Opera history and Kant

In the history of opera many distinctive movements, one might even call them fashions, have come and gone. That known as bel canto continues to have its admirers among the cognoscenti and I will say a few words about it today.

The phrase simply means "beautiful singing" in Italian. That is not a phase that comes or goes. Who could not want the singing to be beautiful? What bel canto generally means when used outside of vernacular Italian is (a) a particular style of singing that its admirers deem beautiful, and (b) the view that the rest of the opera exists mostly as a setting for that singing.

The composers and lyricists behind that setting are expected to give the star vocalists plenty of opportunities for exhibitions of vocal gymnastics (coloratura --light agile soprano voices showing off their stuff). They were also supposed to discourage the orchestra from showing ITS stuff. To the mind of a bel canto enthusiast the orchestral accompaniment should be low-key and supportive so that the singing remains the main thing.

The composers who most satisfied these expectations were: Vincenzo Bellini (1801 - 1835) and Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868).

These thoughts come to me today because I recently encountered a speculation about the vogue of bel canto in the mid 19th century that is new to me. The idea is that Immanuel Kant's aesthetics, as expressed in Critique of Judgment (1790) fueled this movement, freeing vocal music from any obligation to serve the words.

(And just when I was starting to think nice thought about Kant, too. )

Kant said that we make four types of judgments about the objects of our sensation: that they are agreeable, beautiful, sublime, or good -- we can affirm or deny any of these. The agreeable is a purely sensory observation . I like French vanilla ice cream. I don't expect to be asked why, It is agreeable. The good is a moral judgment to be rendered by reason, and the subject of the second critique, that on the practical reason. So aesthetics must especially concern itself with the two in-between judgments: about the beautiful and the sublime.

Within the heading of "beautiful," Kant has another distinction up his Teutonic sleeve, that between free beauty on the one hand and adherent beauty on the other. I can understand adherent beauty X to be beautiful only if I understand its function. I can understand a simple wooden cabinet open in front to be beautiful, perhaps, once I understand that it was created as a display case for my favorite bound works of philosophy. In general, though, I can understand free beauty X to be beautiful regardless of any conceptual understanding whatsoever. (This sounds to some observers as if Kant is suggesting that the perception of free beauty is contact with a noumenal reality, not a merely phenomenal one, though THAT is a very controversial reading.)

Bellini's famous Romeo and Juliet themed opera (I Capuleti e I Montecchi) came out forty years after the book in question, after the rather esoteric discussions therein had had plenty of time to worm their way into popular consciousness on the continent of Europe.

A connection? I'll have to give it some thought. But I gather the underlying idea is that simple orchestral settings are like a plan wooden bookcase -- they may be beautiful, though only in an adherent way. The coloratura they allow is what is free beauty.

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