The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In the 29-volume second edition. Grove Music Online /General Editor – Stanley Sadie. Oxford University Press. 2001

Bellini, Vincenzo

(b Catania, 3 Nov 1801; d Puteaux, nr Paris, 23 Sept 1835). Italian composer. He was a leading figure in early 19th-century opera, noted for his expressive melodies and sensitive approach to text-setting.

1. Education and early career (1801–26).

2. Achievement of fame (1827–9).

3. Rapprochement with the Rossinian style (1829–31).

4. Last works (1831–5).

5. Reception and influence.

WORKS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MARY ANN SMART (text), FRIEDRICH LIPPMANN, SIMON MAGUIRE/MARY ANN SMART (works), FRIEDRICH LIPPMANN/MARY ANN SMART (bibliography)

Bellini, Vincenzo

1. Education and early career (1801–26).

Bellini was born into a musical family in Sicily, the eldest of seven children of Rosario Bellini (1776–1840) and Agata Ferlito (1779–1842). His grandfather, Vincenzo Tobia Bellini (1744–1829), originally from the Abruzzi, had studied in Naples at the Conservatorio di S Onofrio a Capuana, and from 1768 worked as an organist, composer and teacher in Catania. His father, Rosario, was also a composer, maestro di cappella and teacher, although his career was apparently overshadowed by that of Vincenzo Tobia. An anonymous manuscript now in the Museo Belliniano in Catania, almost the sole source of information about Bellini's childhood, tells of prodigious musical feats, but amid its hyperbole the account outlines what was a fairly typical career path for a musically gifted young Italian at this time. Without formal training, the infant Vincenzo reportedly sang an aria by Fioravanti at the age of 18 months, took over from his grandfather as conductor during a church service at three, and by the age of five played the piano expertly. The same chronicler reports a rigorous and well-rounded Classical education, encompassing Latin, Italian literature, philosophy and modern languages, though neither Bellini's correspondence nor his literary instincts later in life show much evidence of such training. He wrote his first composition at six, and the following year began to study composition formally with his grandfather. During his childhood and teenage years, he wrote much sacred music and some secular songs, many of which received local performances.

In 1819 he was granted a scholarship to study at the Real Collegio di Musica in Naples, where his teachers included Giovanni Furno, Giacomo Tritto and, after 1822, Niccolò Zingarelli. Besides the traditional lessons in harmony and counterpoint, an important element of Bellini's training with Zingarelli was the composition of hundreds of wordless solfeggi (none of which survive); his sense for vocal writing must also have benefitted from his study of theoretical aspects of singing with Girolamo Crescentini. The conservatory's mostly septuagenerian faculty promulgated a conservative style of composition represented by Neapolitan composers Cimarosa and the recently deceased Paisiello, espousing simple melodies and clear text-setting while violently opposing the florid vocal style and ‘noisy’ orchestration of Rossini, who, as resident composer of the Naples theatres from 1815 to 1822, was an ever-present threat. Bellini absorbed the Neapolitan doctrine thoroughly and produced works that pleased his teachers without ignoring the Rossini example. The conservatory training required regular attendance at the theatre, where Rossini was standard fare, and Bellini was reported as being particularly struck by performances of Semiramide, Mosè in Egitto and Maometto II; influential works by other composers included Donizetti's La zingara, Mayr's Medea in Corinto, and Spontini's La vestale. A simultaneous attraction and resistance to Rossini's style is one of the most intriguing aspects of Bellini's student works; indeed, the confrontation with Rossini remained both a creative problem and a spur to innovation throughout his career.

When he graduated in 1825, Bellini was given the opportunity to present an opera at the conservatory; performed by an all-male cast of students, Adelson e Salvini became popular enough to be repeated every Sunday in the school's teatrino. Bellini himself thought highly enough of the work to revise it over the next few years, but he never succeeded in securing a professional performance, and ended up in what would become a lifelong practice with unsuccessful works – recycling numbers into his next four operas. In an early instance of the determined careerism at which he excelled, Bellini built on this first operatic success, lobbying the conservatory's governor and superintendent of theatres to enforce a statute by which the most promising student each year should be invited to compose a new work for one of the two professional theatres in Naples. Bellini fulfilled this commission with Bianca e Fernando, to a libretto by Domenico Gilardoni; the opera had its première in May 1826 at the Teatro S Carlo, where it was renamed Bianca e Gernando to avoid an apparent allusion to the reigning prince and recently deceased king of Naples.

Although written close together, these two student operas have surprisingly little in common stylistically. Adelson e Salvini's semiseria plot and the cast of inexperienced singers seem to have called forth a mixture of a conventional buffo idiom and a smoother, almost folk-like vocal style, reminiscent of Paisiello. Bianca e Fernando, basically a ‘rescue opera’, also embraces established idioms, but here it is a seria style, characterized by two-tempo (or ‘double’) arias and generous vocal display. While Bianca is thus more predictable in its largest dramatic outlines, the two operas share a varied and imaginative approach to the construction of individual lyric pieces. The most predictable part of the form is the fast, concluding section of the double aria, the cabaletta, and in these early works cabalettas are the only numbers to be constructed along the lines of what Friedrich Lippmann has identified as the standard Bellinian melodic design, sometimes called the ‘lyric prototype’. This refers to a structure that distributes two quatrains of poetry across four (usually) four-bar phrases: the first two lines of poetry are set as a four-bar phrase, the next two as a modified repetition (AA'); the music for lines 5 and 6 introduces a contrasting motive and moves away from the tonic (B), and the last two lines return to the tonic, either with a version of the opening motive or cadential material (A'' or C).

The lyric prototype became an increasingly important element of Bellini's style after Il pirata, but in these first operas longer, freer designs are much more common. For example, Salvini's solo in the Act 2 finale of Adelson e Salvini, ‘Ecco signor la sposa’, begins with a conventional AA'BB' (all four-bar phrases), but when a new idea arrives in the text the music moves with it, proliferating new motifs (CC'DD'), before returning to a modified version of A to close. A surprising amount of the music in these early operas is designed according to an individual formal logic that resists representation as schemas of letters. In Adelson's half-declamatory, half-decorated aria ‘Obbliarti! abbandonarti!’ in the Act 1 finale of Adelson, for example, melodic repetition begins only in the seventh bar after a florid and proclamatory opening (ex.1); and the slow movement of Fernando's entrance aria, ‘A tanto duol quest’anima’ in Bianca e Fernando shows erratic melodic contours and a free, almost ad hoc formal plan that owes more to the alternation of verse metres in Gilardoni's poetry than to any conventional musical form.

Such freedom of construction suggests that, even while conforming to the conservatory's doctrine and (largely) resisting the lure of florid vocal writing, Bellini was already borrowing from Rossini in other ways, especially in his treatment of small-scale form, crafting lyric movements that eschewed symmetry and melodic repetition in favour of a freer alternation of declamation and ornament. While the extremes of Bellini's early style – melodic naivety drawn from Paisiello and Rossinian formal freedom with its occasional forays into pure virtuosity – may seem diametrically opposed, both could be seen as ways of bringing song closer to the rhythms and contours of speech.

Bellini, Vincenzo