2. Achievement of fame (1827–9).

In May 1827, Bellini left Naples, drawn north by a contract from impresario Domenico Barbaia to compose for Milan's Teatro alla Scala. He left behind in Naples two significant personal attachments, to Maddalena Fumaroli, a young woman he had hoped to marry once his financial position permitted, and to Francesco Florimo, his fellow student at the conservatory and closest friend. Once established in Milan, Bellini soon forgot Maddalena, but the attachment to Florimo never wavered, and his long and frequent letters to his friend are by far our fullest source of information about his professional and personal life. Florimo remained in Naples as librarian at the conservatory until his death in 1888, but his true calling was as chronicler and guardian of Bellini's fame. In 1882 he published a biography and edition of Bellini's letters; although Florimo's desire to protect and enhance his friend's reputation sometimes led him to censor or even substantially falsify the content of the letters, his portrait of the composer remains valuable and influential.

In Milan Bellini quickly formed a new series of personal and professional connections. He took rooms with Francesco and Marianna Pollini, who became almost surrogate parents, moved easily into society circles, and embarked on what would be his most important working relationship, with the librettist Felice Romani. As resident poet at La Scala, Romani was appointed as librettist for Bellini's first Milanese effort, Il pirata. The collaboration was such a success that Bellini began to insist on working only with Romani, and the two collaborated on all his subsequent operas except the last, I puritani. Romani had a remarkable sense for building dramatic situations with inherent musical potential, but what made him Bellini's ideal poet was his ability to craft beautiful lines and phrases in a classical mould. As Bellini himself put it in a letter to Florimo, ‘just notice in Il pirata how the verses, not the situations, inspire my talent … that's why I must have Romani’. Romani was inclined to autocratic treatment of his collaborators: his practice was to present composers with the fait accompli of a finished libretto, with little latitude for revision. Only Bellini and Meyerbeer enjoyed special status: sketch materials show that Bellini had active input from the very first stages of preparation, and indeed often presented Romani with already-composed music, demanding verse metres that fitted their rhythms and phrasing. Perhaps because of his own perfectionism, Romani was usually good-natured about Bellini's incessant demands for revision. Harmonious as the match was artistically, it often met with practical difficulties, since Romani was frequently over-committed and notoriously late in delivering poetry. Bellini suffered much from these delays; the phrase ‘Romani is late’ became a refrain in his letters, and in 1833 this chronic tardiness led to a serious rift.

Il pirata had its première at La Scala in October 1827 (fig.1) with a cast headed by three singers who maintained close ties to Bellini throughout his career: soprano Henriette Méric-Lalande (the first Bianca and Alaide in La straniera), Giovanni Battista Rubini, who created the tenor leads in Bianca e Fernando, La sonnambula and I puritani, and baritone Antonio Tamburini, who would sing in premières of both La straniera and I puritani. The opera was an immediate success, and was quickly taken up in Naples and Vienna, establishing Bellini as a leading figure of his generation and assuring his financial and professional security. Although Bellini was paid only about 2000F for Pirata itself, the success put him in a position to demand twice as much for his next opera, La straniera. La sonnambula and Norma would earn just over 10,000F each, fulfilling Bellini's long-standing dream of outdoing the 5000F Rossini had been paid for Semiramide in 1823, previously the top fee for an Italian operatic commission. Bellini was unusual in being able to earn his living entirely from operatic commissions, but even at the peak of his earning power, he seems to have lived fairly frugally, sending money to his family in Catania and indulging only in his taste for silk gloves and other fine clothing.

Il pirata's libretto is a radical departure from the Classical idiom and the calcified generic outlines of Bellini's Naples operas: drawn from Charles Maturin's tragedy Bertram (in an adaptation by J.S. Taylor), the plot is quintessentially ‘Romantic’, set on a storm-tossed seashore and focussing on the proscribed love between a Byronic pirate-exile and a married woman who ends the opera insane. Bellini devoted six months (an unprecedentedly long period by the standards of the time) to Il pirata's composition, and the Romantic innovations of both text and music seem to have been quite self-conscious. The autograph score bears witness to struggles over almost every detail, including transpositions, orchestration, and trimming back of cadential passages. One not particularly reliable witness even reported hearing Bellini exhort Rubini to a more impassioned performance during rehearsal by asking, ‘if I had taken it into my head to create a genre and a musical style that strictly expresses the words, and to make singing and drama into an integrated whole, ought I to give it up because you don't wish to support me?’. Identifying Romanticism in Italian opera of this period is contentious: certainly there is little about Bellini's music (or Donizetti's) at this stage that breaks sharply with past structures in the way we tend to expect of the Romantic. Indeed, for Italian composers, Romanticism was first of all a matter of literary innovation, an invitation to abandon mythological or classical plots in favour of those based on more recent history, preferably centred around a violent and passionate conflict and set in a remote and mysterious location. But musical experiment also played a role: if double arias and other conventional structures were rarely jettisoned completely, they often became a background for injections of couleur locale, an elevation of the status of the chorus to participant in the drama, or melodic gestures that infuse lyric numbers with something of the rhythms of conversation.

Although Bellini's decisive step into Romanticism and an individual style is – with some justification – often dated from the première of La straniera two years later, many of the later opera's innovations are anticipated in Il pirata, both in vocal style and approach to form. The lyric prototype design now dominates even more completely in the cabalettas, but is rare in slow movements, which tend to be more varied. The opening section of Imogene's aria finale, ‘Col sorriso d'innocenza’, expands on a lyric prototype design in order to make room for declamatory text-setting, resulting in a melding of syllabic and florid vocal writing that is almost the signature of this early style (ex.2). The A' phrase (bar 5) begins as a gracefully ornamented version of the opening motive, but after two bars moves off into a halting, nearly monotone exclamation (‘deh! favella al genitor’) that extends the phrase by two bars and leads to a florid cadence. Contrasting vocal styles are similarly melded in this aria's cabaletta, ‘Sole, ti vela’, where the alternation of syllabic declamation and coloratura (and the sharp registral shift) captures the extremes of the heroine's madness (ex.3).

An extreme example of the freedom with which Bellini lays out individual movements is the episodic organization of the slow movement of Imogene's entrance aria, the dream narration, ‘Lo sognai, ferito, esangue’, a piece that would exert an influence on dream narrations by both Donizetti (‘Regnava nel silenzio’ from Lucia di Lammermoor) and Verdi (‘Condotta ell’era in ceppi’ from Il trovatore). The form follows the logic of the text, proposing new melodic figures as each new image is described, even moving in and out of recitative. Such loose construction is often combined with a remarkable economy of motivic material, sometimes reaching the point of obsessiveness, as where Imogene's first 15 bars merely prolong and embellish the fifth scale degree, mostly elaborated through a rocking back and forth between D and E . The dream narration takes on a sense of periodicity only at the arrival of the E -major phrase (‘Era sorda la natura’) that becomes a sort of refrain, returning with new words to close the movement.

After the acclaim of Il pirata, Bellini turned to revising Bianca e Fernando for a Genoa performance, with new text by Romani substituting for some of Gilardoni's original poetry. Bellini began revision before receiving Romani's verses, using words by a mediocre poet as a template and later grafting Romani's verses onto the existing melodies. It seems typical of Bellini's compositional priorities that he found writing new music without poetry less of a problem than composing two new arias for the Genoa Bianca, Adelaide Tosi, without the singer on hand to consult. Some of Tosi's demands were extravagent, but, always eager to earn loyalty from good performers, Bellini acceded gracefully, even to her insistence that he rewrite her entire entrance aria twice. Tension arose only when he began to suspect that her dissatisfaction was provoked by Donizetti's verdict that the aria was ‘worth nothing’, a contretemps that prompted Bellini's bitter remark that ‘friendship within the profession is quite impossible’. Such rivalries, real or imagined, would torment Bellini more and more as time went on; he could be fiercely competitive and ungenerous with colleagues and his letters are strewn with references to the plots laid by his ‘enemies’. However, as John Rosselli has suggested, these remarks might be not so much signs of paranoia as the normal concerns of an often solitary man who had invested everything in professional success and who, having no one but Florimo to confide in, poured his anxieties into the letters without inhibition.

Bellini's position in Italy was secured decisively by the première of La straniera in February 1829, again at La Scala (fig.2). He had agonized over presenting a second opera in Milan so soon after the success of Il pirata, but the new work was immediately recognized as a bold and successful experiment; it was in reviews of the première that the word filosofico was first invoked to describe Bellini's style. Early critics remark again and again on opera's revolutionary use of canto declamato, a term that points to two separate elements, a predominance of syllabic writing and the practice of setting some lines of unrhymed, loosely metred recitative verse (or versi sciolti) as brief bursts of arioso, thus injecting melodic interest and periodic phrase-structure into stretches of recitative that had previously been more strictly plot-orientated. Bellini had already experimented sparingly with this technique in both Bianca e Fernando and Il pirata, but in La straniera arioso and a rigorously syllabic style become items of a Romantic doctrine, reaching extremes of adventurousness and austerity Bellini never again attempted.

La straniera also goes much further than Il pirata in combining formal freedom with thematic economy, lending the opera a brooding, obsessive character. Berlioz, who admired La straniera alone among Bellini's works, captured this when he approvingly described Valdeburgo's cabaletta, ‘Meco tu vieni’, as ‘devoid of development’ (ex.4). Berlioz's phrase could apply equally well to many other passages, including the circular crotchet figure spun out by the orchestra in the introduction to the Act 1 terzettino or the repetitive rhythmic profile and stepwise melodic contours of Alaide and Arturo's duet slow movement, ‘Ah! se tu vuoi fuggir’.

The minimalism of these melodies is clearly related to an effort to strip away ornament and to bring even the lyrical sections of the form closer in character to the cadences of conversation, a tendency that shows up more systematically in the crotchet-based cabalettas that were to become a Bellinian trademark, such as the closing sections of the duets for Isoletta and Valdeburgo or Alaide and Arturo (La straniera) or Gualtiero's ‘Ma non fia sempre odiato’ (Il pirata). In a sense, Bellini's style in these early operas is defined by his willingness to risk monotony in order to achieve novelty and expressive force.

Bellini, Vincenzo