As the sky drew its curtain of gray clouds over the sun, the Cercle Richard Wagner Rive Droite was giving a lecture at the Nice Opera on the composer Vincenzo Bellini, born in Catania, Sicily in 1801 and who died in Paris in a villa in Puteaux in 1835.
He should not be confused with another Bellini, a Venetian painter from the 15th century. The speaker, while illustrating his talk with excerpts from the composer’s operas, showed us Bellini’s personality, a character far removed from the Italian soul. Vincenzo Bellini is mostly imbued with melancholy and romanticism, and the settings of his operas are generally found in northern Europe.
His family was already musical; his father was the chapel master in Catania where he was born in 1801, being the eldest of six children. He demonstrated early talent by composing when he was barely seven years old. Young Vincenzo found himself in 1819 in Naples where he studied at the conservatory. His first opera, Bianca e Gernando, succeeded at San Carlo in 1825-1826.
Then successively it was Milan and La Scala where he presented Norma, followed by Paris in 1833 where he would pass away two years later.
The speaker emphasized the rarity of Bellini’s operas in the Nice repertoire. In almost a century between 1887 and 1970, Bellini was never featured. This deficiency is explained by the difficulty of interpreting Bellini. The voices must not only be perfect, they must be excellent, a risk that some divas dare not take.
We are familiar with the intimate Bellini thanks to his correspondence with his friend and fellow student Francesco Florimo. Il Pirata, created in 1827, is a unique work. It is indeed the only opera by Bellini where the classic trilogy appears: Soprano, Tenor, Baritone. The speaker concluded his lecture with Norma and its great interpreters, among whom Maria Callas and her unforgettable performance could not, of course, be avoided, even though it has already been over sixty years.
So, the question: Was Bellini unknown? Unrecognized? This was no longer very true after this brilliant and richly detailed presentation about a man whose life was, unfortunately, too short.
How many other operas would he have written if he had lived like Verdi, to the autumn of a human life? This is the final question, and of course, one without an answer.
Thierry Jan
