Vincenzo Bellini

Vincenzo Bellini (1776–1840) is considered the creator of romantic Italian opera, the “melodramma tragico.” His principal librettist, Felice Romani, played a significant role in this creation. In Norma, considered Bellini and Romani's magnum opus, the two succeeded in creating a novel combination of elements of the then emerging Black Romanticism with the dramaturgy of classical tragedy. Even Richard Wagner praised Norma as a prime example of musical tragedy. Romani's highly cultivated language, technically trained on 18th-century models such as Pietro Metastasio, finds a new tone for the passionately heightened emotions that dominate the characters in the drama. To do justice to Romani's texts, Bellini created an equally innovative musical language, characterized above all by a departure from the style of Gioachino Rossini, which was still dominant at the time. This “canto popolaresco” was then also taken up by Gaetano Donizetti and Giuseppe Verdi, on whom Bellini exerted a great influence overall. In addition, Bellini developed his own unique type of long, drawn-out lyrical cantilenas, which do without any repetition of individual passages and achieve a previously unknown intensity in the expression of elegiac moods. Prime examples of these “melodie lunghe lunghe lunghe,” as Verdi called them, are the first part of the final aria “Ah non credea mirarti” from La Sonnambula.