Italo Cristalli (1879-1932)

Italo Cristalli was a spinto tenor from Piacenza, Italy who made his opera debut in "La Boheme" in Torino in the year 1900. He studied at the Musical High School of Piacenza with Tito Piroli and he studied in Florence with singer-composer Corrado Pavesi-Negri.

Cristalli enjoyed a substantial international career for many years. He was successful as a verismo singer, with a distinct sense of style, clarity and command in his voice. He was one of the few Italian singers who had a voice for the works of Wagner. He performed throughout Italy and in 1911 he joined Pietro Mascagni for a series of concerts in South America. He came to the United States and sang with the Metropolitan Opera of New York from 1913 to 1914.

During his year with The Met Cristalli was one of the few tenors who had the honor of singing with the great conductor Toscanini, the other tenors being Enrico Caruso and Giovanni Martinelli. He sang tenor in an opening act preceding Caruso’s performance on several nights, including his last performance with The Met in Atlanta, Georgia on May 2, 1914.

By the mid-1920's Cristalli returned to his home town of Piacenza and only gave performances in smaller, out-of-the-way locations. He died at the early age of 52.

Italo Cristalli was the singing teacher of Julian Miller.

Corrado Pavesi-Negri (1843-1920)

Singer-composer Corrado Pavesi-Negri brought a wealth of life experience to his art. He had studied jurisprudence at the University of Parma and he also fought in the wars of Italian independence. He had a talent for learning different languages and he traveled a great deal in Europe.

Pavesi-Negri studied music and singing with Giovanni Quacquerini, Giovanni Rossi and Amilcare Ponchielli. He was made a master composer in the Academia Filarmonica of Bologna in 1877, and he wrote and published a biography of singer Rosmunda Pisaroni.

Pavesi-Negri lived in Florence, Italy for 36 years, where he concentrated his efforts as a singing teacher, producing some of the more accomplished students of his day, including Italo Cristalli, Angelo Masini, Amedeo Bassi, Enrico Ventura and Nunzio Rapisardi. Pavesi-Negri himself was also known to be a fine baritone singer who gave some beautiful performances during his lifetime.

Eventually he retired to his hometown of Piacenza, Italy, where he was a great support to the Musical High School there. He left his entire library to them after his death.

Amilcare Ponchielli (1834-1886)

Amilcare Ponchielli was a Bel Canto composer of the 19th Century. His tenor aria "Cielo e Mar" in the opera La Gioconda embodies the true spirit of Bel Canto singing because it requires the singer to really use his imagination and art to create a dreamy, heavenly effect that the audience can clearly understand.

Ponchielli suffered in his early career because he was ill-equipped to negotiate the politically driven, back-biting world of the established music societies of his day and the wealthy bourgeoisie which controlled them. For a time he was forced to take whatever work he could find, taking jobs such as band leader in Piacenza and in Cremona. He was known among his peers to be a man of absolute honesty and moral rectitude. He believed that success in any musical career should be based solely on true ability and professionalism and a true love of the art.

Ponchielli was known to feel strongly against any pressure from the impresario who employed him to make his compositions too complicated. He was a proponent of simple, straightforward melody and clarity that was not bogged down in confusion. He was a contemporary of Giuseppi Verdi, who mourned the occasion of Ponchielli’s death, saying the world has lost "a worthy man and a most distinguished artist."

Amilcare Ponchielli was the teacher of Giacomo Puccini, Pietro Mascagni and Corrado Pavesi-Negri.

A “Method” based on sheer MADNESS!

Having new physiological information about the way the human voice works was a temptation for many who believed that they could also dissect and cut into separate pieces the way that the art of singing works. In so doing, they only managed to cheapen the art. Whenever mere human beings try to outsmart nature, they always run into trouble. Nature will always be a far better teacher than technology.

Throughout all of history the craft of singing was passed down from singer to singer through personal contact between teacher and student. No textbooks, no diagrams, no impersonal lectures or videos could take the place of a true and personal lineage of authentic teaching in the art of singing. And this manner of personal study with a teacher over the course of several years managed to produce the greatest singers that the world has ever known. The traditional way of teaching wasn’t broken. It didn’t need to be “fixed.”

The traditional singing teachers were called professori. They patiently guided their students to VOCAL FREEDOM– to the point where the student was freely and effectively expressing the true art of singing with his or her own unique, unadulterated and healthy voice. However, this was done in a holistic, natural way that was designed to draw out the true artistry within each singer.

The physical facts were indeed present: When a singer had true VOCAL FREEDOM, the singer’s breath, vocal cords and resonators were operating in effortless synchronicity with one another and the singer could move about the full register of his or her true and natural voice without stumbling at the “bridge” (in Italian “passagio”). But because the singer achieved his or her own VOCAL FREEDOM through a patient, balanced and holistic study guided by a professori, the physiology never got in the way of the artistry.

It was a grave mistake to believe that a contrived artificial technology forced upon the physiology of the singer’s body could provide a quicker and easier way to become an accomplished singer. The harbingers of this “scientific” approach to singing called themselves maestros (masters) and their teaching was called “method teaching.” They invented separate “exercises” purportedly aimed at the breathing, the vocal cords, the vocal range, and so forth, and they became so anxious to “produce results” in a short amount of time that they trained young singers to push and force their voices in unnatural ways.

A Misguided Response to New Technology

The 1800's were a time when all of Western society was having “growing pains.” Nations, businesses, schools and everyday people were adjusting gradually and sometimes bitterly to the radical changes that had begun in the previous century, not the least of which were the Industrial Revolution and the advent of a scientifically based medical system (sometimes called “Western allopathic” medicine). These two developments had a profound effect on the way that human beings perceived themselves and the world around them.

The Industrial Revolution brought with it a drive to manufacture things in a way that was increasingly bigger and more “efficient.” The artisan’s workshop was replaced by the factory. People in the workplace were replaced with machines, and many human beings were killed or injured while operating those machines. The focus of the factories was to get as many products as possible in the hands of as many customers as possible as quickly as possible, rather than concentrating efforts on doing a good job at something. An urgent drive to produce, produce, produce became more important than human life, good health or the meaning of being a person.

And that’s what happened to singing, slowly and steadily. In a time when artists and composers were no longer receiving constant support from one monarch or another, singing and music fell into the hands of industry as well, and in particular charlatans.

New opera houses were built throughout Europe that housed bigger and bigger audiences. Singers were expected to force the sounds of their voices to fill larger auditoriums so that more tickets could be sold and, with the advent of the phonograph, more records could be promoted and marketed to the public. The new music industry drove singers to produce, produce, produce rather than allowing the singers to serve their art in an effective way.

How My Singing School Follows McCormack’s Bel Canto Tradition

I teach my students at the Bel Canto House School of Singing to work for the goal of VOCAL FREEDOM. Each student’s voice is unique and the task of Bel Canto training is to open up that unique and unrepeatable natural voice to reach its fullest potential, and never to force the voice to imitate another person’s sound. Students of authentic Bel Canto learn the expressiveness and beauty of singing through telling the story rather than getting lost in a series of mechanical exercises that only serve to distract students from their own individuality. Other “methods” of teaching singing are only an attempt at merely physical singing to produce a sequence of tones and sounds, but true Bel Canto teaches students to communicate the human spirit clearly with true art.