Joseph Gibaldi
Two centuries after his birth, Vincenzo Bellini is universally considered one of the greatest of Italian composers. Italy itself very publicly acknowledges Bellini among its most important historical figures by placing his portrait on the 5,000-lira note. Yet in January 1832, when a young man from Catania, known to us only as “Giovanni,” met the renowned composer in Naples, he immediately and excitedly wrote home about the encounter, proudly speaking of Bellini as “Il Cigno Siciliano” (“The Swan of Sicily”). Although the Sicilianness of Bellini is almost always ignored by scholarly writers, a consideration of his chief works indicates that he had a great affinity for his native land, which he had to abandon at an early age, as well as a deep awareness of Sicilian history and culture.
Vincenzo Bellini was born in Catania on 3 November 1801. His birthplace, now the Museo Belliniano, was a three-bedroom apartment near the Piazza San Francesco d’Assisi. Bellini came from a musical family: both his grandfather Vincenzo and his father Rosario were able to make a modest living through composing, performing, and teaching music locally in Catania.
According to all accounts, the young Vincenzo was extraordinarily precocious. He is said to have played the pianoforte when he was just three years old, and he was already composing music by the age of five. His father and grandfather taught him what they knew, but Vincenzo clearly needed formal training if he were to fulfill his evident musical genius.
Unfortunately for Sicily and Bellini, this was the period of the so-called Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and the Bourbon rulers had established Naples as the political and cultural capital of their kingdom. Under the Bourbons, Naples boasted an internationally acclaimed music college and one of the world’s major opera houses, the Teatro San Carlo. If Bellini were therefore to receive an education worthy of his talent, he would have to leave Sicily.
Recognizing the young Bellini’s artistic gifts, the city officials of Catania generously awarded him a full scholarship to study music in Naples. And so, in 1819, at the age of seventeen, Bellini became part of the historic Sicilian diaspora, like millions of earlier and later Sicilians who have had to leave their homeland to realize the full potential of their abilities. Thereafter, Bellini seems to have returned to Sicily just twice and, of necessity, only for brief visits, although he always spoke of himself as a Sicilian and signed his letters with such Sicilian nicknames as “Vincenzuddu.”
Bellini spent nearly eight years in Naples, studying not only Italian composers (Cimarosa, Paisiello) but also those of northern Europe (Haydn, Mozart), and he regularly attended the Teatro San Carlo to see recent operas by Gioacchino Rossini and the young Gaetano Donizetti. His student compositions included masses, songs, a cantata, and an oboe concerto. As his graduation work, Bellini wrote an opera entitled Adelson e Salvini, which was staged with an all-male student cast in the conservatory theater in 1825.
The success of this student work led to a commission to compose for the Teatro San Carlo the opera Bianca e Fernando, which received its premiere in May 1826, when Bellini was twenty-four. Perhaps fittingly, the opera is set in Sicily, specifically in thirteenth-century Agrigento, and is based on the play Bianca e Fernando alla tomba di Carlo IV, Duca d’Agrigento (1820) by Carlo Roti, the source doubtless chosen by the young composer himself.
Bianca e Fernando presents themes all-too-recurrent in Sicilian history and, as we will see, recurrent in Bellini’s works as well: tyrannical rule by a foreign force and the civil strife, political turmoil, and personal suffering resulting from that rule. The agent of conflict in this opera is the foreign adventurer Filippo. Seeking to gain political control of Agrigento, Filippo has secretly imprisoned Duke Carlo, making his subjects believe he is dead, and has succeeded in having the Duke’s son Fernando exiled. Now that the realm is governed by the Duke’s daughter Bianca, a recent widow with a young son, Filippo wishes to marry her and thus become the new Duke of Agrigento.
The exiled Fernando becomes the first example of an archetypal figure in Bellini’s operas – a figure perhaps with autobiographical undertones: the emigrant, exile, or expatriate who returns to his beloved homeland after a sorrowful period of separation. The opera in fact opens with Fernando arriving back on the shores of Agrigento, where he finds “the sweet air” of his homeland and where “everything speaks of peace and happiness.”
His sister Bianca also represents a familiar Bellinian character: a woman (perhaps the embodiment of Sicily itself) who endures great suffering caused by violent and contending men. Early in the opera, as head of the duchy, Bianca feels that her land is especially vulnerable to foreign powers because she is a female ruling alone. Thus, attempting to do her duty to her people, Bianca decides to marry again to place a male ruler on the throne. Unaware of his treachery and believing him trustworthy, Bianca names Filippo her regent and announces that she will make him her husband.
Yet when she is rejoined with her brother, Fernando disowns the innocent Bianca, thinking that she is in league with Filippo. Later, when Bianca and Fernando, reconciled, go to rescue their father, the Duke, too, initially scorns his daughter. As the men in her life tear and pull at her from all sides, political as well as personal, it is no wonder that Bianca at one point speaks of herself as a “victim to sacred duty.” Even towards the end of the opera, when Filippo is on the verge of complete defeat, Bianca is tested again when the thwarted usurper drags in her young son and threatens to kill the boy unless Bianca accompanies the desperate villain in his escape. It appears that the anguished mother will lose what is most precious to her until Filippo’s nefarious plan is routed, the ducal family is reunited, and rightful rule returns to Agrigento. The opera appropriately concludes with a triumphant aria of joyous relief sung by Bianca.
Bianca e Fernando was an unqualified success. Donizetti attended the first performance and wrote to a friend that the work was “beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, especially for someone who is writing his first opera.” The warm reception of the work brought Bellini to the attention of Domenico Barbaja, an ambitious impresario who ran opera houses in Naples, Milan, and Vienna. Barbaja was so impressed by Bellini’s music that he offered the young composer a contract to write an opera for the following year at the famous Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the most prestigious theater in Italy.
In April 1827 Bellini left Naples for Milan. There he formed a most productive partnership with Felice Romani, the finest librettist of the time, who was to supply the librettos for all but the last of Bellini’s remaining operas. Their first collaboration was the opera Il Pirata, which was premiered at La Scala in October 1827, a month prior to Bellini’s twenty-sixth birthday. Derived from the tragedy Bertram by the British writer Charles Robert Maturin, Il Pirata, like Bianca e Fernando, is set in thirteenth-century Sicily, during the period of the Angevin rule of Sicily.
The chief male character of the opera is Gualtiero, Count of Montalto, who had been a follower of Manfred, son of the Emperor Frederick II and the last Hohenstaufen ruler of Sicily. Gualtiero had been betrothed to marry Imogene, whose father similarly supported Manfred. Also enamored of Imogene was Ernesto, Duke of Caldora. Ernesto, however, had sided with the Angevin leader Charles of Anjou, who defeated and killed Manfred and took control of Sicily in 1266. With the triumph of the Angevins, Gualtiero fled to Aragon, whose king also claimed dominion of Sicily. (Indeed, the Aragonese were to succeed the Angevins as rulers of Sicily following the famous rebellion in 1282 known as the Sicilian Vespers.) Intent on returning to Sicily to battle the Angevins, Gualtiero became the leader of a group of Aragonese pirates.
Meanwhile, Ernesto, now a powerful political figure in Sicily, imprisoned Imogene’s father and forced her to marry him to save her father’s life. During the ten years of her loveless marriage, Imogene bore a son to Ernesto.
Just before the opening of the opera, Gualtiero’s fleet has battled and been defeated by the forces of Ernesto in the Straits of Messina, with Gualtiero and his men being cast up on the shores near Caldora. Thus the work begins with Gualtiero returning to Sicily, like Fernando in the earlier opera, after a long period of wretched exile. The pirate lands in the midst of a raging storm, accompanied by turbulent music that prefigures the opening of Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello, written some sixty years later.
Before long, Gualtiero and Imogene, still in love with one another, are reunited. They embrace, but when Imogene informs Gualtiero that she is married to his bitter enemy, he accuses her of betrayal, reminiscent of Fernando’s denunciation of Bianca. Although Imogene explains that her father would have perished in prison had she not wed Ernesto, Gualtiero continues to brand her a traitor. And when Imogene’s little son enters, Gualtiero (like the earlier Filippo) seizes the boy and threatens to kill him, although Imogene’s pleas make him relent. Gualtiero begs Imogene to escape with him, but she refuses to leave her husband and son, foreseeing that bitter remorse would forever follow the lovers.
Imogene is caught, as Bianca was previously, between conflicting demands made on her by the warring men in her life. When Ernesto finds out that his wife is still in love with the lover of her youth, he calls her immoral even while knowing that she has remained a dutiful wife and that he forced her to marry him without love. She reminds him, “You wanted my hand and did not care about my heart.” In time, despite Imogene’s frantic efforts to keep the men apart, Gualtiero and Ernesto fight a duel, the lover killing the husband. Gualtiero is arrested, tried, and sent to his death. Crushed by these violent deaths, Imogene, no longer able to cope with reality, loses her sanity.
Il Pirata is, in effect, a tragic version of Bianca e Fernando. Bellini’s second Sicilian opera contains all the major themes of the first– civil strife, political turmoil, and consequent personal suffering, effected by external forces (here the Angevins and Aragonese). There is also a striking number of similar plot details: the imprisoned father, the exile’s return to his homeland, the young son threatened with death, and the suffering heroine (the personification of Sicily itself?) torn between violent and contending males. Although the increasingly cosmopolitan Bellini never again wrote an opera set in Sicily, many of these motifs resurface in his later works.
There is a final Sicilian element in Il Pirata. It is usually said that the opera was the first to demonstrate fully the Bellinian style, including especially his famous “long, long, long melodies,” as Verdi called them in a letter written in 1898 – beautiful, expressive, often elegiac. But another, more exuberant aspect of Bellini’s art, often overlooked, was his occasional use of Sicilian folk music, especially in his choral writing. In Il Pirata, the pirates’ chorus (“Evviva! allegri!”) in Act One is a lively tarantella, written in 6/8 time, with an innovative echo effect. So fond was Bellini of such music, that he used similar tarantella-like pieces in later operas, regardless of their setting.
Romani was later to write that he proposed Il Pirata to the composer of Bianca e Fernando because he thought the subject likely “to touch the most responsive chord in his heart; nor was I mistaken.” Bellini’s second and final opera set in Sicily was rapturously received by the public and became the young composer’s first international success. After fifteen performances at La Scala in the fall 1827 season, Barbaja took the opera to his theater in Vienna. Productions quickly followed in Dresden, London, Madrid, Paris, and New York.
Bellini’s next two operas– La Straniera (Teatro alla Scala, Milan) and Zaira (Teatro Ducale, Parma) – both written in 1829, are somewhat flawed and problematic, at least for modern audiences, and are rarely performed. But the following year witnessed another great triumph for Bellini, as Romani presented him with a libretto on a subject he doubtless knew would again “touch the most responsive chord” in the composer’s heart. This was Romani’s version of that ultimate story of civil strife: the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi received its first performance at the famous Teatro La Fenice in Venice in March 1830. The work was an enthusiastic success, and we are told that Venice became so enamored of Bellini that after the third performance, the composer was escorted back to his living quarters by a crowd of people carrying torches and by a band playing melodies from his operas.
Set in thirteenth-century Verona, I Capuleti e i Montecchi is adapted not from Shakespeare but from earlier treatments of the Romeo and Juliet story by the Italian Renaissance writers Masuccio Salernitano, Matteo Bandello, and Luigi Da Porto. In Romani’s libretto, the family rivalry between the Capuleti and the Montecchi (Shakespeare’s Capulets and Montagues) takes on historically profound political dimensions, recalling the conflict between the Angevins and the Aragonese in Il Pirata. The Capuleti are Guelphs, and the Montecchi are Ghibbelines—the warring parties, about which Dante knowingly wrote, that brought great discord to medieval Europe. In this version, too, Romeo is transformed into the Bellinian archetype of the returning exile, like the earlier Fernando and Gualtiero. Bellini’s Romeo, unlike Shakespeare’s, left Verona as a boy and moved from city to city during his exile.
Another evident difference from the Elizabethan play is the absence of Lady Capulet and Juliet’s Nurse. In fact, Giulietta, like Bianca of Agrigento, is the only female character in the opera – thus intensifying her position as the Bellinian heroine victimized by the contentious men in her life. On one side, Giulietta is in love with Romeo, her family’s hated Ghibelline enemy, who, to make matters worse, has killed her brother in battle. On the other side, Giulietta’s father wishes to marry her to his Capulet-Guelph ally Tebaldo.
Romeo, like Gualtiero in Il Pirata, begs Giulietta to escape with him, but she, like the wife and mother Imogene, refuses, similarly speaking of “a stronger power of love”— “that of duty, of law, of honor, yes, yes, of honor.” Needless to say, like previous Bellini heroines, Giulietta is denounced on both sides – by Romeo for failing to run off with him and, when she hesitates to marry Tebaldo, by her father as well.
As in the familiar Elizabethan tragedy, Giulietta relies on a sleeping potion provided by the physician Lorenzo (Shakespeare’s Friar Laurence) to delude her family into thinking that she is dead. But Romeo, unaware of the dissimulation, returns to Verona to poison himself at the tomb of his beloved. Giulietta revives just long enough for Romeo to die in her arms, and she in turn falls dead from grief on his corpse. Like the Sicilians Imogene and Gualtiero, Giulietta and Romeo are victims of the destructive political forces engulfing them.
With the triumph of I Capuleti e i Montecchi in 1830, Bellini at twenty-eight was on the threshold of what must sadly be considered the mature period of his brief life. During the very next year, he composed two of his greatest masterpieces: La Sonnambula and Norma. Based on the scenario by Eugène Scribe for the French ballet La Somnambule (1827; music by Hérold), La Sonnambula received its first performance in March 1831 at the Teatro Carcano, La Scala’s ambitious new rival theater in Milan. A pastoral tragicomedy set in early nineteenth-century Switzerland, La Sonnambula seems at first glance completely unlike previous Bellini works and as far removed as possible from Sicily and Sicilian themes. Yet there are several significant points of similarity.
The opera begins with the touching betrothal of the lovers Amina and Elvino. In the midst of these celebrations, a middle-aged stranger arrives and is welcomed by the assembled villagers. He is Count Rodolfo, returning to his ancestral home following his father’s death. Yet another in the series of Bellini’s expatriates, Rodolfo sings a beautiful aria (“Cari luoghi”) that delineates the complex emotions he experiences when he sees again the “lovely places” where he peacefully spent the happy and serene days of his youth. Although he has rediscovered these places, he knows that he can never relive those happy days.
Romani’s original draft libretto for La Sonnambula, now in the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, presented Rodolfo as not just an expatriate but an exile returned to his native land after a long absence – like the earlier Bellini protagonists Fernando, Gualtiero, and Romeo – and the draft also involved him in a youthful Romeo-and-Juliet relationship. The young Rodolfo, a noble, fell in love with a village maiden, and they conceived a child out of wedlock. For this behavior, the youth was banished by his parents, and the maiden, after giving birth, died of grief and shame. The child of this union was none other than the opera’s heroine Amina.
Although this plot element was eventually dropped because it was considered too daring, traces of it still survive in the final version of the libretto. Amina remains an orphan, and when Rodolfo meets her, he confesses that she reminds him of an unnamed beautiful young woman he adored in his youth. The suppressed relationship between father and daughter perhaps also explains why the sleepwalking Amina winds up in Rodolfo’s room and falls asleep in his empty bed – the abandoned child unconsciously seeking the long-lost parent.
The depiction of somnambulism, like the ubiquitous mad scenes in bel canto operas, was another manifestation of the interest of the Romantic age in the unusual workings of the mind (cf. Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene in Verdi’s operatic Macbeth of 1847). When Amina is discovered asleep in Rodolfo’s bed, she becomes, like many other Bellini heroines, an innocent female denounced by her beloved, Elvino. In time, though, Amina’s guiltlessness, thanks to Rodolfo’s efforts, is finally made clear, and there is a happy ending.
La Sonnambula being a pastoral tragicomedy, both Romani and Bellini seemed fully aware of Sicily’s historic connection to the pastoral tradition. In fact, in his notes on the libretto, Romani said he conceived of Amina as a figure of innocence and simplicity characteristic of personages in the poetry of Theocritus, the poet of Siracusa who established the pastoral tradition in the third century BC. For his part, Bellini seems to have wished to communicate Amina’s innocence through her brilliantly pure, emotionally charged coloratura arias, such as the ecstatic “Ah, non giunge uman pensiero,” which concludes the opera. Bellini further emphasized the pastoralism of the work by having his chorus of villagers, even though they are Swiss, sing tarantella-like songs in 6/8 time, beginning with the introductory chorus of Act One (“Viva, viva Amina”) and continuing through the entire opera. Bellini also included in his elaborate score folk dances played by a country band – doubtless similar to ones directed by his grandfather and his father in Catania– and even inserts an orchestral simulation of distant bagpipes, an instrument closely allied to Sicilian folk music.
In December 1831, just nine months after the first performance of La Sonnambula and only a few weeks after his thirtieth birthday, Bellini unveiled at La Scala another operatic masterpiece: Norma. Based on a recent French tragedy by Alexandre Soumet, Norma is set in ancient Gaul under Roman occupation during the first century BC, but the opera could just as easily have been set in ancient (or modern) Sicily, for it concerns the oppression of a nation by a foreign invader, a recurrent crisis in Sicilian history. In fact, Sicily was the primary battleground for the First and Second Punic Wars fought between Rome and Carthage in the third century BC, and – as it was considered a foreign nation – the vanquished and occupied island became the first Roman province. The Romans engaged in widespread slavery in Sicily, and ruthlessly exploited the land’s abundant natural resources, transforming the island into “Rome’s granary,” as the ancient writer Cato put it, “the nurse at whose breast the Roman people is fed.”
In Norma, the Druid high priest Oroveso serves as the spokesman for all conquered nations seeking to drive out foreign rulers. Feeling hatred and anger towards the Romans, Oroveso wonders at the beginning of the opera how much suffering and indignity his people must endure, and he looks forward to the day when rebellion will be possible.
Typical of Bellini-Romani operas, political conflict is also reflected in personal relations. Oroveso’s daughter Norma is a Druid high priestess– her prayer to the moon (“Casta diva”) is doubtless Bellini’s most famous aria– but she has been seduced by Pollione, the Roman proconsul in Gaul and symbol of the colonial oppressor. In breaking her sacred vows, Norma has also borne her lover two children in secret. Pollione now wishes to abandon Norma, for he has fallen in love with the novice priestess Adalgisa, whom he wishes to take to Rome with him. Like previous Bellini heroines, Norma and Adalgisa are torn between conflicting loyalties. Allegiance to religion, to nation, and to each other contend with their irrational passion for the Romeo-like enemy-lover Pollione.
The opera includes as well a plot element observed in Bellini’s two Sicilian operas, Bianca e Fernando and Il Pirata: the threatened murder of children. Like Medea from Greek tragedy, Norma contemplates killing her own offspring in revenge for Pollione’s infidelity. In the original Soumet tragedy, which was entitled Norma, ou L’Infanticide, the priestess did indeed murder her children, but the Bellini-Romani adaptation has Norma, dagger in hand, come to her senses in time as her maternal instincts conquer her jealous fury. The children, though menaced, are saved like those of Bianca and Imogene in the Sicilian operas.
Pollione eventually redeems himself. He comes to recognize Norma’s great nobility and once again proclaims his love for her. But it is too late, and they are sentenced to death for their forbidden love. Like Romeo and Giulietta and like Imogene and Gualtiero in Il Pirata, Norma and Pollione are caught in the throes of violent and uncontrollable political forces.
Norma was sung thirty-nine times during its initial season and has since become Bellini’s most popular opera. In the nineteenth-century alone, Norma received productions in thirty-five countries and in sixteen different languages, and the opera continues to be frequently revived and recorded.
Shortly after the success of Norma, like one of his own protagonists, Bellini returned to his homeland for what would prove his last visit. His stay in Sicily lasted only three months, from February to April of 1832, but it was a memorable experience for the young composer. He was enthusiastically welcomed everywhere he went and triumphantly hailed as a returning hero. In Catania, where he was briefly reunited with his family, there was a celebratory procession in which the town band jubilantly played pieces from his operas. He attended performances of Il Pirata in Messina and I Capuleti e i Montecchi in Palermo. He was asked to sit for portraits, received numerous awards, and enjoyed concerts and banquets in his honor.
When Bellini returned to the Italian mainland to resume his career, he contracted to produce another opera for the Venetian Teatro La Fenice in early 1833. This was to be the ill-fated Beatrice di Tenda, for which Felice Romani was supposed to deliver the libretto by October 1832. The overworked Romani, who was simultaneously writing separate libretti for five different composers in three different cities, did not meet the deadline. In December 1832, just two months before the projected February premiere, Bellini still did not have his libretto. He complained to the Governor of Venice, who had Romani summoned by the police from Milan to Venice to fulfill his contractual obligation.
The indignant Romani arrived in Venice in late January 1833 and proceeded to write the libretto very slowly, forcing Bellini to compose at great speed. The premiere had to be delayed until late March 1833, during the final week of the season. Beatrice di Tenda was coldly received by the public, leading the estranged composer and librettist to exchange bitter accusations in the press, with each blaming the other for the delay and failure of the opera. This marked the end of a great friendship and a legendary collaboration that had produced some of the world’s greatest operas. Bellini and Romani never met again, although they were later reconciled through correspondence.
Immediately after the fiasco of Beatrice di Tenda, Bellini left Italy to supervise productions of his operas in London and Paris. In Paris he moved in circles that included the likes of Rossini, Liszt, Victor Hugo, Chopin, and George Sand, and he signed a contract to compose an opera for the city’s Théâtre-Italien for the 1834-35 carnival season. This proved to be another Bellinian masterpiece, I Puritani, for which Bellini selected as his librettist Carlo Pepoli, an Italian living in Paris.
Pepoli was an established poet but had never before written for the theater. Bellini himself chose the subject for the opera—the 1833 historical drama Têtes Rondes et Cavaliers (Roundheads and Cavaliers) by the French writers Ancelot and Saintine—and he drafted a scenario for Pepoli to follow. The opera received its first performance in January 1835, shortly after the composer’s thirty-third birthday.
I Puritani is set in Plymouth, England, around 1650, during the Civil War between the Puritans (or Roundheads) led by Oliver Cromwell and the Cavaliers, the Royalist followers of the deposed and executed Stuart King Charles I. For the composer who had already treated historical conflicts between the Angevins and the Aragonese, the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, and the Gauls and the Romans, the subject obviously had great appeal.
Once again, political conflict is also depicted in personal terms. Elvira, a Puritan, and Arturo, a Cavalier, are in love. In this variation of the Romeo-and-Juliet theme, though, it initially appears as if there might be a happy ending as early as the first act. Elvira had been promised in marriage to the Puritan Riccardo, but as the opera opens, her father has bowed to his daughter’s wishes and is allowing her to marry the respected enemy Arturo. Thus I Puritani begins like La Sonnambula with the promise of a happy marriage. Indeed, the chorus of English Puritans, like the Swiss villagers in La Sonnambula, not to mention the brigands in Il Pirata, express their joy by singing tarantella-like songs in 6/8 time. Unfortunately, the marriage plans are again disrupted, as in La Sonnambula, this time for political reasons.
When Arturo arrives to marry Elvira, he learns that Queen Enrichetta (Henrietta), the widow of Charles I, is being held prisoner by Elvira’s father, who is about to escort her to London for trial and certain execution. Arturo’s patriotic ardor wins out over his desire for personal happiness. He decides to rescue his queen and escapes with her, abandoning his beloved Elvira on their wedding day. When Elvira, unaware of Henrietta’s true identity, learns that Arturo has fled with another woman, the distress causes her, like Imogen in Il Pirata, to lose her senses, as she joins the many Bellinian heroines who undergo extreme suffering caused by the men they love.
Arturo also proves an archetypal Bellinian figure—the returning exile. At the beginning of Act Three, he lands at Plymouth during a fierce storm, like the Sicilian exile Gualtiero in Il Pirata. Arturo’s sentiments upon arrival echo those of previous protagonists we have encountered. He blesses every leaf and every stone he sees and passionately declares “how sweet it is for an unhappy exile to see his treasure and after so much wandering from shore to shore to kiss at last his native soil.” Arturo then sings an aria that several earlier Bellini heroes might also have sung. He tells of how the exile wanders through valleys and over mountains, with grief as his only companion. He seeks sleep in the dark night and dreams but always “wakes with sorrow at the fate of his country and of himself.”
Like the returning exiles Romeo in I Capuleti e i Montecchi and Gualtiero in Il Pirata, Arturo is pursued by vengeful enemies, but he enjoys a happier ending than his predecessors. The Cavalier is reunited with Elvira, who regains her sanity, and when word comes that the Puritan government has granted a general amnesty to the Cavaliers, Arturo is liberated, and, like Amina and Elvino in La Sonnambula, the loving couple is joyfully reconciled.
The Parisians greeted I Puritani with immense enthusiasm. Six days after its premiere, King Louis-Philippe named Bellini a Knight of the French Legion of Honor. The opera was performed seventeen times during the spring of 1835 at the Théâtre-Italien. Later in the same year came productions in London and at La Scala, and the work quickly achieved the kind of international success to which Bellini was now accustomed. Although Pepoli’s libretto fell somewhat short of what Felice Romani would likely have produced, Bellini’s superlative music rendered audiences unmindful of flaws in the text. Rossini, who attended the first performance of I Puritani, wrote that it was the most accomplished score yet composed by the young composer.
Thus at the age of thirty-three Bellini was at the height of his powers. And yet I Puritani was to be his last opera, for in September 1835, just eight months after his latest triumph, Bellini was dead. The cause of death was acute dysentery resulting from amebic infection. The music world was stunned. Rossini, who took charge of the funeral arrangements, was “inconsolable,” as he wrote to Filippo Santocanale, a Sicilian friend of Bellini’s: “Be lenient in judging me, and tell the relatives and friends that the only consolation remaining to me is that of dedicating my careful attention to honoring a friend, a compatriot, and a distinguished artist.”
Bellini is buried in the Cathedral of Sant’ Agata in Catania. Inscribed on his tomb are these prescient words from an exquisite aria from La Sonnambula: “Ah! non credea mirarti/ Sì presto estinto, o fiore” (“Ah! I did not think to see you dead so soon, o flower”).
One wonders, of course, what Bellini might have accomplished if he had enjoyed a normal lifespan. Yet the few operas he left us have won him a permanent place in the pantheon of world composers, as attested by writers on music both from his time and ours. Chief among the qualities for which he is renowned is his extraordinary melodic gift. Richard Wagner wrote in 1837, “What enchanted us in Bellini was the pure melody, the simple nobility, and beauty of song.” More recently, John Rosselli (1996) spoke of Bellini’s “gift for original distinguished, unforgettable melody—a gift exceedingly rare.”
But there are other features of Bellini’s music for which he is also celebrated. The modern music historian Charles Osborne (1994), for example, has praised not only “Bellini’s unique melodic gift” but also “his artistic conscience.” More specifically, in an obituary that appeared in the Gazzetta Piemontese (Turin) in October 1835, the artist who probably knew and understood him best, his long-time collaborator Felice Romani, declared that “few composers in Italy, and perhaps no composers other than ours, knew as well as Bellini the necessity for a close union of music with poetry, dramatic truth, the language of emotions, the proof of expression.”
In 1901, commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Bellini, Arrigo Boito, the eminent librettist and composer, wrote in his Omaggio a Bellini nel primo centenario dalla sua nascita: “Chi non ama Vincenzo Bellini non ama la Musica” (“He who does not love Vincenzo Bellini does not love music”). A full century later, one can do little more than emphatically repeat Boito’s apt assessment of the “Swan of Sicily.”
Selected Discography
Bianca e Fernando. Andrea Licata, conductor. Young Ok Shin, Gregory Kunde, Haijing Fu. Orchestra and Chorus of Teatro Massimo Bellini di Catania. Nuova Era, 1992.
Il Pirata. Gianandrea Gavazzeni, conductor. Montserrat Caballé, Bernabé Martí, Piero Cappuccilli. Orchestra and Chorus of Radiotelevisione Italiana Roma. EMI, 1971.
I Capuleti e i Montecchi. Riccardo Muti, conductor. Agnes Baltsa, Edita Gruberova, Dano Raffanti. Orchestra and Chorus of Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. EMI, 1985.
La Sonnambula. Richard Bonynge, conductor. Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti, Nicolai Ghiaurov. London Opera Chorus and National Philharmonic Orchestra. London, 1982.
Norma. Tullio Serafin, conductor. Maria Callas, Franco Corelli, Christa Ludwig, Nicola Zaccaria. Orchestra and Chorus of Teatro alla Scala, Milano. EMI, 1960.
I Puritani. Tullio Serafin, conductor. Maria Callas, Giuseppe Di Stefano, Rolando Panerai, Nicola Rossi-Lemeni. Orchestra and Chorus of Teatro alla Scala, Milano. EMI, 1953.
Selected Bibliography
Adamo, Maria Rosaria, and Friedrich Lippmann. Vincenzo Bellini. Torino: ERI, 1981.
Failla, Salvatore Enrico. Vincenzo Bellini: Critica storia tradizione. Catania: Maimone, 1991.
Maguire, Simon. Vincenzo Bellini and the Aesthetics of Early Nineteenth-Century Opera. New York: Garland, 1989.
Orrey, Leslie. Bellini. London: Dent, 1969.
Osborne, Charles. The Bel Canto Operas of Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini. London: Methuen, 1994.
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