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

After the success of La straniera, Bellini was enough in demand to exert unprecedented control over the practical aspects of his career. In an age when composers were routinely expected to accede to the demands of singers and impresarios, he could be increasingly exigent about the practical circumstances of operatic production, refusing to sign a contract if the singers had not yet been determined, and sometimes electing not to work at all rather than compromise his conditions. This unusual freedom proceeded partly from the financial security of high commission fees, but also perhaps from the fact that for extended periods between 1828 and 1833 Bellini lived without expense in the home of his mistress, Giuditta Turina, a young and wealthy married woman. He had met Turina in Genoa in 1828 and he became her lover by September of that year, as Bellini recounted with surprising candour in a letter to Florimo. The liaison was discreet without being secretive: although Turina's husband and parents probably accepted Bellini's residence in their homes, she did not accompany Bellini on his travels except in the last few years of their relationship. Turina's character and the nature of the relationship remain mysterious, partly because Florimo destroyed many letters containing personal disclosures. However, one thing the letters make clear is that having a married mistress suited Bellini perfectly, in that Turina provided a limited emotional contact who could never make excessive demands nor threaten to compete with his career.

Partly thanks to the support of Turina (including her canny management and investment of his earnings), Bellini was able to compose more slowly than most of his contemporaries, writing at a rate of about one opera each year compared to the more usual three or four. However, Romani's delays often meant that an entire score had to be composed within only a month or so of a scheduled première, rather than at the more leisurely pace Bellini preferred. These rush jobs could be stunning successes (as with La sonnambula), but the forced haste never failed to bring on minor health problems and attacks of nerves. What is more, the intermittent pace imposed by Romani meant that even at the peak of his career Bellini must have spent several months of each year idle, waiting for words to set to music. He found such enforced inactivity burdensome, but apparently lacked the energy to compose without a pressing deadline.

After the première of La straniera, the next project came all too quickly, a commission for a new work to open Parma's Nuovo Teatro Ducale in May 1829. The ceremonial nature of the occasion made this a sensitive undertaking and difficulties with the choice of subject arose immediately. An official of the Parma theatre complained in an official report that Bellini had rejected the Classical libretto he proposed as ‘cold and tedious’, taking the man to a local print shop to view a series of gory engravings as examples of the sort of Romantic subjects that appealed to him. By the time Voltaire's Zaïre was agreed upon, only a few months remained to prepare libretto and score. Civic pride was already wounded before the première by reports that Bellini and Romani had been seen loitering in cafés while the theatre's copyists awaited material, and matters did not improve when Romani prefaced the libretto with a note admitting that the text lacked polish because it had been ‘written in shreds while the music was being composed’. Not surprisingly, the première was received coldly. However, Bellini lost no time in rescuing much of Zaira's music, re-using about a third of it in his next work, I Capuleti e i Montecchi, for La Fenice (fig.3). The music that had failed so completely in Parma was acclaimed in Venice, probably more because of a more congenial public climate than through any aesthetic improvements.

Late in 1831 Bellini and Romani began work on an Ernani (based on Victor Hugo's play) for Milan's Teatro Carcano, but after several pieces had been composed the project was abandoned, replaced with La sonnambula. Bellini once mentioned fear of censorship as a reason for the change of subject, but Romani's widow, Emilia Branca, suggested less charitably that Bellini had wished to avoid presenting another tragic opera after the success of Donizetti's Anna Bolena earlier in the season, and had seized on the pastoral subject of La sonnambula to avoid direct comparison with his rival. Branca's account doesn't quite stand up to historical scrutiny – the change of subject was announced before the Anna Bolena première – but the canny careerism behind her explanation seems characteristic of Bellini. Whatever the reasons, the switch of topics was an inspired decision: La sonnambula's successs surpassed even Bellini's previous acclaim in Milan. Based on a Parisian ballet, the opera places the vogueish melodramatic theme of sleepwalking against a pastoral background more typical of the old-fashioned genre of opera semiseria. The chorus plays a larger role than in any other Bellini opera, celebrating impending marriages and singing the bride's praises in hallowed 18th-century fashion, but also commenting extensively on the action and even at one point offering collective testimony to the heroine's innocence.

The three operas of this period can be regarded as a group mainly because they share a renewed interest in the florid vocal writing so strictly avoided in La straniera. The reasons for the retreat from the self-consciously innovative, ‘philosophical’ style are complicated: the heated journalistic debates over the excesses of La straniera may have been a deterrent to further experiments with canto declamato, and, in the case of Zaira (as Filippo Cicconetti suggested in 1859), the Parma public's reputation as dedicated Rossinians may have played a role, although if so, this was one of the few occasions when Bellini's instinct for audience taste failed him. Both Zaira and I Capuleti have been criticized for retreating into superficial vocal display and a mechanical succession of double arias, failed attempts – some have argued – to adopt the assembly-line working methods of his contemporaries. This seems unfair: these works, too, show elements of experiment, if not in the crucial area of vocal style. Zaira is striking for its integration of complex action into ensemble scenes, most impressively in the Act 2 finale, where a midnight rendez-vous, a murder and a suicide fall into place around a largo concertato quintet and aria finale for the grief-stricken bass, Orosmane; the more famous tomb scene from I Capuleti (fig.3) combines action and lyricism with similar flexibility.

The sweeping adaptation of eight entire numbers from Zaira in Capuleti was far from an exceptional instance of self-borrowing. Bellini re-used much material from his first two operas – one chorus from Bianca e Fernando (‘Tutti siam?’) reappears almost note-for-note in both Zaira and Norma (as ‘Non partì!’) – but he never recycled numbers from his successes, which would have been remembered by audiences. Bellini's self-borrowings were at once pragmatic and ‘Romantic’, initially motivated by reluctance to waste good music, but also guided by a subtle concern for dramatic context. When the last section of the terzetto from Zaira turns up as the stretta of I Capuleti's Act 1 finale, the two scenes share not only a general sentiment (two characters looking forward to a reunion in heaven) and a verse metre, but also end with identical poetic couplets. Similarly, Nelly’s cavatina, ‘Dopo l'oscuro nembo’ from Adelson e Salvini and its reworking as Giulietta’s romanza (‘Quante volte, o quante’) in I Capuleti are linked by the dramatic situation, a soprano alone, reflecting on her desperate fate. These two pieces are actually part of a larger group of harp-accompanied, minor-key, single-movement arias for sad sopranos that goes back to Desdemona's Willow Song from Rossini's Otello (other Bellinian examples are ‘Sorgi, o padre’ from Bianca e Fernando and Alaide’s romanza in La straniera). Rossini's model is heard not only in general features of timbre and tonality, but also in an allusion to the Willow Song's characteristic melodic gesture of gasping chromatic descent (ex.5).

Other manifestations of this pairing of dramatic situations with related melodic figures include the falling-4th figure used to launch duet movements beginning with the word ‘Vieni!’ (or ‘Taci!’) in the Imogene-Gualtiero duet in Act 2 of Il pirata and the Elvira-Arturo duet in Act 3 of I puritani (ex.6); and the resemblance between the E major refrains of Imogene's cavatina (at ‘Era sorda la natura’) and Elvira's ‘Rendetemi la speme’ in Act 2 of I puritani, both of which appear as moments of celestial clarification in the midst of an otherwise disordered musical and verbal discourse.

Only one self-borrowing ignores dramatic context altogether: the giddy cabaletta of Zaira's ‘Non è, non è tormento’ recurs in curiously effective tragic guise as Romeo's heart broken solo ‘Deh! tu, deh! tu bell'anima’ in the tomb scene of I Capuleti. Despite the frequency of the practice in the operatic world, scholarly opinion has traditionally regarded such extensive self-borrowing and self-allusion as a problem, challenging Bellini's reputation as a composer of uncompromising originality, who (to use his own phrase) ‘vomited blood to compose’ and took such care to suit music to words. However, the clear sense for detail that guides each recycling might just as easily testify not only to Bellini's practicality and economy of means, but also to his strong theatrical instincts.

As in the earlier operas, the force of Rossini's example in this period can be felt as much on the level of form as of melodic style. While most set pieces continue at least to allude to the lyric prototype, the design of individual movements looks in two directions: back to the virtuoso, asymmetrical Rossinian designs already prominent as far back as Adelson e Salvini, and forward to a new type of organization, more driven by harmonic and motivic activity, its formal idiosyncrasies often motivated directly by the dramatic situation. From about 1830, arias increasingly aspire to the condition of ensembles, with dialogue inserted in the central B section and melodic continuity provided by the orchestra: in the middle section of her Act 2 slow movement in I Capuleti, Giulietta converses with Lorenzo just before taking the sleeping potion, and in La sonnambula Elvino participates in the B section of Amina's ‘Ah! non credea mirarti’, singing lines added to the libretto by Bellini himself. On a larger scale, the first encounter between the lovers in La sonnambula teeters between aria and ensemble. Labelled ‘Cavatina: Elvino’ in the autograph, but listed as a duet in the published scores, the number foreshadows the lovers' impending conflict by assigning them sharply contrasting material throughout. After a slow movement presented almost entirely by Elvino (‘Prendi, l'anel ti dono’; fig.4), the cabaletta emphasizes Amina's inarticulateness by isolating her melodically. Her whispered, agitated motive (‘Ah! vorrei trovar parola’) is forgotten as soon as Elvino enters with his confident new melody and moves to the relative major; rather than the two voices uniting at the cabaletta's conclusion, the lovers are subsumed into exclamations by the ever-present chorus, who – with perhaps a touch of irony – celebrate the ‘single thought’ that unites the couple (‘L'un nel altro un sol pensier’).

La sonnambula also inaugurates the period of what Verdi admiringly called Bellini's ‘melodie lunghe, lunghe, lunghe’ – although it is worth recalling that Verdi intended the phrase to refer to the ‘lesser-known’ Il pirata and La straniera. (Letter to Camille Bellaigue, 2 May 1898; Cesari and Luzio eds.: I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi (Milan, 1913), 415–16.) The term has become something of an analytical cliché, too often used as a blanket term of praise, almost a synonym for beautiful melody; but it has a more precise meaning. The locus classicus of ‘long melody’ is perhaps Amina's ‘Ah! non credea mirarti’: a long-breathed phrase, certainly – the first section spins out a remarkable 11 bars before coming to rest on a tonic – but with a melodic contour that is itself anything but long (ex.7). After the small arch of the first two measures, the melody proceeds in short gasps, never managing more than a few beats before being interrupted by a rest, and sometimes almost breaking down into speech-like units (as at bar 3). This combination of an ‘endless’ harmonic line and a melodic contour made up of breathless, declamatory fragments is typical of Bellini's ‘long melodies’: a similar balance is struck in other well-known examples, such as ‘In mia mano alfin tu sono’ and ‘Qual cor tradisti’ (both from the final scene of Norma) and Elvira's ‘Qui la voce sua soave’ from I puritani.

Bellini, Vincenzo