“Nowadays one hardly ever hears a really beautiful and technically perfect trill; very rarely, flawless mordents; very seldom, a rounded coloratura, a genuine unaffected portamento, a perfect equalization of the registers, and absolute maintenance of the intonation through all the various nuances of crescendo and diminuendo. And the public, accustomed to imperfect execution, overlooks the defects of the singer provided that he is a capable actor and knows the routine of the stage.”
That might be anyone over the age of forty speaking, any of the laudatores temporis acti who dip into their early memories and reach for favorite records to demonstrate their points. In fact, this particular lament over the decline of vocal standards is Richard Wagner’s, in Mein Leben, and it was occasioned by his memory of having heard Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient (later the first Adriano in Rienzi, Senta, and Venus), as the Romeo of Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi, in Leipzig in 1834. “I shall never forget the impression that a Bellini opera made upon me. Simple and noble Song made its appearance again.” For a while, I Capuleti became a stick that Wagner used for whacking Weber’s Euryanthe—and all “solid” German music.
I Capuleti was the sixth of Bellini’s ten operas. The first of them, Adelson e Salvini (1825), was a student work. The second, Bianca e Gernando (1826), was composed for the San Carlo in Naples, and with it Bellini proved his ability. The major impresario of the day was Domenico Barbaia, who managed the principal opera houses of Naples and Milan, and for a while those of Vienna, too. Rossini and Donizetti both put in busy spells as Barbaia’s house composer and musical director in Naples; Beethoven’s, Schubert’s, and Weber’s paths crossed his in Vienna. After the success of Bianca, Barbaia decided to launch the young Sicilian composer in Milan; Bellini’s third opera, Il Pirata, was commissioned for La Scala, performed there in 1827, and the following year brought out in Vienna and Naples. La Straniera, again composed for La Scala, appeared in 1829. A few months later there appeared Zaira, commissioned from Bellini to inaugurate the new Teatro Ducale in Parma. With Zaira Bellini suffered his first—and the only serious—setback of his brief but otherwise very successful career. Zaira was a failure.
At the end of the year, Bellini went to Venice to supervise the local premiere of La Straniera and, as was the custom, to match his music to the particular talents of the local cast: Giuditta Grisi, a mezzo-soprano (the sister of Giulia Grisi, who was later the first Adalgisa, a celebrated Norma, and the first Elvira in I Puritani), was undertaking the prima-donna role written for the soprano Henriette Méric-Lalande. In addition, it was arranged that if Giovanni Pacini, who had been engaged to write a new opera for the Venice season, should not produce one, then Bellini would fill the gap. On January 5, 1830, he signed a letter of agreement: “Should Maestro Pacini fail to fulfill his contract I, in response to your invitation to me, take on the responsibility of composing Romani’s Giulietta Capellio for you. I am to have a month and a half between receiving the libretto and the first performance.”
On January 20, Bellini wrote to a Neapolitan friend that he would indeed be composing a new opera for Venice. Six days later, he announced to his mistress Giuditta Turina that “two pieces of the opera are completed and orchestrated.” Eight days before the premiere, there was an orchestra rehearsal of Act I, but Act II had still not been finished. I Capuleti e i Montecchi had its first performance on March 11 and was an immediate success.
Any student of operatic history soon learns not to be surprised by the rapidity with which operas were once composed (and the materials copied) and with which singers mastered unfamiliar music. Although Bellini was not as prolific as Rossini, Donizetti, and the young Verdi, when he worked he worked fast. La Sonnambula (1831) and Beatrice di Tenda (1833) were also composed at high speed. His autographs, it is true, show much detailed revising and polishing, but in the case of I Capuleti much of the preliminary work had already been done: ten of its movements employ material composed for Zaira, while Giulietta’s first aria, “Oh! Quante volte” is a reworking of Nelly’s aria “Dopo l’oscuro nembo” from the early Adelson e Salvini. (Incidentally, Zaira was by no means mined out in I Capuleti; other numbers from it provided material for Norma, Beatrice di Tenda, and I Puritani.) But none of the music was simply taken over as it stood. Nelly, in 1825, was played by a young man—Adelson had been given with an all-male cast—and for Giulietta the aria was raised a tone, from F minor to G minor, and invested with a far more intricate vocal line. Some of the changes are slight, and some of them are considerable, and in any case—as Charlotte Greenspan remarks in her study The Operas of Bellini (which contains tables and comparisons of the borrowed material)—“in a musical fabric as delicate as Bellini’s, a subtle change can be a significant one.”
Much of Bellini’s score, then, represents a repolishing and resetting of musical jewels that had not been appreciated in Zaira. (In the successful I Capuleti Bellini remarked, “Zaira took her revenge.”) Similarly, Felice Romani’s libretto for the opera represents a careful and thorough remodeling of an earlier work of his to match Bellini’s musical and dramatic ideas. Romani was a prolific and elegant poet. Rossini (Il Turco in Italia), Donizetti (Anna Bolena, L’Elisir d’Amore, Parisina, Lucrezia Borgia), and Mercadante (Francesca da Rimini, and a new setting of the failed Zaira) were among the composers he worked with. Verdi set his Un Giorno di Regno; Bizet contemplated resetting his Parisina. And all Bellini’s operas from Il Pirata to Beatrice were collaborations with Romani.
Romani’s Romeo and Juliet libretto was written first for Nicola Vaccai; this Giulietta e Romeo was performed at the Cannobiana in Milan in 1825, and it was taken up at La Scala the following year. It soon crossed the Alps and the Channel and went on being played in Europe even after Bellini’s opera had appeared. Although Bellini described his undertaking of I Capuleti at short notice as “a perilous venture,” he evidently had no fear of challenging Vaccai. He was more concerned lest he distress his old teacher Nicola Zingarelli, whose most successful opera had been yet another Giulietta e Romeo. (Zingarelli' s opera was first seen at La Scala in 1796; Napoleon and Schiller were among its admirers; and it was one of the first operas to be performed in New York.) Bellini wrote to Zingarelli begging forgiveness for tackling the subject (rather as Rossini had written to Paisiello apologizing for daring a new Barbiere di Siviglia). The old man replied that he was not at all offended and urged his former pupil to go ahead, since, he said, the subject matter was very interesting in itself and offered poignant situations well suited to Bellini's music.
Subjects, particular treatments of them, and even existing libretti passed freely from one composer to another. I Capuleti owes little to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet; Romani's source was the tragedy Giulietta e Romeo by Luigi Scevola, which had been published in Milan in 1818. And his libretto for Vaccai had already been reset by one Torriani (Vincenza, 1828) before it was adapted for Bellini. But when we compare Romani's libretto for Vaccai and his libretto for Bellini, it becomes evident how definite, individual, even revolutionary Bellini's ideas about music-drama were. In the Vaccai version, Juliet's parents, Adele and Capellio, have arias; Juliet has duets with her mother and with Lorenzo (the Friar Laurence role, but here the family physician); and Lorenzo has far more to sing. This is an opera seria devised to provide vocal opportunity for every member of a large cast.
Bellini's I Capuleti, on the other hand, is a tight, swift romantic drama focused on the principals and including only what might be called the “essential” dramatic numbers. In each act, the lovers have an aria apiece and a duet; otherwise there is only an introduzione, an aria for Tebaldo (who combines the Tybalt and Paris roles of Shakespeare's play) a Romeo-Tebaldo duet, and the first-act finale. Bellini summoned Romani to Venice to work with him on the opera. From all that we know of the composer, we can be sure that the taut, concentrated structure was produced at his insistence. Romani seems to have been apprehensive about the result. To the published libretto he added an apologetic preface: many explicatory recitatives have been omitted; the spectator's mind must supply what has not been represented.
I Capuleti was a turning point in Bellini's musical career. In the standard textbooks he is characterized as the composer of, above all, long lyrical melodies: Norma's “Casta Diva,” Amina's “Ah, non credea,” Elvira's “Qui la voce sua soave.” But in fact Bellini had made his name, in II Pirata and La Straniera, as a composer whose abruptness, energy, passion, even violence of declamation had brought new notes into Italian opera. Donizetti and then Verdi went on to develop Bellini's canto d'azione, as it has been called, while Bellini himself went on to cultivate a milder, less declamatory, often elegiac vein. After the premiere of I Capuleti, a Venetian critic remarked with some surprise that he discerned in the opera “a completely new genre, not noisy, but pensive, harmonious, and very gentle.” That aptly describes some—but not all—of I Capuleti.
The role of Juliet was composed for a gentle, delicate singer, Rosalbina Caradori-Allan (she was later the soprano of Mendelssohn's Elijah), who was admired not so much for dramatic power as for her sweetness, flexibility, and faultless style. Juliet's keys are G minor and A major. The tempo indications of her solos are andante sostenuto, Iento, and andante. Her melodies move mainly by step. On the other hand, the solo music for Romeo and for Tybalt is in C major and G major, and their melodies are vigorous and leaping. (It is important to remember that Bellini's Romeo is not Shakespeare's romantic youth but the dreaded, dauntless captain of the Ghibelline forces; not family squabbles and street brawls but deadly warfare underpins the romantic plight.) I Capuleti combines in exciting confrontation the vein of tender lyricism for which Bellini is so highly prized and the passionate energy of vocal declamation with which he first made his name.
Despite the borrowings from two earlier operas, and across the carefully planned, energetic contrasts, I Capuleti holds together. It was as if Bellini suddenly saw how to bring various musical inspirations of the preceding years into sharp dramatic focus. The heroine, Juliet, has a "motto" rhythm. Her entrance aria, “Oh! quante volte,” her “Morte io non temo,” which opens Act II, and its cabaletta, “Ah, non poss'io partire” all begin with the same rhythmic pattern (rum rumti tum tum, rumti tumti tum). (Did Donizetti recall it when he composed Lucia's mad scene?) “Oh! quante volte,” as we have noted, is an elaborated and refined reworking of Nelly's romanza from Adelson. In the new version, a horn solo, warm and a little solemn in tone (kin to that which starts the bass-baritone duet in I Puritani) introduces the scene. Juliet sings the recitative, unaccompanied but punctuated by the orchestra. The flexible horn solo is resumed, and cooling breaths seem to spring up from the harp; then the romanza begins. Both the situation and some turns in the melody recall Desdemona's scene in the last act of Rossini's Otello; perhaps unconsciously, perhaps not, Bellini transposed his Adelson aria into Desdemona's key, G minor, and recalled her harp.
The second bar of “Oh! quante volte,” borrowed from Adelson, is, lifted into a new harmonic context, note-for- note the second bar of “Morte io non temo,” borrowed from Zaira, and the same five notes, at the same pitch, are then used as the sixth bar of “Ah! Non poss'io,” also from Zaira. The thematic connections, rhythmic and melodic, may have been unconsciously achieved (what Schoenberg called “a gift from the Supreme Commander”); but it was a sure instinct that led Bellini to bring three distinct melodies into a new, one-character relationship.
Similarly, the rhythm of the lovers' famous unison melody in the first-act finale, “Se ogni speme e a noi rapita,” borrowed from Zaira, takes up the rhythms of the central section of their duet earlier in the act; and the oftnoted “sublime” effect of "Se ogni speme"—Berlioz is an eloquent witness—probably owes something to the listener's subliminal recognition of the echo. As the world conspires to part them, Romeo and Juliet reiterate the rhythms of their love duet. The orchestral introduction to Act II, as Juliet sits pondering, before Lorenzo brings her the potion, holds a hinted reminiscence of this rhythm.
After the Venice premiere, I Capuleti soon swept both Italy and the rest ofEurope. Wagner, as we have noted, wasbowled over by Schrbder-Devrient'sRomeo. His adopted niece, JohannaWagner (his first Elisabeth in Tannhiiuser) chose Romeo for her London debut, atHer Majesty's in 1856, and BenjaminLumley, the manager of the theater, givesa vivid account of it in his memoirs:
She appeared: tall, stately, self-possessed, clothed in glittering mail, with her fine hair flung in masses upon her neck She sang! The sonorous voice, which heralded the mission of the young warrior to his enemies, rang through the house as penetrating and as awakening as a clarion.
Berlioz saw the opera in Florence the year after its Venice premiere and was particularly impressed by the first-act finale:
The lovers, forcibly separated, escape for a moment and rush into each other's arms, singing “We shall meet in heaven.” The setting of these words, which is intense, passionate, and full of life and fire, is sung in unison, which, in these special circumstances, intensifies the power of the melody in the most wonderful manner. Whether it is owing to the setting of the musical phrase, to the unexpected effect of the unison, or to actual beauty of the tune itself, I do not know; but I was completely carried away.
I Capuleti reached London and Paris in 1833, Havana and Mexico in 1836, New Orleans in 1837, New York only in 1848. In most nineteenth-century productions, Vaccai's final scene took the place of Bellini's—a practice inaugurated by Malibran in Bologna in 1832. Vaccai's scene is conventionally and more showily effective; Bellini's, a setting of the same text in irregular, eloquent periods, is more imaginative and adventurous.
The opera returned to our stages in the mid-1950s, with Giulietta Simionato, then Fiorenza Cossotto, as Romeo. At La Scala in 1966 the role of Romeo was usurped by a tenor, and for some years a tenor-Romeo edition prepared by and often conducted by Claudio Abbado held sway on Europe's stages. Giacomo Aragall was usually the Romeo, Luciano Pavarotti was usually the Tybalt, and the Juliets ranged from Renata Scotto to Anna Moffo. In Boston in 1975, under Sarah Caldwell, Bellini's pitches were restored, with Tatiana Troyanos and Beverly Sills as Romeo and Juliet; the following year Janet Baker and Sills recorded the opera. Marilyn Horne, Houston's Romeo in 1977, reverted to the “more effective” Vaccai finale. Bellini's autograph score has been published in facsimile (Garland), and many modern performances have restored not only the composer’s pitches for his principals but also the stranger, less conventional orchestration than in the regular hire material earlier editors had “regularized.”
I Capuleti is the shortest of Bellini's operas. He and Romani were pressed for time as they created it, but of necessity they made a virtue. Their Norma is a greater achievement, but in some ways I Capuleti is the most adventurous and most “modern” of all their operas.
Andrew Porter was the music critic for The New Yorker from 1972 to 1992. He has translated 37 operas for English performance, including the Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan and Isolde, and Parsifal; eight of Verdi's operas; and nine of Mozart's. His discovery of excised portions of Verdi's Don Carlos in the library of the Paris Opera led to the restoration of the original version of the work. This article appeared in a previous issue of San Francisco Opera Magazine.