Like so many successful composers before and after him, the young Vincenzo Bellini found music to be a golden ticket – the passport out of a restricted life to travel opportunities, wealth, and a broadening of cultural horizons.
When was Vincenzo Bellini born?
Vincenzo Bellini was born into a musical family on 3 November, 1801, in Catania, Sicily. He showed exceptional musical talent from an early age and was tutored by his grandfather Vincenzo Tobia.
There was no family money: Bellini’s immediate forefathers were musicians too, but of the jobbing kind, more craftsmen than artists. Playing the organ, teaching and, in his grandfather’s case, composing music in the service of a local nobleman gave them an influence that extended no further than the local community in Catania, Sicily.
The surrounding hills were alive with the sound of folksong, and of course the church required a never-ending supply of quotidian liturgical music. But, for an aspiring opera composer, opportunities were few. Vincenzo showed exceptional musical promise, however, and a petition to the local council resulted in him being granted the funds to take up a place at the Naples Conservatoire, where his grandfather had studied before him.
Where did Bellini study?
In 1819, he duly won a scholarship to study at the Real Collegio di Musica in Naples. He was taught by Niccolò Zingarelli, though regular visits to theatre familiarised him with the operas of Rossini.
To a 17 year-old arriving across the water from Sicily, Naples was a metropolis of unimaginable riches. At this time, in the 1810s, it was one of the most highly respected musical centres on the Italian peninsula (Italy would not be a united country for a half-century yet), boasting an extraordinary reputation for music education and a superbly well-endowed opera house, the San Carlo.
Bellini attended regularly and immersed himself in the operas of Rossini, though was encouraged by Zingarelli to eschew the current vogue for coloratura and emulate the simpler style of earlier composers such as Paisiello.
From Naples, Bellini would move on to other, progressively more important cultural centres. Success with a juvenile opera (the short Adelson e Salvini) led to an opportunity to put an opera of his own on the stage at the San Carlo.
That work, Bianca e Fernando, impressed the theatre’s impresario Domenico Barbaja so much that he passed Bellini’s name on to his associates at La Scala in Milan. Bellini was commissioned to write an opera with the leading librettist of the day, Felice Romani: a tremendous coup for a young man just out of music college. The resulting work, Il pirata (1827), was a triumph.
Wealthy Milan had become a thriving intellectual capital in the early years of the 19th century and opera formed the kernel of the city’s cultural and social life. The presence in the city of music publishers, agents, singers and instrumentalists, as well as other composers, gave Bellini numerous useful contacts.
Later, the young man’s horizons would be broadened further when he spent time in London, supervising the performance of his works, and when he eventually moved to Paris, the pre-eminent European capital of culture. Here, he received the commission to compose I puritani, which was premiered at the Théâtre-Italien in 1835. Although Bellini would dutifully send money home to support his family in Sicily, return visits were few and far between.
Despite ‘only’ writing an average of an opera a year – unlike more prolific contemporaries such as Donizetti – Bellini was able to make a living entirely from the profits of his compositions, as one success followed fast on the heels of another. Without the need to take on ancillary teaching, conservatoire or church work, and commanding high fees for his operas, he was able to live the life of a fashionable dandy.
In both Milan and Paris, he mixed in the highest social circles, spending prolonged periods living as the guest of one wealthy friend or another, and enjoying commitment-free love affairs, including an extended romance with a married woman, Giuditta Turina. He mixed in the highest echelons of artistic society at Parisian salons, meeting musicians including Rossini, Chopin and Paer, and leading literary figures such as Heinrich Heine, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas père.
At times, however, he found the social whirl wearying and there were ominous signs of trouble ahead. The completion of each opera led to a period of nervous exhaustion, and by his mid-twenties he was already suffering regular and debilitating gastric problems.
Like Verdi after him, Bellini believed that drama should be placed on a par with music. In works such as Il pirata and La straniera (1829) he embraced the preoccupations of the Romantic era: violent, thrilling situations that required passionate music. Other works, such as La sonnambula (1831) are more sentimental and tender in mood.
In the librettist Felice Romani, with whom he composed the majority of his works, Bellini found a writer of genuine talent who produced verse of real elegance and clarity, far surpassing the more workaday writing of many Italian opera librettists of the day. Romani was in high demand and, consequently, often overworked, stressed by his own perfectionism and sometimes unreliable.
Nevertheless, Bellini showed an unusual degree of loyalty to this single librettist. Furthermore, when called upon to work with another writer (Count Carlo Pepoli, librettist for I puritani), he found himself constantly frustrated by what he regarded as conventional turns of phrase.
Other important figures in Bellini’s creative life were the singers who created his roles. Particularly significant was Giovanni Battista Rubini, a light-voiced tenor with an excellent upper range. Also key was the star singer Giuditta Pasta, the sensation of the 1820s, who took on a large number of roles spanning the full alto-mezzo-soprano range.
Like another noted Bellinian soprano 130 years later, Maria Callas (see p26), Pasta possessed a particularly rich voice and was noted for the way in which she appeared to inhabit a character. Her voice could be uneven in places, and was sometimes described as ‘husky’, but even this Bellini exploited for striking dramatic effect in La sonnambula and Norma.
A particularly stellar cast of singers was gathered together for the Parisian première of the composer’s final work, I puritani: Rubini once more, the soprano Giulia Grisi, the baritone Antonio Tamburini and the bass Luigi Lablache.
With the notable exception of Zaira (written for Parma in 1829), some of whose music was recycled the following year in I Capuleti e i Montecchi, and Beatrice di Tenda (written for Venice in 1833), over which Bellini and Romani fell out, most of the composer’s operas were instant successes.
Interestingly, it was Norma (1831), the work for which he is best remembered today, that fared least well at its first outing at La Scala, leading Bellini to utter the words ‘Fiasco, fiasco, solenne fiasco…’. The première was marred by singers suffering from exhaustion after a gruelling rehearsal period – though Bellini also suspected the presence of a disruptive claque, a common menace in the 19th-century opera house.
Within a matter of nights, however, the performers were back on form, audiences were happy, and the opera enjoyed a prolonged run. By the late 1830s it was being performed as far afield as St Petersburg, Mexico City and Algiers.
When did Bellini die?
The composer would not witness its long-term success, for Bellini, the beautiful blond young man characterised in Heine’s words by ‘languid sadness visible in his whole appearance’, had died of amoebic dysentery complicated by liver problems. The composer died, alone and isolated at yet another friend’s beautiful, leafy suburban house in Paris at the shockingly premature age of 33, in 1835.
This was an era in which many composers of prodigious output did not live to see their 40th birthdays: Mendelssohn died at 38, Bizet at 36, Mozart at 35. But Bellini was younger even than them, surpassing only the unfortunate Schubert, who died at the age of 31.
Bellini’s works impressed and influenced other composers as varied as Tchaikovsky and Wagner, the latter writing that ‘Bellini’s music comes from the heart and is intimately bound up with the text’. A few notable figures dismissed him as a trivial figure, resorting to a snobbery from which Italian opera all too commonly suffers.
Schumann, for instance, dismissed him as ‘a butterfly fluttering around the German oak’. Berlioz called him ‘a grinning puppet’. Nevertheless, Bellini’s operas became ubiquitous across Europe, with Glinka even witnessing a performance of Norma by Spanish children and Dickens seeing an act of it being performed by labourers in the marble quarries of Carrara.
But then fashions changed and, together with the rest of the bel canto repertoire, Bellini’s operas were rather neglected in the early 20th century. When Norma was put on at Covent Garden in 1929 for the first time in some 30 years as a vehicle for the American star soprano Rosa Ponselle, critics grudgingly began to admit that the work had its merits.
Ernest Newman wrote that ‘old-fashioned as the idiom is, the composer knew his job’. Elsewhere, a critic for The Musical Times reported that ‘There is stately and charming lyrical music in this neglected opera. Perhaps some of the quick movements are a little cheap; but Bellini’s best cantabile subjects are very beautiful’.
Happily, the mid-20th century saw a revival of interest in his operas: Maria Callas sang the role of Norma countless times at La Scala, the Met and elsewhere and was considered a superlative interpreter of the role, as was Joan Sutherland. Singers, particularly women tempted by his strong and dynamic female roles, would remain pivotal to his success to the last.
What was Bellini's music like?
Simplicity
From his earliest works, Bellini’s melodic style was characterised by striking simplicity. ‘Casta diva’ from Norma, with its extended, elegiac vocal arcs – so unusual at the time that the first Norma was initially reluctant to sing it – is the most famous instance of this direct and expressive cantabile style, but there are countless other examples.
Restraint
The florid decorative writing favoured by Rossini was something the more serious, ‘philosophical’ Bellini largely rejected. Coloratura is never used in his works for mere effect, only employed when required to illuminate a dramatic situation, such as Elvira’s descent into madness in I puritani.
History
Many of Bellini’s operas were based on relatively recent literary sources, but most were set in much earlier periods, such as Ancient Rome (Norma) and the English Civil War (I puritani). Bellini returned most frequently to Medieval themes (ll pirata, La straniera, I Capuleti e i Montecchi), which had a particular appeal to the Romantic imagination.
Words
Bellini took a keen interest in the crafting of his libretti, insisting on revisions until a text was perfect. In his settings, he would often break up a musical line into fragments to draw attention to and linger expressively around a particular short phrase or word for particular dramatic effect.
