Extrapolating the sounds of 18th- and 19th-century bel canto 

This presentation explores how theoretical reflection, artistic experimentation, and creative practice intertwine within historically informed approaches to 19^th-century vocal and pianistic repertoire, using Goethe, Schubert, and Liszt as interlocking case studies. It argues that creative practice can function as a form of historical inquiry when grounded in close engagement with primary sources, performance traditions, and embodied experimentation. The starting point is Johann Anton André’s (1775–1842) Lieder und Gesänge for voice and piano, a 4-volume didactic collection notable for its density of expressive markings. Goethe is known to have visited André in Offenbach am Main in the early years of the 19th century and reportedly recited his poetry to him, raising the tantalising possibility that André’s detailed indications capture aspects of Goethe’s own rhetorical delivery. Read in this light, André’s settings provide a rare window onto late-18th and early-19th-century expectations of vocal and pianistic declamation, phrasing, and expressive nuance—expectations largely absent from the comparatively sparse notation of Schubert’s songs.

This framework informs a second case study centred on Schubert’s Erlkönig and Franz Liszt’s piano transcription of the song. Liszt’s version intensifies expressive markings and assigns the four characters to distinct registral and timbral zones of the keyboard, effectively translating vocal rhetoric into pianistic terms. Striking parallels emerge when Liszt’s conception is considered alongside recordings by Ernestine Schumann-Heink (1861–1936) and the spoken recitation of Goethe’s poem by the Austrian actor Alexander Moissi (1979–1935), both trained within Viennese traditions of rhetorical delivery. These performances suggest a shared expressive language encompassing timing flexibility, colouristic contrast, and character differentiation across voice, speech, and piano.

The final strand presents recent collaborative practice-led projects. Anna Fraser and Neal Peres Da Costa have recorded Schubert’s Schwanengesang using Liszt’s transcriptions (amongst other sources) through a process of reverse engineering. In parallel, Connor Fogel has recorded Liszt’s Erlkönig. In both artistically driven projects, the performers have embedded historically documented declamatory practices such as rhythm and tempo modification, sliding and trembling effects, and manual asynchrony and arpeggiation. Presented jointly, these projects demonstrate how theory, experimentation, and creative practice can operate as a single, mutually reinforcing process of historical and artistic discovery.

In his classic memoir Am I Too Loud?, the great English accompanist Gerald Moore (1899–1987), reported how, in about the 1920s, many German singers who visited England held a condescending attitude towards English musicians: they “did not believe it possible” for an Englishman to be able to understand and accompany lieder. While Moore tried to defend the sensibilities of his compatriots—schooled as they had been by the “frequent visits” of German singers such as Elena Gerhardt (1883-1961), Elisabeth Schumann (1888-1952) and Lotte Lehmann (1888-1976)—the attitude of these German singers suggests that understanding and performing lieder required knowledge of an approach, perhaps common among Germans, that was not likely to be automatically understood by foreigners. In other words, that there existed a tradition related to performing lieder in Germany, that could not be learnt by merely reading the score.

Early recordings of lieder by German singers trained in the 19th century also suggest the existence of such a performing tradition. Frequently, these singers alter tempo and rhythm, colour their tone of voice, and employ various other un-notated practices, seemingly with the intent to deliver the text clearly and express its meaning. One fascinating practice is how singers such as Ernestine Schumann-Heink (1861–1936) vary the style of delivery in works that feature more than one character, like Schubert’s Erlkönig or Der Tod und das Mädchen, as if to give each character its own voice, as one might do when reciting poetry or prose.

In this lecture-recital, Charis Postmus and Nicholas Williams will present an exploration of how 19th-century German singers approached lieder, looking particularly at how text delivery and expressive practices were used for vocal characterisation. It will conclude with a performance of a selection of lieder inspired by the research.

Pianist Frédéric Chopin and mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot-García were introduced in 1839 by the novelist George Sand. They shared a prodigious pianism (Viardot-García had originally trained as a concert pianist), a forensic musicianship, a love of bel canto and a demonstrated willingness to insert bel canto features into their compositions. Despite their different social personas (Chopin the reluctant performer and Viardot-García the consummate salonnière), both had experienced success in the Parisian and London salons of the 1830s and 1840s.

The personal connection between Chopin and Viardot-García was immediate, and they spent many hours in Sand’s country home in Nohant in the summers of 1841–1843 and 1845, reading scores at the piano and discussing their art (Eigeldinger, 1986).

When Viardot-García presented Chopin with a set of six mazurkas set to texts by poet Louis Pomey, he was reportedly pleased, describing the songs as “charming” (Azoury, 1999). He went on to witness his friend perform them in his capacity as both audience member and as accompanist. Viardot-García published the mazurkas in two series, the first appearing during Chopin’s lifetime (1836–1842), and the second after his death (1880–1885).

This lecture-recital explores the bel canto style in Viardot-García’s twelve vocal transcriptions of Chopin’s mazurkas. The composition and original performances of the mazurkas will be positioned within their historical context, and their bel canto elements—specifically ornamentation and the cantabile melodic line (Harley et al., 2000)—will be analysed and illustrated in performance.

This presentation interrogates how 19th-century vocal transcriptions of piano works—exemplified arrangements of Chopin’s mazurkas by Pauline Viardot (1821–1910)—might give modern artistic researchers a new understanding of the expressive aims and practices of nineteenth-century performer-composers. Viardot’s adaptations, created during summer visits with Chopin at Nohant in the early to mid- 1840’s, transformed Chopin’s Polish dance idioms into vocal works enriched with French and Spanish texts, ornamentation, and cadenzas. Her creative process, supported by Chopin himself, demonstrates an historical model of collaborative artistry where transcription served as a vehicle for expressive experimentation.

Our research asks: how can such transcriptions illuminate emotional delivery in classical singing? How might they enable pianists to extrapolate earlier performance styles? And to what extent can this knowledge expand present-day artistry? We employ practice-led, embodied methods to address these questions, trialling expressive effects against documentary sources—including annotated scores and performance instructions by Manuel García II (1805–1906), Viardot’s brother—to sonically reconstruct bel canto aesthetics from the pre-recording era.

This investigative process is both extrapolative and experimental, relying on intuitive artistic responses to historical cues. We argue that performance itself constitutes a research method capable of producing knowledge through artistic action. We situate Viardot’s transformations within the continuum of the bel canto school and explore how reciprocal expressive choices can inform performance interactions, generating new insights into historical style and its affective dimensions. This approach offers a framework for reimagining historical soundscapes while expanding the expressive palette available to modern performers to foster innovation in contemporary classical practice.

Dame Nellie Melba (1861–1931), one of the last exponents of the bel canto tradition, is among the most significant singers on early sound recordings, whose art largely disappeared by the 1950s. Trained by Mathilde Marchesi (1821−1913), whose pedagogical lineage included Manuel García II (1805−1906).

Focusing on selected recordings made between 1904 and 1926, this presentation explores how Melba’s electrical recordings deepens our understanding of her earlier acoustic recordings: the increased fidelity of the electrical recordings provides a valuable framework for reassessing the acoustic recordings, bringing into sharper focus vocal qualities often obscured by the limitations of early recording technology. Among these are aspects of timbre, tonal colour, resonance, vibrato, and dynamic shading.

The presentation also draws on contemporary newspaper reviews and critical descriptions of Melba’s voice published during her lifetime, comparing these with evidence preserved in her recordings. While such reviews provide valuable insights into her performance practice, they are inevitably subjective and open to interpretation. Melba’s recordings, by contrast, clearly preserve many aspects of her vocal style, making it possible for such qualities to be examined in detail. In doing so, they bring the past into the present, allowing us to hear and appreciate what would otherwise remain unheard.

Italian solfeggio, as cultivated in the Neapolitan conservatories (Baragwanath, 2020), provided the foundation of eighteenth-century singing and instrumental performance. it shaped a musical imagination grounded in bel canto ideals of myriad expressive practices, agile ornamentation, and rhetorical delivery through the embodied mastery of schemata as theorized in Robert Gjerdingen’s work (2007) on galant schemata, and partimenti (Sanguinetti, 2012).

This presentation explores Mozart’s musical language through this Neapolitan-derived schematic framework, examining the Phantasie in C minor, K. 475 not merely as a keyboard work but as an operatic and theatrical utterance. Its abrupt contrasts, recitative-like passages, and aria-inspired lyricism evoke bel canto effects of vocal inflection, dramatic pacing, and heightened affect, suggesting a drama without words. This perspective is further illuminated through comparison with the aria “Voi che sapete” from Le nozze di Figaro K. 492, highlighting shared bel canto gestures and schematic vocabularies across Mozart’s instrumental and vocal writing.

The evolution of 19^th-century musicianship reveals a sustained engagement with vocal aesthetics in shaping instrumental performance practice, as demonstrated in the research of Brown (1999, 2024) and Peres Da Costa (2012). Developments in piano manufacturing (longer sustain and register possibilities (including through varied pedal effects) increasingly enabled alignment with bel canto ideals: its expanding expressive capacity was channelled toward vocal imitation and rhetorical articulation.

Within this framework, this presentation considers how Carl Reinecke (b. 1824), a pianist regarded as preserving an “old tradition” of Mozart interpretation, performed Mozart’s Phantasie K. 475 with a dramatic range informed by bel canto aesthetics, offering a lens for understanding historical performance practice. This perspective is further contextualised through bel canto aesthetics in the artistry of the celebrated Mozart soprano Adelina Patti (b. 1843), alongside Mozart’s aria “Voi che sapete.”

This presentation culminates in an aria excerpt by Mariana Martínez (b. 1744), who was a student of Porpora, reimagined in performance to foreground the relevance of historical practice today through the embodied realisation of galant schemata and historically informed performance.

The late-19^th century witnessed growing anxiety over the perceived decline of 18^th-century bel canto under the pressures of increasingly dramatic operatic repertories. Within this climate, early editions of 17th- and 18^th-century Italian arias—most notably Arie Antiche, edited by Alessandro Parisotti—formed part of a broader Romantic revival of earlier vocal repertory. Although not intended as a systematic preparation for contemporary opera, this repertoire acquired pedagogical authority as it circulated among prominent singers and became associated with preserving a tradition of Italian singing. However, the revival was shaped by its own historical context. Parisotti’s editions altered earlier materials by introducing expressive markings, phrasing, and harmonic modifications that reflected late 19^th-century aesthetics. Early recordings indicate that singers did not treat this revived ‘antique’ repertoire as stylistically distinct but instead performed it using vocal techniques developed within contemporary operatic practice.

This lecture-recital presnetation investigates this tension through practice-led inquiry. One aria from Arie Antiche will be performed as notated in Parisotti’s edition, informed by early 20^th-century recordings to demonstrate documented characteristics such as phrasing, portamento, dynamic contour, and register management. These strategies will subsequently be applied in performances of selected excerpts from late-19^th-century operatic works documented in recordings up to the 1920s. By employing similar vocal approaches across both repertoires, the recital assesses whether the discourse of ‘saving’ bel canto generated a distinct pedagogical vocal practice or reinforced a unified operatic aesthetic. Highlighting the interaction between nostalgic reconstruction and operatic habit, this presentation contends that bel canto around 1900 was shaped both by inherited tradition and by revivalist reinterpretation. Thus, reconstruction became an integral component of its historical development.

Domenico Corri (1746–1825) was one of many Italian musicians who worked in Britain in the late-18th century. According to his autobiography in The Singers Preceptor, or Corri’s Treatise on Vocal Music (1810) he was the last student of Nicola Porpora (1686–1768), and as such, brought to the singers of Edinburgh and southern Britain knowledge of the vocal pedagogy of the Neapolitan school of singing which produced artists such as the famous castrato Farinelli (1705–1782).

Corri’s vocal treatises preserve pedagogical advice alongside carefully annotated editions of the most popular songs and arias heard in 18th-century salons, concert halls and theatres, including Giuseppe Sarti’s Lungi dal caro bene in The Singers Preceptor (1810).

Angelica Catalani (1780–1849) was the most celebrated soprano in Britain at the beginning of the 19th century, following in the footsteps of Elizabeth Billington (1765–1818) and Gertrude Mara (1749–1833): Corri’s brother, Natale, published another annotated edition of Sarti’s aria which claims that the score holds “Madame Catalani’s own Graces”. Was this how Catalani presented the aria in Edinburgh on February 8th, 1810?

The Corri/Catalani connection grew even closer when the singer became the teacher of Natale’s daughter Fanny, who sang in the early British performances of the vocal works of Mozart and Rossini.

This lecture-recital will examine the annotated editions by Domenico Corri and Natale Corri/Catalini to consider how Sarti’s aria could have been performed in the early-19th century.

This practice-based presentation focuses on the influence of singing on horn playing and horn playing on singing in 1820s-1850s Paris and centres on the performance practice of Jacques-François Gallay. Gallay held the role of principal horn at the Théâtre Italien and was appointed, alongside Gilbert Duprez, Filippo Galli and Manuel Garcia II, professor at the Paris Conservatoire as part of the “grands changements” of 1842.

Using three case studies (Vaccai’s Giulietta e Romeo “È questo il loco”, Mercadante’s Nitocri “Se m’abbandoni”, and Mercadante’s I Briganti “Perche non posso” and “Ove a me rivolgi un guardo) the presentation asks what it meant in practice for Gallay to describe the horn as “another voice that sings” and for a singer, such as Giovanni Battista Rubini, to state “you too, my dear Gallay, you are primo tenore. Let us both sing; the instrument alone is different.”

Drawing on Gallay’s Méthode, nineteenth-century vocal pedagogy, and early recordings of singers, the presentation challenges key tenants of modern historically informed performance horn playing and explores the use of timbre and portamento as deliberate expressive tools shared across vocal and instrumental domains. Particular attention is given to practical strategies relevant to performers today, including the expressive use of stopped and open notes, the management of harmonic transitions, the coordination of breath, embouchure, and hand position to shape vocal-style phrasing.