Italian for Singers: understanding what you are singing

Diction gets taught. The language does not

Conservatoires teach Italian diction: open and closed vowels, doubled consonants, where the stress falls. That is the sound. What almost nobody teaches is the meaning, so singers learn a word-by-word gloss of their own aria and understand nothing of the scene around it.

The cost shows up in phrasing. If you do not know which word is the object and which is the subject, you cannot know which one to lean on.

The vocabulary of the rehearsal room

Libretto Italian is not modern Italian

Most of the standard repertoire was written between 1780 and 1920, in a deliberately literary register that was already archaic when it was set. You will meet inverted word order, the passato remoto everywhere, and vocabulary no living Italian uses.

• Ei for egli: he
• Onde for perciò or da dove
• Alma for anima: soul
• Cor for cuore: heart, shortened for the metre

This is why studying modern conversational Italian alone leaves a libretto opaque. You need contemporary Italian for the rehearsal room and literary Italian for the page, and the second is what nineteenth-century novels are made of.

The most useful thing a singer can read

Nineteenth-century Italian prose, at a level you can actually get through. It is the same register the librettists wrote in, without the metre.

I promessi sposi at B2 is the obvious one: Verdi’s generation grew up on it. Il piacere at C1 for D’Annunzio, who wrote for the same audience as Puccini. See the full graded series.