The Appearance of the Singer and the Bocca Ridente

Tosi’s directions regarding the singer’s presence continue and refine the tradition expressed earlier in the seventeenth century by Italian writers and commentators on the subject. These include Francesco Durante, Marco da Gagliano, Girolamo Diruta, Pietro Cerone, Orazio Scaletta, Giovanni Battista Doni, and Ignazio Donati, whose caveats were directed largely against bodily and facial contortions and mannerisms that would detract from the singing. Tosi advocates a noble bearing (graceful posture) and an agreeable appearance; he insists on the standing position because it permits a freer use of the voice; further, he warns against bodily contortions and facial grimaces, which may be eliminated, he says, by periodic practice in front of a mirror. He recommends that if the sense of the words permit, the mouth should incline “more toward the sweetness of a smile than toward grave seriousness.” In short Tosi recommends the bocca ridente, which requires not only a “smiling mouth,” but also a positioning of the vocal apparatus critical to the bel canto style.


Mauro Uberti has called attention to a late fifteenth-century sculpture by Luca della Robbia in the Museo di Santa Maria del Fiore, a marble relief that depicts a group of singers whose mouths are open in such a way, he believes, as to produce an agile voice and make easy the ornamentation characteristic of early Italian singing.

In studying the depiction of the sculpture on page 489 of Uberti’s article, one can see that one of the singers has a very pleasant, relaxed, almost beatific expression on his face. The mouth, while not smiling, looks as if it is just ready to break into a smile. The heads of the others are lowered somewhat so that the smiling effect is not visible and their mouths are open wide enough but not too wide, apparently about the width of the little finger. A third, turned almost to profile, shows clearly, and even in a rather exaggerated way, the mouth position and facial expression that is common to all of the singing figures. The face is relaxed and natural looking; the lower jaw juts greatly forward. All the figures give the impression that the singing is done easily and without strain. These mouth positions are commonly found in early Italian representations of singing according to the author, who distinguishes between Italian vocal techniques prior to the early nineteenth century and Romantic techniques.

Uberti also compares the position of the larynx in the Romantic style with that of the early style:

In both the older and the more modern techniques the Adam’s apple is tipped forward by muscles outside the larynx and thereby stretches the vocal cords. In the older techniques this is achieved by pulling forward the upper horns at the back of the Adam’s apple . . . whereas in Romantic techniques the Adam’s apple is pulled down . . . [and] the muscles attached to it from above react by tugging upward (just as they do when we yawn); the vocal cords join in the fray, as it were, and so reach that more vigorous contraction which is needed for the very powerful, stentorian high notes of modern operatic singing.

In the bel canto technique, the mouth is opened only very moderately with the bocca ridente position. Uberti explains that the shield cartilage rocks or is tilted forward, moving on the fulcrum of its connection with the cricoid; the hyoid bone remains almost horizontal, the ligament between it and the thyroid or shield cartilage remaining flexible and relaxed; the muscle under the chin is short and relaxed; and the jaw is pressed moderately downward and somewhat forward. The singer has the sensation that “while the front wall of the throat is also drawn forward, the jaw itself remains free to move vertically.” Also, as Uberti explains,

for the less energetic mechanism of the older techniques, the forward tipping of the Adam’s apple can be facilitated by using a rather forward position of the jaw in many Renaissance and Baroque depictions of singing . . . and to this day Neopolitans use it both in singing and in speaking.”

Conclusion

For singers seeking advice on performance in the late seventeenth-century bel canto style today, there are many generalities but few specifics. We may be reasonably certain that singing then was more articulated, less loud, and had less vibrato, but we do not know, for example, precisely when bel canto singers did and did not use vibrato, nor exactly how wide its ambitus was. Theorists of the time did not have a vocabulary that could adequately describe vibrato—nor do we. Such is the limitation of treatises on musical performance in any period.

Obviously, we do not have recordings of the great singers of the late seventeenth century, but we do have recordings made in the early years of the twentieth century. Listening to singers such as Amelita Galli-Curci, Adelina Patti, and Jenny Lind (a student of Manuel García),46 one is struck by the light, facile tone production, not unlike that of early-music specialists today. And Patti’s “tone sounds absolutely straight . . . except for occasional ornamental vibrato.” These early recordings postdate Tosi and Pistocchi by some two centuries, yet perhaps they offer us at least a shadow of the original bel canto style.