Word: cantos
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What Beverly has shown since 1966 is that an American singer can take up where Maria Callas left off. Callas, now virtually retired, had a soaring, flexible voice that projected a matchless dramatic intensity. In the 1950s, among other roles, she almost singlehanded revived the ornate bel canto repertory of Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini. (Bel canto, literally "beautiful singing," more properly applies to the whole vocal art of making the fiendishly difficult sound easy.) It is this repertory that Beverly and her chief coloratura rival, Joan Sutherland (see box, page 81), have since then mastered. Beverly comes...
Beverly does not have the powerful top notes for roles like Tosca or Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly, and particularly not for Wagnerian roles like Brünnhilde in Götterdämmerung. But she is ideally suited to bel canto, and to the French lyric romanticism of Gounod and Massenet. In these areas she is unbeatable, and even among the diverse other sopranos in this age of great sopranos?Birgit Nilsson, Sutherland, Price, Marilyn Horne, Monserrat Caballé?she more than holds...
...over them. Last month Italy's Minister of Education signed a decree authorizing the installation of the doors. Art Critic Mario Salmi, vice president of the government's Superior Council of Fine Arts, promptly and publicly denounced Greco's work. "It is like inserting a modern canto into The Divine Comedy," he complained, and resigned his post. Another leading antiquarian, Giorgio Bassani, described the doors as "outrageous, awkward, pseudo modern." Among the doors' defenders was Orvieto's bishop, Monsignor Virginio Dondeo, who contended that "each century should make its contribution to the cathedral...
...essence of bel canto is making the vocally difficult sound delectable. Long, lung-stretching phrases, rococo trills, breathtaking leaps of voice slide into the air and ear with soft, summery ease and grace. The quintessential bel canto role is Norma, the most taxing female part in all opera. Giuditta Pasta, the first singer to try the part after Bellini created it in 1831, found it so difficult that the violins had to play out of tune deliberately to disguise her failures...
...usually ahead of performers. Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, she observes, was abandoned as un-performable, "yet nowadays no dramatic soprano can be considered accomplished if she is incapable of singing an Isolde." Beverly Sills, who sang many modern roles before going on to fame in Italian bel canto operas, endorses Nilsson's and Reardon's sensible attitudes. "Contemporary opera kills your voice," she says flatly, "only if your voice is sick to begin with...