The Pinnacle of Bel Canto

You can plod along surveying all the rarely-performed Donizettis one after another, and that’s fun, but then if you step out and watch Vincenzo Bellini’s Beatrice di Tenda, it will bend your mind for the rest of the evening, and maybe longer.  This one is in a different category altogether.

Poor guy only wrote about 11 operas, and these days, you’re lucky to find something besides Norma and Sonnambula on the stage – maybe an occasional I Puritani – so the selection is meager. Bellini knocked out his first opera at the age of 23, but then he only lived another 10 years. Yet his output is so good that he’s standing there in the La Scala lobby with Verdi, Rossini, and Donizetti, and he deserves it.

Anthony Tommasini, and others, write about Bellini as the quintessential bel canto composer, and refer to his “long-spun phrasing”, so what does that mean?

I think it points you to, first, the bel canto era’s satisfying format of a heroic story of royals and conflicted romances, with solos, duets, and more, along with occasional lively or dramatic choruses filling the narratives in.  You can pull wonderful songs and choruses out of any of these operas, and listen to them in isolation, and it’s a fabulous musical experience. 

Second, Bellini in particular writes music for sentences and phrases that actually are long and lyrical – not choppy or fun, no quick-stepping country dances here. You can feel the long lines extending across the whole page, and there’s a lot of poetry and heartfelt emotion carried in lyrics crafted this way.

Of course, part of the credit for Bellini’s high regard here goes to Felice Romani, who wrote up eight of the eleven, including all but one of the big masterpieces. Romani was too good, though, and he took on more than he could easily handle. The timeline became impossible, so after Beatrice, Bellini was pretty ripped with his trusted writing partner, and called in someone else for I Puritani.

For context, Beatrice di Tenda came next to last, in 1833, so this was about the time that we saw Donizetti mid-career with L’Elisir d’Amore and Lucrezia Borgia, after Rossini had gone to sit on the beach, and before Verdi hit the scene (6 years later). Clearly, I was born about 150 years too late, and on the wrong continent.

Who’s Beatrice?

This one’s a true story, and it happened outside of Milan back in the early 1400’s. Unusually, in this tale, nobody loves anybody, but they pretend convincingly, because there is a lot of money and power at stake. All those devious efforts run most of them completely and fatally aground.  Briefly:

1. Beatrice, the wealthy widower, holds the money and the lands left to her by her first husband, so she throws her enormous lot in with the young hothead Filippo, who is already upwardly-mobile as the Duke of Milan.

2. But the two lots don’t mix, and Filippo the Duke is kind of bored with this marriage; he just wants the money and the property. Yet Beatrice still has her supporters, and rebellion is afoot.

3. The conniving little Agnese sees her way in, and pursues the Duke and the throne, knives out for aging Beatrice. 

4. Beatrice works with a trusty lieutenant named Orombello, but that goes a bit too far when everyone decides that these two are up to (a) overthrowing the Duke and (b) highly illegal adultery. 

5. (In 1418, it was hard to tell which was worse, treason against your nation, or stepping out with someone else’s wife.)

6. Well-meaning Beatrice and ambivalent Orombello lose the case, and they get the axe (along with, in real life, two of her servant girls). Angry Filippo and slippery Agnese win, but they spend the rest of their lives tortured by guilt.

Romani and Bellini make this into a shocking melodrama, from the opening bars through to the end, where we share in a tragic pre-execution scene, with Beatrice coming to terms with her fate. This is so similar to the finale of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, from three years earlier, that Bellini worked to make Beatrice sufficiently distinct.

(The haunting, desperate wait for the gallows happens again in Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, two years later.  I find these scenes uncomfortable, and frightening, but they must have been all the rage in the 1830’s.)

Let’s Get This One in Chicago

Paris staged this one in winter 2024, and it looks like Dusseldorf has it set for June 2025. Naples did it a couple years ago. It’s pretty hard to find!  But CueTV (and regular YouTube) has a great recording made in 2010, at the relatively small Bellini festival.

It’s a complete knockout. 

First, you see eye-catching colors, and they are on the large female chorus, cast as villagers and assistants on one side of the conflict or another.  There’s an unusual amount of dancing and whirling, so that is lovely. The men, by contrast, mostly wear either 21st century business suits or dark gray shirts with tinfoil reflective garb.  So this is an artistic mixture, no matter whose side you are on.

The other key stage feature looks like a very wide tree trunk, big enough for you to go inside and hide. The darned thing glows with external surface lighting, so it is always putting on a show like the Vegas Sphere. I’m not sure how they do this, and I can’t imagine the cost.  In any case, it descends from the rafters and rises up out of the scene as needed.  Sometimes it is, visually, a forest, and later, ice with blood; for other scenes it looks like a tabby cat with green eyes – I’m not too clear on the symbolism, myself.

Dimitra Theodossiou does it well as Beatrice, but the perfect casting was for Filippo, frighteningly sung by Michele Kalmandi; I would not trust this man either.  Then you have a lovely mezzo with a perfect smile for the duplicitous Agnese, and her name is José Maria Lo Monaco. (We’ve just met a girl not named Maria – it’s not a Leonard Bernstein song.)

Settle in for the Tunes

From start to climactic finish, Bellini sets up extremely enjoyable music; he’s got the touch, when he needs powerful emotions, building suspense, sorrowful grief. He’s there with the two choruses, and there are a number of duets and an important quartet, along with Beatrice’s “crying aria” at the end of Act 1.  Exquisite stuff; the man was clearly a master of driving your emotions with his carefully chosen melodies, the pacing, and the orchestration.

Bellini composes music you could just listen to while you drive to Toledo; you don’t really need the nail-biting story line, or the budget-breaking sets and costumes.  It really is touching. I need to check again, to see if this comes through as clearly in Norma and the others.

Meanwhile, I can report that the equally-rare Il Pirata is just as masterfully composed, because I saw it shortly after I watched Beatrice. I’ve never seen Bellini’s first opera, Adelson e Salvini, or his two about Bianca, or Zaira, but I’ll be searching.

I suppose there are worse ideas than anesthetizing your post-election-day funk with a new video of I Puritani.

Catania in November

The Bellini Festival in Catania (Sicily) seems small, compared to the Rossini Festival (Pesaro), the Donizetti Festival (Bergamo), and the Verdi Festival (Parma). I find it difficult to learn about this festival online, whether looking for the history, or for future plans.

A program that I read shows just one opera on offer per year, with the schedule filled with other features like concerts, competitions, films, “pasta alla Norma”, “a celebratory Bellini cake”, and the “Bellini cocktail”.