Opera has a distinct history in Italy, in France, and in Germany. For a considerable time it makes progress in Italy. Then Italian composers and Italian singers go abroad taking Italian opera with them. German composers, too, visit Italy, and after studying there return to their native land, to produce with modifications operas which must still be regarded as Italian in character. At last the Germans who have studied in Italy become the rivals of the Italian masters. Then Gluck and Piccinni contend with one another in presence of French audiences, and above all, of French critics. Finally it becomes the turn of the Italians to borrow from the Germans; for Mozart, so highly indebted for his melodic inspiration – or at least for his melodic forms – to Italy, was so much before the Italians in regard to the composition of his orchestra and the construction of his musical pieces, that when Rossini wished to introduce into Italian opera the important reforms which must always be associated with his name, he had nothing to do but to turn to Mozart as a model. Rossini was the first Italian composer who accompanied recitative with the full band, assigned leading parts to bass singers, made of each dramatic scene one continuous piece of music, and brought to perfection those highly varied, amply developed concerted finales, which form so striking a feature in modern Italian opera. All these innovations were simply adaptations from Mozart.
The history of Rossini's Italian career is the history of opera in Italy during the first half of the nineteenth century; for Rossini caused the works of his predecessors to be laid aside, while his own works and those of his immediate successors, and in an artistic sense followers, continued to be played almost to the exclusion of all others until the Verdi period. And even Verdi, who in his latter works has studied dramatic consistency and dramatic effect more than Rossini studied them in his earlier works, must be regarded as belonging, more or less completely, to the school of Rossini.
CHAPTER XII.
DONIZETTI AND BELLINI
DONIZETTI, Rossini's immediate successor but not supplanter, composed from sixty to seventy operas ("c'est beaucoup" dirait Candide) of which to this day three at least ("c'est beaucoup" dirait Martin), are still played regularly every season in London: Lucia, Lucrezia, and La Favorita. Of his two charming works in the light style – comic operas in which the composer never approaches the farcical, never once ceases to be graceful – neither L'Elisir nor Don Pasquale can be compared to the much more vigorous Barber. Nor has Donizetti produced any work so full of melody as Semiramide, or so dramatic as William Tell. But he rises to unwonted heights in the last act of La Favorite; which, composed for the French Académie, became naturalised in due time on the Italian operatic stage under the title of La Favorita.
Although the career of Donizetti was very much longer than that of Bellini, whom he preceded and whom he survived, he produced in proportion to the number of his works fewer by a great deal which have kept the stage.
Donizetti brought out his first opera Enrico di Borgogna at Venice in 1818, when he was twenty years of age, and Catarina Cornaro, his sixty-third (not to count two or three that were never produced) at Naples, in 1844, when he was forty-six.
Bellini brought out the first of his works performed in public, Bianca e Fernando (he had previously composed a sort of pasticcio for the school theatre of the Naples Conservatorio) at the San Carlo in 1826, when he was twenty-five years of age; and his last, I Puritani, at Paris in 1835. He had a career then, of but nine years, during which he composed ten operas, of which five were played with great success, and of which three, La Sonnambula, Norma, and I Puritani, forty-five years after their composer's death, still keep the stage. Stendhal (or perhaps it was Carpani) had foretold that Rossini, the composer of florid music, would be followed by a master whose melodies would be remarkable for extreme simplicity, and this prophecy was fulfilled in the case of Bellini.
Donizetti, like so many other composers, was not encouraged by his parents to adopt the career in which he was destined to obtain so much distinction. When, however, his father at last consented to his becoming a professional musician, he is said to have presented him with an ivory scraper, as if to impress upon him the necessity of practising the art of erasing. Probably no composer ever did less in that line than Donizetti; and though he wrote more accurately than many other Italian composers, one is frequently astonished to find in his works melodies of significance and beauty followed at haphazard by the merest trivialities. Donizetti never went to work without the paternal scraper by his side. The fluent composer, however, had no occasion to make use of it for scratching out notes; and it never seems to have occurred to him to strike out feeble passages, not to say entire pieces. What Donizetti's father should have given him was not a scraper but a pair of scissors.
Donizetti, born at Bergamo in 1798, was but seventeen years of age when he commenced his studies in his native town under Mayer, who, before the appearance of Rossini, was one of the most popular composers in Italy; and he finished them (so far as studies can ever be finished) at Bologna under Pilotti and Mattei, the latter of whom had some years previously been Rossini's instructor. Finding that Mattei gave him very few lessons at the Bologna Lyceum, where he was professor, the youthful and ingenious Donizetti contrived to obtain supplementary ones by making himself very agreeable to his master and by turning the conversation as often as possible to musical subjects. He even went so far as to play at cards every evening with Mattei's aged mother, a piece of benevolence for which he was rewarded by much instructive talk from the grateful son. While at the Lyceum Donizetti occupied himself not only with music, but also with drawing, architecture, and even poetry; and that he could turn out fair enough verses for musical purposes was shown when, many years afterwards, he wrote – so rapidly that the word "improvised" might here be used – for the benefit of a manager in distress, both words and music of a little one-act opera, called Il Campanello, founded on the Sonnette de Nuit of Scribe.
No composer, with the exception of Mozart, possessed a more remarkable memory than Donizetti. After two hearings of Allegri's Miserere, Mozart remembered the whole work so as to be able to write it out note for note; and Donizetti, wishing to procure for Mayer a copy of an opera which was being performed at Bologna, and which the impresario had refused to lend, had such a lively recollection of the music after hearing it two or three times that he was able to put it down on paper from beginning to end. Unfortunately the tellers of these stories omit as a rule to say whether the possessors of such wonderful mnemonic powers make notes while hearing the compositions, which, in rather a literal sense, they propose to carry away with them. A prodigious memory for small things as for great would be necessary to enable a musician in the present day to write out, even after a dozen hearings, an opera by Meyerbeer or by Wagner with all the changes of harmony, all the details of instrumentation. The operas, however, of Donizetti's youth were much simpler affairs than these latter-day productions.
Already known by many pieces of instrumental and religious music, Donizetti produced his first opera, Enrico di Borgogna, at Venice in 1818. This work obtained so much success that the composer was requested to undertake at once a second one for the same city. After writing an opera for Mantua in 1819, Il Falignamo di Livonia, Donizetti visited Rome, where his Zoraïde di Granata procured him an exemption from military service, which would otherwise have carried him off, and the honour of being crowned at the Capitol. He now produced a whole series of operas which owed their success chiefly to the skill with which he imitated the style of Rossini. Strangely enough it was not until Rossini had ceased to write that Donizetti, his immediate successor, exhibited something like a style of his own. In 1830, however, the in many parts highly-dramatic Anna Bolena was produced; a work which was long regarded as its composer's masterpiece. Donizetti wrote Anna Bolena for Pasta and Rubini, and it was first represented for Pasta's benefit in the year 1831. In the tenor air, Vivi tu, Rubini made a striking success; and it was in this opera, as Henry VIII., that Lablache first gained the favour of the London public. Anna Bolena was destined soon to be eclipsed by other works from the pen of the same composer; and it is now but rarely, if ever, heard. Many years, indeed, have passed since it was last performed in London with Mdlle. Titiens in the principal character. It contains an unusually large number of expressive, singable melodies; and many of its scenes possess more dramatic significance than belong as a rule to Rossini's Italian works. It marks a step in fact, in the movement from the style of Rossini, as exhibited in his Italian operas, towards that of Verdi; a movement in which Bellini, standing by himself, cannot be said to have had any part. Neither in his earlier operas does Bellini, like Donizetti, resemble Rossini, nor in his later ones does he, like Donizetti, approach what was afterwards to be known as the style of Verdi.
Lucrezia Borgia, written for Milan in 1834, was a distinct advance on Anna Bolena. This work, with Lucia and La Favorita, by which it was to be succeeded, must be ranked among Donizetti's most successful productions; and it has already been pointed out that the three operas just named are the only ones by which Donizetti is now represented regularly every year at our great lyrical theatres. Lucrezia Borgia is based on one of Victor Hugo's most dramatic plays; but the composer has not turned to so effective account as might have been expected, the great scene in which Maffio Orsini's drinking song is interrupted by the funeral dirge given to the procession of monks in the outside street. Like Verdi, some years afterwards, in Ernani and in Rigoletto, Donizetti counted too much on a musical effect which is naturally much more impressive in a spoken drama, where music, until this one scene, has not been heard, than in an opera which is sung throughout. Francis I.'s song, in the drama of Le Roi s'amuse, arrests the attention much more than does the Duke of Mantua's canzone in Rigoletto. The horn of Hernani is mysterious and terrifying in the play, while in the opera, heard after many other horns, not to speak of cornets, trombones, ophecleides, and all the instruments of the Sax family, it scarcely excites even a feeling of surprise. As regards Lucrezia Borgia, though the singers of the drinking-song and the chanters of the burial service have the scene entirely to themselves, yet the contrast between reckless life and inevitable death is less striking in a work where music possesses no special significance than in one where music has been introduced for the sake of impressiveness in the single scene where it is employed. Taking it, however, for what it is worth, Donizetti's successor, Verdi, would doubtless have made more of it than Donizetti himself has done. Maffio Orsini's brindisi is spirited, and characteristically voluptuous. But there is nothing very awe-inspiring in the chorus of monks at the back of the stage; and the two pieces bear no relation to one another – which they might perhaps with advantage have been made to do.
Lucrezia Borgia contains less recitative than belongs to the operas of Rossini, who himself dispensed with the endless monologues and recitatives cultivated by his predecessors. Indeed, the amount of measured talk in Lucrezia Borgia scarcely exceeds that which is to be met with in the most popular of Verdi's works. The brilliancy of the introduction, the series of dramatic scenes – for which the composer had, above all, to thank his librettist, who, in his turn, was indebted to Victor Hugo – and an unusually large number of tuneful themes for four leading personages among whom the interest is judiciously distributed, could not fail to secure for Lucrezia Borgia the success it in fact obtained.
The graceful Elisir d'Amore, which, owing to the prevailing taste for spectacular opera, is now but rarely heard, was given for the first time at Milan in 1832. Donizetti was now composing operas at the rate of about three a year. Many of them made but little impression and scarcely a twelfth part of them are performed in the present day.
In 1835, however, Donizetti produced an opera which was received with enthusiasm, which soon became popular throughout Europe, and which seems to possess as much vitality now as when it was first brought out. Lucia di Lammermoor, the work in question, contains some of the most beautiful melodies, in the sentimental style, that Donizetti has composed; and it is especially admired by musicians for the broadly conceived, well-constructed and highly dramatic finale which brings the second act to so effective a conclusion. The sudden appearance of Edgar of Ravenswood just as his devoted but despairing Lucy has been forced to sign the contract which gives her to another, is but the first of a series of situations, skilfully varied and contrasted, which the librettist has ably planned, and which have been admirably treated by the composer. The part of Lucia, beloved by every "light soprano" of the present day, was written for Persiani; that of Edgardo, which, in the days of the great tenors, was even more popular than the prima donna's part, for Duprez. Of the last act of Lucia, which, until the reign of the light sopranos set in, used to be considered the crowning glory of the opera, Donizetti wrote both words and music. It has already been mentioned that he once transformed a French vaudeville into an Italian opera or operetta; and it may be added that the libretti of Betly and of La Figlia del Reggimento are both from his pen. La Figlia del Reggimento, however, was only La Fille du Régiment translated into Italian; and the libretto of Betly is based, scene by scene, on Adolphe Adam's little opera of Le Chalet– known in English as the Swiss Cottage. In the case of the last act of Lucia, Donizetti not only wrote the words; he designed the scenes. In the novel Edgar loses himself on the seashore, and is drowned. In the opera, however, when so far as Lucia is concerned the story is at an end, he reappears in an appropriate cemetery to celebrate, in a lyrical lament, the virtues of his demented love; to be informed by a chorus of retainers that she has not only lost her reason, but has departed altogether from this world; and finally to stab himself while still singing the praises of his "bell' alma adorata." When the Lucia of the evening is Patti, Nilsson, or Albani, and the Edgardo is no one in particular, the final scene of course falls flat; no one, indeed, stops to hear it. But the case was quite different when the part of Edgardo was filled by a great dramatic vocalist, like Duprez, or in later days by Mario.
In 1835 Donizetti visited Paris, and there brought out his Marino Faliero, remembered for a time by several pretty pieces, including, in particular, the opening chorus for the workmen in the arsenal, and a chorus of gondoliers at the beginning of the second act. He was more successful when revisiting the French capital, in 1840, he produced there his opera of I Martiri, founded on the subject of Polyeucte which, composed for Naples with a view to Nourrit in the principal part, had been objected to by the Neapolitan censorship; La Fille du Régiment, written for and performed at the Opéra Comique; and La Favorite composed in the first instance for a house of the second rank, the Théâtre de la Renaissance, but afterwards transferred to the Académie. La Favorite– or La Favorita, as it became after passing from the French to the Italian stage – has, like Lucrezia Borgia, the advantage of being founded on a highly dramatic story. It is based on a French drama known, until the opera caused it to be forgotten, as Le Comte de Comminges; and it seems to owe its origin to a Spanish work. In La Favorita, as in most Spanish plays, there is no unfolding of the plot through introductory narrative. The action, from the beginning, takes place beneath the eyes of the spectator. A young man, already tired of the world, is seeking repose in the seclusion of a monastery. But he has been troubled by a vision. The vision still haunts him, and the prior vainly exhorts him in a duet to abandon all thought of the external, and to concentrate his attention on the inward and spiritual. Fernando's adventures with the beautiful lady who turns out to be the "favourite" of the king, the recompense bestowed upon him in the shape of this lady's hand for the valour he has shown in the king's service, and his ultimate return to the monastery when he finds how bitterly he has been deceived, need not here be recounted. It is worth observing, however, that the success of the opera has been in a great measure due to the excellence of the libretto; and that in all really good libretti, as in that of La Favorita, the action of the piece, instead of being related, is presented continuously on the stage. The duet of the first act for Fernando and the chief of the monastery is sufficiently interesting. The choruses of women and the ballet music (of which these choruses form part), in the second act, are graceful and melodious; and the king's air in the third act, Pour tant d'amour, has been always liked both by the popular baritones who sing it and by the public. Leonora's scena, too, "O mon Fernand," possesses, at least in the slow movement (the quick one being quite unworthy of it), a certain amount of beauty. But the fourth act of La Favorita is worth all the rest of the opera, and it may well be regarded as the finest act Donizetti has composed. The calmness and purity of the tenor's air, "Ange si pur," and the passionate impulsiveness of the final duet for the despondent lovers, are eminently dramatic: the character of each piece being perfectly in accord with the situation. The choruses are highly impressive, and the whole scene becomes filled with earnest animation as it moves towards the final climax. Donizetti is said to have sketched and in the main to have completed this act at a single sitting, and in the space of some three or four hours. The andante, however, of the duet was added at the rehearsals; and the cavatina, "Ange si pur" was borrowed from the score of a work never brought out —Le Duc d'Albe. If there could be any doubt about the fact, it would be difficult to believe that Fernando's air had not been inspired by the situation in which it occurs. So, after all, in a measure it was; since the composer took it from elsewhere to introduce it where he knew it would be in place.
La Favorita was by no means Donizetti's last work. He had yet to write Linda di Chamouni, in which there is more of what is called "local colour" than in any other of his operas; and Don Pasquale, which, apart from the brightness and gaiety of its never-ending series of melodies, would be remembered if only from the circumstance of its having been written for that incomparable quartet, Grisi, Mario, Tamburini, and Lablache. The very year (1843) that Donizetti produced Don Pasquale at Paris he brought out Maria di Rohan at Vienna. The music of Maria di Rohan is in some respects the most dramatic that Donizetti has written. The libretto, like almost every good libretto, is based on a French play —Un Duel sous Richelieu; and it contains a very strong part for the baritone, in which, at our Royal Italian Opera, Ronconi has often shown the highest histrionic genius, together with a certain inability to sing in tune. Maria di Rohan, however, is not to be called dramatic simply because it contains one great dramatic part. What is more important is the fact that the music of the work is appropriate to the various personages and to the great situations of the piece. In portraying the original of the jealous husband, Donizetti exhibits all the earnestness and vigour of Verdi, whom, as before observed, he resembles more in Maria di Rohan than in any of his earlier works.
Donizetti's last opera was Catarina Cornaro, brought out at Naples in 1844. This was his sixty-third dramatic work, without counting a certain number – variously estimated, but not likely to be great – which have not been represented. At least two-thirds of Donizetti's operas have never been heard in England. Soon after the production of Catarina Cornaro Donizetti fell into a melancholy condition. Symptoms of dementia manifested themselves while he was on a visit to Paris. The doctors thought the air of his native town might have some salutary effect, and the patient was accordingly ordered to Bergamo; but the case was already a hopeless one. He was taken to Bergamo, but was attacked with paralysis on the journey; and soon after his arrival, having experienced a second attack, he succumbed.
Donizetti, as has already been said, worked for some time before and for many years after Bellini, whom he preceded and survived. Bellini was born in 1806, nine years after Donizetti, and died in 1837, thirteen years before him. He was a native of Sicily, and his father, with whom he took his first lessons in music, was an organist at Catania. The organist was persuaded to send his son to Naples by a Sicilian nobleman, who promised to pay his expenses as a student at the famous Conservatorio, which he in due time entered, and where he had for fellow-pupil Mercadante – more or less known whereever Italian opera has been cultivated by his Giuramento, the only one of his numerous works which ever met with anything like an enduring success. Mercadante was a better musician than Bellini. But he possessed far less creative power; and his creations or inspirations in the shape of melodies are seldom comparable in beauty to those of which the scores of La Sonnambula, Norma, and I Puritani are so full. The tenor's love-song in Il Giuramento, and the highly dramatic duet which brings that opera to a conclusion, will be remembered by all who have once heard this masterpiece of a composer who did not produce masterpieces. Opera-goers of the last thirty years cannot altogether forget him; and it may in particular be observed that he made a far more effective use of the orchestra than his more divinely endowed fellow-student, who thought and felt in melody as Ovid, and afterwards Pope, "lisped in numbers: " every sequence of notes that occurred to him being melodious.
Bellini composed his first work while he was studying at the Conservatorio, where it was afterwards performed. His next production was intended for the outside public. It was entitled Adelson e Salvino, and had the honour, or at least the advantage, of being represented in the presence of the illustrious Barbaja, who, without being a musician, was, as we have already seen, a keen appreciator of musical excellence. It would have been necessary, perhaps, to have been a little blind not to perceive the merit of three such masters as Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini. Such blindness however, was as a matter of fact exhibited by a good many, whereas the ex-waiter of the San Carlo gambling saloon showed himself clear-sighted in the matter. Rossini and Donizetti had both been under engagements to Barbaja, and he was not going to allow Bellini to escape him. The famous impresario was at this time director of the San Carlo at Naples, of the Scala at Milan, of some smaller operatic establishments in Italy, and of the Italian Opera at Vienna. He commissioned Bellini in the first place to write an opera for Naples, where, in 1826, he brought out his Bianca e Fernando. This work obtained no very great amount of success. But it pleased a considerable portion of the public; and it so far satisfied Barbaja that the sagacious manager entrusted the young composer, now twenty years of age, with the libretto of Il Pirata, in which the principal part was to be written specially for Rubini. This time Bellini's opera was to be produced at La Scala. In the simple touching melodies of Il Pirata– of which the principal one for the tenor, quickly laid hold of by composers for the pianoforte and the violin, was still remembered long after the opera, as a whole, had been forgotten – Bellini at once revealed the character of his genius; and the composer of twenty was destined to express the reaction he felt within himself, and which the public was prepared to feel, against the florid style of Rossini. While composing Il Pirata, Bellini retired into the country with the singer on whose execution the success of the work would so much depend. Rubini sang the melodies of his part as Bellini wrote them; and Bellini is said not to have succeeded all at once in inducing him to abandon his taste for ornamentation, and in prevailing upon him to deliver the simple phrases of his principal airs, not only from the chest, but also from the heart. Rubini and his composer, Bellini and his singer, soon understood one another; and in his great scene the admired tenor excited the utmost enthusiasm. Now were fulfilled the words of the prophet Stendhal (or perhaps it was the seer Carpani beneath whose mantle Stendhal, we know, was in the habit of concealing himself), who, writing only some two or three years before, had foretold that Rossini would be followed by a composer remarkable for the simplicity of his style.
After producing in succession La Straniera (Milan, 1828), Zaira (Parma, 1829), Bellini brought out at Venice his operatic version of Romeo and Juliet, under the title of I Capuletti ed i Montecchi which owed such success as it obtained to the singing of Mdle. Pasta, as Il Pirata had been indebted for the favour with which it was received to the singing of Rubini. The years 1829, 1830, 1831, and 1832 are especially memorable in the history of Italian opera; for in the first of these Rossini's William Tell, in the second Donizetti's Anna Bolena, in the third Bellini's Sonnambula, and in the fourth Bellini's Norma, was produced. The Italian school of operatic music was certainly at that time supreme in Europe; and Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini continued for many years to hold sway at theatres where they have now to share their dominion with the composers of France and Germany – with Gounod, Ambroise Thomas, and Bizet, with Meyerbeer and with Wagner.
La Sonnambula, as the work of a new composer, was a good deal sneered at on the occasion of its first production in London. But its endless flow of melodies – many of which, being full of true emotion, are so far thoroughly dramatic – could not fail to ensure its success, with the public at large; and this success, now of half a century's duration, has scarcely diminished since the part of Amina was first undertaken by Pasta, and that of Elvino by Rubini. Our old friend, Lord Mount-Edgcumbe, true type of the praiser of times gone by, having been scared by Rossini, was not likely to be calmed down by Bellini. Of Norma he tells us that the scene of the opera was laid "in Wales," and that it "was not liked." It is difficult to understand the mood of one, having ears to hear, who, whatever he might think of Norma as a specimen of the highest kind of tragic opera, could fail to "like it." Rossini, together with a mass of opera-goers in all countries, was of those who not only "liked" but greatly admired Norma; and he gave the composer the benefit of his counsels when the still young Bellini (he was even now only thirty years of age) undertook to write an opera for the Italian Theatre of Paris, with Grisi, Rubini, Tamburini, and Lablache in the principal parts. The effect of Rossini's advice may be seen in the greater degree of attention paid by Bellini to the orchestration of I Puritani and to the concerted music. It would have been well if some one had recommended Bellini not to set to work upon so poor a libretto as that of I Puritani derived from Ancelot's poor novel, Les Puritains d'Ecosse. Rubini's air, "Ah te, o cara," the polacca for Grisi, the duet in three movements for Tamburini and Lablache, – as to which Rossini, writing an account of the opera to a friend at Milan, remarked that some echo of the final outburst for the two voices, with its brazen accompaniments, must surely have reached him, – and the beautiful tenor solo of the closing concerted piece: these in themselves must have been enough to secure the success of the opera. The last-named melody for the tenor voice, so thoroughly religious in character, was sung at Bellini's funeral to the words of the Lacrymosa; and it was in the midst of the enthusiasm created by his last work that Bellini, at the age of thirty-eight, died.