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Just to throw my 2 cents in, as somebody who's both studied an instrument and bel canto (classical) style singing, studying the voice is MUCH harder than people realize or tend to give credit. 1) Bel Canto is supposed to be "natural." You're supposed to naturally manipulate your body so that your resonance flows to the back of a hall projecting your crisp and clear vowel structures. While this sounds fairly easy, teaching this can be a nightmare. If a student is singing poorly, they *think* they're doing something naturally b/c it's probably what they're used to doing and/or hearing on the radio. When a teacher goes to correct/shape a student's voice, they don't have an instrument to grab or body appendages to manipulate (like my viola instructor grabbing my hand as I play). Almost ALL of the work that needs to be done involves hundreds of tiny muscles INSIDE the mouth and throat, on the tongue, surrounding the jaw, balancing the head, and hugging the ribcage. Factor in the notion that everybody's physical bodies, resonaters and vocal chords are different, and the teacher has to resort to using guesswork and highly trained knowledge to figure out how to pass along this student to change something they cannot see or feel. BUT WAIT, it STILL gets more complicated. Everybody knows that puberty brings along changes to the human voice (especially men.) The part people tend to not realize is that the voice truly doesn't "Settle" until the upper-mid twenties to the early thirties. This means that ALL college undergraduates and High School students are training and teaching themselves on voices that will change as they get older. I started off as a baritone and my voice decided to rebound back to tenor. Guess what that means? Relearning the balance of where to put my tongue for vowels at which part of my register. 2) Classicaly trained singers have to study other languages. We have to do more than sound like foreigners though, we have to sound like we're fluent, born speakers of (traditionally) up to four languages. This means that I've had to study French, German, Italian AND proper English diction. While we don't have to be fluent in these languages, we still have to master the sounds of them. Lemme tell you something: every singer has at least one language they have to work their hindquarters off at to sound natural on. For me, it's German. I work and work and work and STILL sound foreign half the time I sing it. Oh, to make it more fun, you have to technically learn singer's diction. This means that if you speak that actual language (like, for me it's french) you have to be able to switch on and off a trigger over how to pronounce things. This is even true in English. "I" becomes "ah-ih" On top of that, while you may not be fluent, you have to understand the nuances to understand what the text is trying to say because.... 3) Singers have to study acting. Even in simple art song/chanson/lieder, if the person just stands up and says a few melodic notes, people stare at you like you've gone crazy. While most instrumentalists get their music, they can get away with a relatively dry and almost disinterested attitude towards their audience (thankfully most don't!) As a singer, that's just simply no. You're supposed to present the illusion that YOU are making the melody up, and there's a reason you're saying it right there on the spot for your special audience. Multiply that tenfold for opera. Just to clarify, if you've ever acted, you can't just say "oh...I'm happy on this part." Nope. Each word has a SPECIFIC meaning and purpose, and good actors/singers understand the nuance of every single one of these words. Each language (and, by extension, songs written in them) have a diifferent pace, ebb, and flow. A good example is the french negation system. In English, "it's I DO NOT like bread." In French, it's "Je N'aime PAS le pain." Notice the different placement of capital words? Guess how that effects the flow of melody and harmony... Also, you have to know which words are throwaways, or the always fun case of people saying something which means something else completely in another language. To go back to my French example, the french don't say: "I am correct." They say "I have reason." SIngers are expected to know or figure out these subtle nuances in each language and act off of them propery.