Bellini: I Capuleti e i Montecchi

no libretto

If you're ordering this particular recording based upon a need, want, yearning to have the complete libretto order not. I ordered this recording simply for that fact: it was promoted "as including the 'libretto'" which is exactly what I was looking for. While I'm sure the recording will be lovely, the fact that it marketed itself with expectations it did not deliver makes one weary from ordering online sight unseen. January 11, 2008

Highest Level of Artistry Displayed

This isn't the Shakespearean version, in case you get disappointed, but is based on an Italian source. In spite of the obvious fact the Sills and Gedda were already past their prime by the time of this recording, they still have plenty to give us, and their musical insight makes this recording better than other well-sung performances recorded in the studio. Baker is absolutely fantastic throughout and gave a very satisfying performance both musically and artistically.

Now coming to the comparison made by a reviewer between Bellini and Verdi. Well, even if Bellini had lived to 80, it would not be his aim to write like Verdi. Bellini stood alone amongst the great opera composers of Italy. Even his contemporaries recognized it and called his music 'filosofico'. Bellini's aim was not to create dramas with music like Donizetti or Verdi, but rather music drama - a fact which Wagner recognized. Only that Bellini's aim was to realize it via the voice (think Norma), while Wagner did it with the orchestra. It is note-worthy that Wagner spared Bellini the usual bashing he gave to the Italians. Not only that - he admitted to Cosima that the love duet from Capuleti was the source of his inspiration for his own in Tristan. In his old age, he was proud to say that he learned from 'these pages' what Messrs Brahms etc had failed to learn. One should approach a Bellini opera as one does a Chopin Ballade or Wagner's Tristan, not Verdi. That is not to say that Verdi is inferior, but just different.

And regarding Bellini's orchestration, Wagner and Bizet were on separate occasions, were tasked to 'improve' the orchestration of Norma. Both eventually gave up the job as impossible and concluded that the orchestration written by Bellini was the most suitable. Comparing the orchestration between the early Il Pirata (with its almost Wagnerian finale!) with Norma, it dawns upon one that the decision to thin out the orchestra by Bellini was deliberate, in line with his purpose of using the voice as the primary tool to express the drama. February 13, 2007

"Behold the Tomb"

I find it difficult to evaluate Bellini's work because it depends so heavily on performance. Never a connoiseur of performances, I leave it to others to tell one bel canto aria from another. It is discouraging to realize that Bellini, who died young, never took much interest in orchestral music, making him a lesser counterpart to Verdi, who combines the Italian devotion to the voice with powerful dramatic effects from the orchestra. Even the cover of the EMI CD is disappointing because it slaps a mod-erotic photograph on an opera where the lovers are too traumatised to make love. The libretto is so poor that the recording does not bother to supply it, confirming the view that Bellini's operas are for connoiseurs of vocal sound only.

I have downoaded the text from Karadar Classical Music as well as a synopsis from Opera japonica. We learn that the Capuleti and Montecchi are local versions of the Guelph and Ghilbelline parties respectively. The Ghibelline Dante would have been allied with the Montecchi, Romeo's party. Capellio, Juliet's father, seeks to avenge the death of a son at the hands of Romeo. Romeo's part is sung by a mezzo-soprano, adding further to the absurdity of the EMI cover photo. Although Romeo and Juliet are already lovers, she refuses to elope with him out of loyalty to her father. These lovers really seem more interested in dying than in making love. Juliet does manage to declare that she breathes easier when she learns that Romeo has survived a fight. We know that Romeo has reached his appointed place when he sings, "Ecco la tomba." Janet Baker, as Romeo, shines in the slow, heart-broken singing that follows, interspersed with sympathetic passages by the chorus of Montecchi. There is no doubt that Bellini's operas allow top performers to sing as beautifully as they can. The instrumental accompaniment in this concluding scene is reduced to a bare minimum. September 29, 2006

Well-sung Shakespearean travesty

Source: Studio recording made at Abbey Road Studio, London, June 16-25, 1975.

Sound: Analog stereo. The engineering is competent, I suppose, but as a matter of personal taste I do not care for the distant and echo-y soundscape. It sounds as though the opera were taking place at the far end of a Gothic cathedral.

Documentation: No printed libretto, although there is a reference to an on-line libretto available at the EMI Classics website, (which failed to download in five tries over two days) just in case I want to listen to this opera while I am working at my computer. The accompanying essay by James Harding is the most useless I have ever found in a CD case--and that is by no means an easily earned distinction. Harding is vitally interested in Bellini's lame love life but indifferent to such trifles as the plot of the opera he is supposed to be writing about.

Format: Disk 1, Act I, Scenes 1 and 2; 60:42. Disk 2, Act I, Scene 3; Act II, Scenes 1-3; 74:23.

Bellini premiered "I Capuleti e i Montecchi" at Teatro La Fenice in Venice exactly one month before his twenty-ninth birthday. It was a success but it was not without critics. In his essay, Harding writes, "It was unfair of Berlioz to denounce I Capuleti e i Montecchi as a travesty of Shakespeare." Berlioz clearly had a point, for where the Bard had twenty characters, the librettist "Romani made do with only five. You will look in vain," Harding gushes on, "for the Nurse and Friar Laurence" and, I must add, for Mercutio, Benvolio and Paris, too. In the opera, Paris and Tybalt become a single character, Tebaldo, to the great detriment of the plot.

"I Capuleti e i Montecchi" came about midway in Bellini's too short career. The really big hits on which his fame rests were yet to come. The music is competent but somehow lacking that indefinable ping that makes "La Sonnambula," "Norma" and "I Puritani" extraordinary.

Overall, the performance is good. Best by far in the cast is Janet Baker. She does not generate overt excitement but she offers an overwhelming sense of rightness when she essays any part in the narrow range that she made her own. This recording is a little late for the best of Sills but she is still very bright and amazingly agile. As always, I feel that her voice is just a little too cool and too thin, but that is purely a matter of personal taste. It is also late for Nicolai Gedda, who sounds unexpectedly baritonal as Tebaldo, a part that any other 19th Century composer would surely have written for a baritone. (I know, I know, Gounod's Tybalt is a tenor. I sang the role, myself, back in college days. But Gounod's Tybalt is markedly different in character from Bellini's Tebaldo-Paris.) Gedda is very good, but I am not at all sure that I would have recognized him if his name had not been on the cover.

"I Capuleti e i Montecchi" is not a great opera, but three famous and very fine singers offer intelligent and entertaining performances. That's worth five stars as far as I'm concerned.

FOR THE HISTORICALLY MINDED: William Shakespeare wrote his "Romeo and Juliet" in the 1590s, in the early days of his career. As was usual for him, he based his play on older materials. The first literary mention of the Montagus and the Capulets is in Dante's "Purgatorio," vi, lines 106-108. The Montagus lived in Verona and the Capulets in Cremona. They were used by Dante as examples of warring factions that had been exterminated. About 1530, Luigi da Porto mistakenly assumed that the Montagus and the Capulets had both resided in Verona and had feuded with one another. He worked up a tale that involved two young members of his warring clans, Giulietta and Romeo. In 1554, Matteo Bandello published a novella called "Romeo e Giulietta" which proved to be an international hit. A French version was adapted from Bandello by Pierre Boaistuau in 1559. This, in turn, was translated into English in 1562 by Arthur Brooke as a "tragical history" in verse form called "Romeus and Juliet," later to be pounced on by Will Shakespeare in search of a popular hit. The only major changes that Shakespeare made in Brooke's plot were to compress the time frame and to introduce Tybalt into the story at an earlier point in order to build him up as a worthy adversary for Romeo. And, oh, yes, he created an array of living characters such as had never been conceived before.

A number of commentators have taken note of the much simplified plot of "I Capuleti e i Montecchi." They have accounted for it by declaring that Shakespeare's version was not yet well-known in the world, so Romani must have based his work on an earlier version of the story, by which I presume they mean by Bandello or even by da Porto. I don't buy that explanation. By 1830, the cult of Bardolatry was firmly established. The standard German translations (that the Germans to this day hold to be superior to the English originals) were well along. Two generations earlier, the tourist industry of Stratford Upon Avon had been given a kick start by the great actor, Garrick (in a bicentennial celebration conceived by David Garrick, written by David Garrick, produced by David Garrick, directed by David Garrick and starring David Garrick--additional dialogue by W. Shakespeare.) Just seventeen years later, Verdi would write his "Macbeth" and make sketches for a "King Lear," that greatest of all operatic might-have-beens. One of the twenty or so books that Verdi kept close to himself until the day he died was an Italian translation of the works of Shakespeare.

No, I do not think that Romani dealt with any obscure 16th Century originals. I think that he exercised a hack's privilege to pillage a respectable source for his convenience. Berlioz was correct. In both the literal and the figurative senses of the word, this is a travesty. October 15, 2005

beautiful and moving opera

One may regret that Beverly Sills and Nicolai Gedda did not
record this opera earlier in their careers (1975) yet still
be glad they did. Though there are some audible signs of vo-
cal wear their artistry and commitment are never in doubt and
they offer memorable performances. Janet Baker is on the other
hand in splendid voice and sings superbly - she portrays a
somber Romeo and is supremely moving in the tomb scene.
Robert Lloyd and Raimund Herincx offer excellent support.
Very well recorded and beautifully conducted by Maestro
Patane - a very welcome release !
August 12, 2005

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