Alexandra Wilson explores the short but lavishly successful life of an opera composer fêted from Milan to Paris and far beyond
ILLUSTRATION: MATT HERRING
Composer of the month
Like so many successful composers before and after him, the young Vincenzo Bellini found music to be a golden ticket – the passport out of a restricted life to travel opportunities, wealth and a broadening of cultural horizons. There was no family money: Bellini’s immediate forefathers were musicians too, but of the jobbing kind, more craftsmen than artists. Playing the organ, teaching and, in his grandfather’s case, composing music in the service of a local nobleman gave them an influence that extended no further than the local community in Catania, Sicily. The surrounding hills were alive with the sound of folksong, and of course the church required a never-ending supply of quotidian liturgical music, but for an aspiring opera composer, opportunities were few. Vincenzo showed exceptional musical promise, however, and a petition to the local council resulted in him being granted the funds to take up a place at the Naples Conservatoire, where his grandfather had studied before him.
To a 17 year-old arriving across the water from Sicily, Naples was a metropolis of unimaginable riches. At this time, in the 1810s, it was one of the most highly respected musical centres on the Italian peninsula (Italy would not be a united country for a half-century yet), boasting an extraordinary reputation for music education and a superbly well-endowed opera house, the San Carlo. Bellini attended regularly and immersed himself in the operas of Rossini, though was encouraged by his principal teacher at the Conservatoire, Niccolò Zingarelli, to eschew the current vogue for coloratura and emulate the simpler style of earlier composers such as Paisiello.
From Naples, Bellini would move on to other, progressively more important cultural centres. Success with a juvenile opera (the short Adelson e Salvini) led to an opportunity to put an opera of his own on the stage at the San Carlo. That work, Bianca e Fernando, impressed the theatre’s impresario Domenico Barbaja so much that he passed Bellini’s name on to his associates at La Scala in Milan. Bellini was commissioned to write an opera with the leading librettist of the day, Felice Romani – a tremendous coup for a young man just out of music college. The resulting work, Il pirata (1827), was a triumph.
Wealthy Milan had become a thriving intellectual capital in the early years of the 19th century and opera for
