 1815, his first opera was heard. Rossini, two years his junior, was already by then the most famous composer in Italy, and Vaccai’s works fell in line with the new style his concittadino had established. So did everybody; as Giovanni Pacini (1796-1867) wrote later, “good God! What else was one to do if one wanted to earn a living?”

Vaccai eventually produced eighteen operas, the last of them rubbing shoulders with Verdi’s I due Foscari in 1845. Several had good success and achieved circulation beyond Italy - most notably Giulietta e Romeo (Milan, 1825), based on the same libretto that eventually served for Bellini’s I Capuleti ed i Montecchi. But they were not destined to survive in repertory beyond the composer’s passing in 1848 at Pesaro.

To judge by his extensive correspondence, Vaccai was of a basically easy-going character, good at his job but not driven by ambition or vision to leave a strong personal imprint on the style of his times. He had a true gift for melody, however, and some of his operas are excellent, especially the late ones, in which he easily absorbed the new advances made by the mature Donizetti. Several scholars of the Bel Canto period have advocated for a Vaccai revival, and Teatro Nuovo hopes to put their hypothesis to the test in a future season.

Title page of first Paris edition (1834)

In the meantime, though, one work proved immortal. Vaccai had a great reputation as a chamber singer and a teacher of singing, and in 1833 while he was resident in London he had an inspired idea: a book for beginning students that would take them straight into the popular new idioms of Bel Canto.

The Metodo Pratico di Canto Italiano per Camera, to give the title in full, was such a hit that it has never gone out of print. Nearly a hundred editions have been traced, in at least thirteen languages, and that is probably an undercount. At least five publishers have it in their catalogues in 2020, two of them in well-researched critical editions. It is entirely possible that this little book of ariettas has been sung more often over the years than any single opera.

What made the Metodo pratico so special?

Vaccai explained his purposes in his original introduction - here excerpted in a free combination of the translation that appeared in the first edition (London, 1834) with my own into modern English where I thought I could represent the Italian text more clearly:

[...] I have learned from long experience in Germany, France, England, and even Italy itself, that few if any who desire to sing for their own pleasure love the idea of undertaking long exercises and solfeggi. Affirming that their goal is limited to chamber singing, they are unwilling to go through the drudgery of the usual systems. I therefore thought of devising one - that which I here present - of a completely new kind, short, pleasurable, and useful, through which the goal may be reached with equal certainty, and in less time.

Since the greatest difficulty for foreigners is that of singing in a tongue not their own, even if they have solfeged and vocalized for a while, I thought that even from the first scale they would do better to accustom themselves to the language, rather than singing on meaningless syllables. Thus, choosing from the beautiful verses of Metastasio those that seemed most apt, I hope to have made less irksome those first lessons that everybody wants to avoid practicing out of boredom. I am certain that this will be useful not just to amateurs, but also those who may aspire to become professionals, because it can be used as an exemplifier or explanation of any other method, inasmuch as it is composed of demonstrative examples.

Vaccai also explained some useful points of difficulty in pronunciation for foreigners, and noted that he had confined the vocal range of the book to a mere octave and a half - in the original keys, middle C to the F-sharp at the top of the staff - “because it is better, in the beginning, to exercise chiefly the centre or middle notes of the voice.” He quickly adds, though, that “there will be no difficulty in transposing any one or more of the lessons, if found requisite.” Our recording - involving all the voice-types from deep bass to coloratura soprano - adopts the author’s suggestion liberally. But his point still holds: all of them are singing principally in the center of their respective ranges, and mastery of the center is the cornerstone of Bel Canto.

The key novelty - integration of orderly exercises with composed and texted music - does actually seem to be original with Vaccai. Canzonettas suitable for students and amateurs had appeared by the hundreds for many years; collections of technical exercises, comparable to the Hanon and Czerny that piano students still know today, were also in circulation. But Vaccai’s idea of embedding the basics in fully-composed (and, most important, well-composed) musical pieces was just what the market needed. Twentieth-century singers as diverse as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Grace Bumbry, and Victoria de los Angeles took their first steps in the company of Vaccai’s little book. Rossini praised it highly. Maria Callas used it for daily warmups all her life. It is Bel Canto in a nutshell.

What was “the drudgery of the usual systems”?

To become a leading opera singer in Italy was to scale the heights of popular culture and to join a financial elite. Thousands of promising youngsters competed for a chance, so the educational system could afford to be very demanding. Rossini described it to Edmond Michotte late in life as it had existed in his youth:

“One started by working exclusively on the emission of tone, pure and simple. Homogeneity of timbre and equalization of the registers, that was the fundament for all subsequent study. This practical instruction occupied at least three years of exercises. [...] When the voice had acquired the required suppleness and equality [...] then and only then could the pupil begin to learn how to use it - the technique, including the attack, the sustaining of sounds, and all the exercises of virtuosity: vocalises, gruppetti, trills, etc.”

The composer didn’t specify a duration for this second phase of study, but his pupil Marietta Alboni (also present at Michotte’s interview with the composer) jumped in to say that “my professor kept me on a single page” containing exercises of all the types described “for three years.”

“After that,” Rossini continued,

“the work on vowels began: one practiced the placement of tones and the vocalises individually on each of the vowels a, e, i, o, u; then one unfolded all five alternately on the same held note or the same agility passage. [...] The goal was to reach a point where the tone varied as little as possible in either timbre or intensity, notwithstanding the movements of the tongue or lips occasioned by the change of vowels. [...] Then came the study of diphthongs, consonants, articulation, breathing, etc. One took special care to ensure that the sound was propagated with the help of the palate.”

Rossini around the time of his interview with Michotte

Rossini was still describing “phase two.” The “third phase,” he said, was putting all of these things together (i.e. actually beginning to sing words and music) for a period of “a minimum of five years for the women and seven for the men.” There still remained “style” to master, but Rossini held that this “escapes teaching” and could be learned “only from the active model, observed in life” - meaning by listening to great artists.

All this is sobering: Assuming that Alboni was on target in her interjection, the description prescribes eleven to thirteen years of dedicated technical study.

Now, Rossini (or Michotte) may have had some motivation to exaggerate. The point of the discourse was to contrast the greater attainments of the stars of his youth with the (in his opinion) unready and half-trained singers of 1858. We also know that many important artists made professional debuts as young as sixteen or seventeen, and it is doubtful that they all began serious vocal study at five (Alboni herself did so, however).

Still, allowing for all that - assuming some exaggeration, granting that some exceptional talents must have advanced faster - one has a very clear description of a process comparable in length and intensity to what career-bound violinists and pianists still undergo. No wonder Rossini could write as exactingly as he did and yet every professional singer could (and had to) appear in his operas!

No wonder, either, that amateurs desiring to sing “in society” saw little point of entry in such a system. They didn’t want to spend three years equalizing the individual notes of their voices before they could attempt a song; they wanted to sing for the pleasure of singing, and to get good at it just as a student today might want to get good at tennis without aspiring to go "on the tour" as a pro.

This is a dimension of music-making we can barely conceive today. Humankind has always wanted music in social gatherings, but for centuries the only way to have it was through the presence of people able to make some. In 2020, practically nobody sings “Una voce poco fa” or “Casta diva” without having at least the thought of entering the operatic profession. In Vaccai’s world, there were literally thousands who wanted to sing them at a party, and do it well. He composed a perfect manual for their needs.

So is it really for amateurs?

Context is everything, and the context has changed completely. By the end of Vaccai’s book, the pieces are too difficult even for professionals if they are not Bel Canto specialists - but in the Bel Canto age everyone was a Bel Canto specialist. It is unlikely that even one out of ten members of the current Metropolitan Opera roster could manage the “Recapitulation” that ends the volume, even if they sang it slower than the wonderful Lisette Oropesa has recorded it for Teatro Nuovo’s project.

Professionals do have to master a wider range and greater volume than are strictly required for the ariettas in the Metodo. But if you have those two things and you can handle the phrasing, agility, and management of the voice required to do the last five or six pieces well, you are already a pro.

As the end of his foreword shows, though, Vaccai saw this already: what he was laying down could also serve the future professional, the one who was going to progress to the “usual drudgery” after or alongside the startup work in the Metodo.

It is probably not used in teaching today as often as it was 100 years ago, but already two members of Teatro Nuovo’s team are working enthusiastically to change that. Rachelle Jonck, our chief coach, and Derrick Goff, our frequent chorus master and also a vocal coach, have launched a popular online Bel Canto Boot Camp, open to beginners, teachers, and advanced singers alike. Guided practice of Vaccai is its centerpiece. Teatro Nuovo enthusiastically endorses this project: the more singers get the grounding Vaccai offers, the more Bel Canto stars the future will see!

About Our Video

Bel Canto in Thirty Minutes was assembled over the summer of 2020 while the world of music was in a pandemic-induced shutdown that is only now, and only in some places, beginning to lift. Twenty-two singers donated their time and effort, and the result is offered to the public completely free of charge on Teatro Nuovo’s YouTube channel (premiering September 15 2020 at 7:30 p.m.). All the recordings were done remotely, on whatever cameras and microphones each singer happens to have at home, so homogeneity of sound and video resolution is not to be expected. Accompaniments (except for the four singers who supplied their own) were added later while I watched the videos and listened on headset.

I want to close with personal thanks to the artists for their generosity. Even an aria lasting 45 seconds is no small job to record at home. Our hope is to give Bel Canto fans a chance to hear a classic whose charms have previously been known only to those inside the business - and to inspire singers everywhere to keep studying and practicing for the day when we can all meet again to perform opera in public!