5. Reception and influence.

It is a revealing quirk of Bellini reception that the fullest statement of the composer's aesthetic comes from a letter that is almost certainly fabricated, supposedly written around 1829 to Agostino Gallo and first published in 1859. In it ‘Bellini’ describes his method of setting a libretto to music:

shut up in my room, I begin by declaiming each character's lines with all the heat of passion, and I closely observe the inflections of my voice, the speeding up and slowing down of the declamation in each situation, the overall accent and the expressive tone that characterizes a man in the grip of passion, and I find the motifs and the general rhythmic character best suited to demonstrate them and infuse them with new life by means of harmony. Then I throw them onto paper, try them out on the piano, and when I myself feel the corresponding emotion, I judge that I have succeeded.

There is something deeply appealing about this picture of a composer locked up with his work, arriving at melodic inspiration by becoming his characters – so much so that the editor of the first modern collection of Bellini's letters could not resist including the ‘Gallo’ letter, although she felt obliged to add a footnote questioning its authenticity. If nothing else, the letter is a trace of the extravagant mythologising that surrounded Bellini from the last few years of his life until well into the 20th century. Similar legends were, of course, woven around other composers of the period, but the terms in which the Gallo letter imagines the moment of creation sets Bellini apart from colleagues like Rossini, Donizetti, or even the young Verdi, for whom the compositional process was more likely to be pictured as rapid, business-like, even a bit careless.

The Gallo letter springs from a tendency to see Bellini as the lone Romantic among Italian opera composers, pioneering what contemporary critics labelled a ‘philosophical’ style. In popular reception, the Romantic label spread from the music to the man: Bellini's delicate manners, fine features and blond hair – the qualities summed up in Heine's phrase ‘a sigh in dancing pumps’ – have obscured equally reliable evidence of the composer's energy and strong will. In one authentic statement of a compositional aesthetic, from an 1834 letter to novice librettist Carlo Pepoli, Bellini adopts an exigent, even hectoring tone and ascribes a power to opera that seems far from gentle: ‘Carve it in your head in adamantine letters: Opera must draw tears, must horrify, must kill through singing’. As such forceful passages remind us, the familiar image of a gentle man known for writing elegiac music, uniquely sensitive to the tones and rhythms of poetry, must be balanced with that of the confident professional willing to browbeat his librettist and to contemplate (however metaphorically) killing listeners with his music. Similarly, the Romantic portrait of an idiosyncratic, rule-breaking rebel is softened by passages from the correspondence showing that Bellini was friendlier to operatic convention than is often thought. Indeed, he was probably as much in sympathy with the operatic world that surrounded him as resistant to it, often content to rely on conventional musical structures inherited from predecessors, and both willing and able to cater to the tastes of his audience.

Although a handful of biographies appeared before Bellini's death, it was really only in the last quarter of the 19th century that influential attempts were made to establish Bellini's reputation. Florimo's notorious biography with its severely censored edition of the letters appeared in 1882. This period also saw a polemical battle over self-borrowing waged by two students of the sketches housed in the newly established museum in Catania. In his 1882 book, Michele Scherillo claimed that Bellini had re-used numbers originally sketched for Ernani in La sonnambula. Although Bellini himself had mentioned this in a letter to the publisher Giovanni Ricordi, native Catanese and Bellini acquaintance Antonino Amore was outraged by the idea. Amore excavated the Ernani sketches, only to prove Scherillo's case: he uncovered not only a fragment of a chorus from La sonnambula but several numbers later used in Norma as well. The passion with which Scherillo and Amore argued their cases seems out of proportion with the importance of the issue (after all Ernani was never finished and never performed) unless we consider that what was at stake was the much larger question of Bellini's originality, and even his image as a ‘philosophical’ composer for whom words and music were intimately, uniquely connected.

If this image was gaining ground in Sicily by the end of the century, it had a much longer history in Germany; indeed, it may even have originated as a German import. As W.F. Kümmel has shown, Bellini's music caught on remarkably quickly in Germany: as early as 1828 critics in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung described him as unusually well acquainted with the German classics and approvingly cited his distaste for cabalettas and his desire to dispense with Italian operatic conventions generally, if only audiences would permit. The same aspects that earned him the philosophical label in Italy were received by German critics simply as ‘German’: as Schumann put it, Bellini was a ‘butterfly who fluttered around the German oak’. This tendency to appropriate Bellini culminated, of course, in Wagner, who seems to have maligned Bellini's music as ‘shallow and empty’ with about the same frequency that he found himself whistling or singing tunes from La straniera or I puritani or Norma. When he wasn't merely criticizing, Wagner cast Bellini as an early link in the great Wagnerian aesthetic chain, more than once referring to Bellini's decisive break with Classicism (which, strangely, he located in I Capuleti) and to the melodic simplicity that must have had such a great effect ‘after Rossini, in whom everything was dissolved into runs’.

However, no amount of Wagnerian disapproval or appropriation could have had much impact on the popular fate of Bellini's operas, whose fortunes were linked to those of bel canto opera generally. Like several works of Donizetti and Rossini and the young Verdi, Bellini's more famous operas were performed frequently and continuously until the end of the 19th century, then fell out of favour for several decades. Il pirata and I Capuleti were revived in Rome and Catania respectively to mark the centenary in 1935, but lasting revivals and resurgences of interest came only with championship by great sopranos in the 1940s and 50s. The leading figure was, of course, Maria Callas, who chose the role of Norma for prominent débuts (including those at Covent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera House) in the 1950s, and sang famous performances of I puritani (from 1949), La sonnambula (1955) and Il pirata (1958). Other influential revivals include Monserrat Caballé's 1967 performance of Il pirata, Joan Sutherland's I puritani (including a 1964 production at Covent Garden, London, where the opera had not been heard for over 70 years), and Renata Scotto's La straniera, I Capuleti and La sonnambula. This is only the most recent chapter in a reception history that has always rested as much on the advocacy of singers as on more scholarly assessments of the operas: Giuditta Pasta's contribution to the initial success and subsequent popularity of La sonnambula and Norma is an obvious case, but even more interesting are the fortunes of Beatrice di Tenda, which, after its disastrous reception at the Venice première, became solidly established in the Italian repertory through the 1840s, mainly owing to several sopranos who included the role in their repertories, partly, no doubt, in order to compete with each other.

Today the practical aspect of Bellini's reputation is thriving, and scholarly activity is increasing. Most of the operas are solidly in the repertory, although performances and recordings are confined to a rather narrow school of singers who specialize in the style. Studies of individual operas, especially the early works, are few and far between. However, a critical edition is now underway, and publication in recent years of the first complete edition of the letters, a comprehensive critical study of Romani based on previously unknown documents, and a new biography that for the first time closely measures Florimo's manipulations of the correspondence provide an invaluable documentary basis that could inject a new energy into interpretative and analytical work on the operas.

Bellini, Vincenzo