Vincenzo Bellini Carteggi by Graziella Seminara (review)

Do we need a new edition of Bellini’s correspondence? Bellini’s own letters have been served pretty well by modern critical editions. Graziella Seminara’s contribution is certainly no exception; indeed, it represents a culmination of work by Luisa Cambi (1943), Francesco Pastura (1935 and 1959), and Carmelo Neri (1991, 2001, and 2005), and deserves to become the primary reference work on the subject. For the first time, practically all the known letters, not only sent by Bellini, but also those written to him, amounting to 517 items in all, are presented together in one chronological sequence, fully annotated with bibliographical concordances and scholarly apparatus. The new Carteggi is a serious and very well-produced volume, clearly and elegantly laid out, strongly bound with the signatures properly stitched. It certainly looks the part: well up to the standard of the comparable scholarly collections of Verdi and Rossini currently growing along university library shelves.

In this field, Bellini has fared better than Donizetti, for whom our first port of call is still Guido Zavadini’s Donizetti: Vita, musiche, epistolario (Bergamo: Istituto italiano d’arti grafiche, 1948); despite additions in Studi donizettiani, there seems no sign yet of a comprehensive edition. It is only since 1992 that a reliable modern edition of Rossini’s letters has started to appear; for many years we were dependent on Giuseppe Mazzatinti and Fanny and Giovanni Manis’s collection of 1902 (Lettere di G. Rossini [Firenze: Barbèra]). One reason is that Rossini and Donizetti wrote so many letters that encompassing them in a single series is a daunting prospect. Bellini died at the age of thirty-four, after a career of little more than eight years, and he was a fairly private individual: his correspondence is far smaller than Mendelssohn’s, although far larger than Schubert’s. Whereas there are only just over 400 surviving letters by Bellini, Rossini appears to have written thousands: the Lettere e documenti will evidently take decades to complete, as the five 800-page volumes issued so far take us only up to 1835. With Verdi, of course, you have to expect a series of scholarly volumes like this one, each devoted to his exchanges with a single correspondent, such as Ricordi, Cammarano, Lanari, and others, which is indeed just what the Ricordi edition has undertaken.

What do Bellini’s letters tell us? The first point to make is that a large number have been lost: they are relatively plentiful from 1828 and again during 1834–1835 (about half the contents in this book date from these final two years), but on average only about thirty a year survive from 1829–1833. So, they tell us about the genesis of operas like La straniera (1829) and I puritani (1835), and rather less about his two masterpieces of 1831, La sonnambula and Norma. Bellini talks a lot about his operatic ambitions in general and prospects for specific commissions from opera houses. Except for one famous letter to Carlo Pepoli, his inexperienced collaborator on I puritani (no. 291), Bellini does not usually discuss his dramatic aims and intentions with regard to specific operas, as Verdi does with Piave and Cammarano; indeed, there are few letters to librettists. However, in 1828 on La straniera, and in 1834 on I puritani, he transcribes passages of the librettos in his long and informative letters to his college friend Francesco Florimo. Unfortunately, on his own admission, Florimo appears to have destroyed practically all those he received from Bellini between March 1829 and March 1834, which explains the curious profile of the Carteggi and the paucity of comparable insights into the most famous operas. What you get instead is an appreciation of Bellini’s aesthetic outlook, regarding both opera generally and its singers in particular, which is notably different from how later composers felt about their art. We discover why Bellini was so devoted to Rubini and Pasta and why he did not discuss with his great...