The operas of Vincenzo Bellini are often praised with words of dulcet condescension: pale, tender, somber, wistful. For better or worse, depending on whom you ask, he was a scribe of languid melodies, a melancholic purveyor of beauty untroubled by intricacy or rigor, an aural aesthetician beguiled by the otherworldly charm of the human voice, or a composer who cared more for singers than instrumentalists. This view of his music, although insufficient to describe it, is not necessarily wrong. But condescension has done Bellini’s reputation more harm than hostility ever could.
It doesn’t help that most of what he wrote—some 90 percent of his nearly eighty compositions—is more or less forgotten, aside from a handful of operas: Il Pirata, La Straniera, I Capuleti e i Montecchi, Beatrice di Tenda, La Sonnambula, Norma, and I Puritani; only the last three are performed with any regularity today. Along with Gioachino Rossini and Gaetano Donizetti, Bellini is part of a Mount Rushmore–like triptych of nineteenth-century Italian composers invoked whenever beautiful singing—bel canto—becomes an object of faith. Their commitment to it turned out to be good business: opera houses still return to their works. There has never quite been a critical or scholarly consensus about them, but Bellini, whose music is suspended somewhere between Rossini’s precise brilliance and Donizetti’s rhetorical force, can move audiences with his melodic facility.
Melody, in the critical language of nineteenth-century musical standards and in much of what followed, is treated as intuitive, unthinking. Harmony is where intelligence resides, while melody is where feelings emerge. But to treat Bellini’s gift for melody as at best a limitation, as many critics have done, is to misunderstand his intentions. Harmony and orchestration are not underdeveloped in his music; they are strategically restrained. The twentieth-century avant-garde composer Luigi Nono observed that the fermatas—the pauses, the moments of silence—in Bellini’s scores point toward something profoundly unmodern: the idea that music may retreat in order to signify more. Later composers accumulate sound to simulate intensity; Bellini removes it, trusting the human voice—and the listener—to bear the weight of its absence.
In her essay “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964), Susan Sontag includes Bellini’s operas in a brisk inventory of what she calls “random examples” belonging to the camp canon, an aesthetic she defines as a devotion to artifice, to stylized excess, to decadence worn knowingly. Camp, she insists, is not a natural mode of sensibility, but her decision to single out Bellini is hard to understand. One wonders why La Sonnambula, Bellini’s opera about a sleepwalking Swiss girl, should register as more camp, more extravagant than Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, at the end of which Brünnhilde self-immolates. Exaggeration is not the exception in opera; it is the rule. To classify Bellini alone as camp is to misunderstand the genre entirely.
Bellini was born into a Neapolitan family in Catania, Sicily, in 1801. His grandfather was maestro di cappella for the Biscari court in the mid-eighteenth century, and he displayed an early aptitude for music as a child: it was said that he could memorize an aria before the age of two. By the time he entered the Conservatorio di San Sebastiano in Naples, he had already absorbed the grammar of melody as if it were a first language. In Naples—crowded, theatrical, perpetually on the verge of performance—he studied composition with a seriousness that bordered on austerity, producing exercises that already hinted at a peculiar instinct for the kind of music that expresses feelings.
Yet his long melodic spans emerge not simply as quirks of temperament but as answers to a particular theatrical reality, for opera was a public practice bound by contracts, calendars, contingencies. Rather than a solitary musical intelligence, Bellini was a working composer moving through institutions that prized speed, novelty, and immediacy. There were always practical considerations: of singers available, of rehearsal hours, of libretti arriving too late and deadlines arriving too soon. Catania, Naples, Milan, Venice, Paris—each had its own rules for what opera could be and how quickly it had to be made: Naples, shaped by conservatory discipline and vocal inheritance; Milan, governed by competitive theaters and restless taste; Venice, animated by carnival and a hunger for novelty; Paris, with its financial resources, its hazards, its essential foreignness for an Italian.
His life offers little in the way of stratagem or dramatic arc, sensationalism or scandal, unlike the lives of Wagner or Dmitri Shostakovich, whose political notorieties cling to their musical legacies. Bellini was not a theorist, not a pundit, not a revolutionary. He worked, he worried, he negotiated, he wrote, he worried some more, and he wrote again. Then he died, in his prime, at thirty-three, before triumph could fully register.
Fabrizio Della Seta in his biography Bellini understands that to overemphasize the details of such a life, brief and a little boring as it was, would be to misjudge it. There are no ideological conversions to track, no political crises to interpret, no dramatic personal ruptures that might give insight into Bellini’s music. Della Seta offers no startling or provoking revelations, no corrective manifestos, no ingenious new thesis designed to unsettle a listless critical culture. Instead, he undertakes something slower: sustained attention to circumstance, to the patient accretion of choices through which an artistic self is formed.
Bellini’s operas are often reduced, heedlessly or willfully, to their diatonic melodies and seemingly uncomplicated harmonies, as though simplicity were synonymous with ease. Yet what looks spare on the page becomes merciless in performance. Of the bel canto composers, Bellini is the most exacting, the least forgiving. Rossini asks for velocity and Donizetti for weight, but Bellini asks for both. Sopranos cannot bluff their way through Norma, Beatrice di Tenda, Elvira in I Puritani, or Imogene in Il Pirata. Maria Callas once remarked that Bellini’s music was harder than Wagner’s, which had places for the singer to hide. Lilli Lehmann insisted that the role of Norma surpassed even the accumulated demands of the three Brünnhildes. In Wagner, the orchestra absorbs, collaborates, envelops. In Bellini, it steps aside, not hiding but on the periphery. What remains is the voice, isolated and illuminated, with nothing between it and the possibility of failure. The margin for error is narrow.
Singers can, to a point, learn the style of bel canto: the long legato line, the calibrated portamento, the elastic phrasing, the careful shading of dynamics across registers. But Bellini’s music requires something more, something physical: vocal folds that create a particular quality of sound in each register. The voice should bloom warmly at the bottom, plummy and supple, and cut cleanly at the top without thinning or straining. These are not entirely accomplishments of discipline: a singer may refine what nature has allotted but cannot create it.
In his prologue, Della Seta writes:
For the opera lover, Bellini’s name is identified with three operas, La Sonnambula, Norma, and I Puritani, and these works in turn evoke the great voices that brought them to the stage in the distant past (Pasta, Malibran, Rubini), inaccessible and therefore mythical, in the recent past (Callas, Sutherland, Pavarotti) and in the present (everyone can supply the name of their choice).
For the better part of the past two decades, the opera world has lived with a scarcity not of Bellini performances so much as of singers, particularly sopranos, with that elusive Bellinian quality—the resplendent beauty of bel canto phrasing combined with authority, volatility, and melodrama—that makes the music seem immortal rather than merely preserved. In recent years, however, we have found ourselves in the midst of another bel canto renaissance, made possible by a handful of singers with the necessary blend of training and natural gifts, among them Nadine Sierra, Lisette Oropesa, Lawrence Brownlee, Xabier Anduaga, Javier Camarena, Juan Diego Flórez, Artur Ruciński, Angela Meade, and Rosa Feola. This helps explain why the Metropolitan Opera chose last season to unveil two new productions of Bellini works: La Sonnambula in the fall, I Puritani in the winter. Programming several operas by one composer in a year is not unusual. What is unusual is the decision to commission two entirely new stagings of two works by the same composer from separate creative teams in rapid succession. The choice reads less as a scheduling convenience than as a recognition that certain conditions, when they appear, must be acted on before they vanish.
The Met’s new La Sonnambula and I Puritani were meticulously thought out, and its singers drew both critical acclaim and enthusiastic audiences. Nadine Sierra sang the lead in La Sonnambula, which has always been one of those operas people apologize for loving, with or without shame, as if they were admitting a fondness for made-for-TV romantic comedies. Its plot is admired for its charm, its pastoral sweetness, its agreeable unreality. The young Amina sleepwalks into the room of a visiting count on the eve of her marriage; the gaffe is revealed to the entire village, and her fiancé, Elvino, calls off the wedding. But when she sleepwalks again in public, her innocence is confirmed, and all is forgiven.
Sierra never pleaded for Amina’s goodness. In her first-act aria expressing her happiness at her approaching wedding, “Come per me sereno,” her restraint was almost unnerving; sentimentality was held at bay like an unwelcome guest. When betrayal arrived, it exploded for Elvino, yet Sierra’s Amina imploded, as if devastation were unfolding somewhere beneath the surface of the music. Something delicate had been mishandled. Her sleepwalking was not unconsciousness but excess awareness, a condition in which truths surface that waking life cannot accommodate. Her lament in the final scene for the brevity of love, “Ah! non credea mirarti,” unfolded with such clarity that it felt less like lament than recognition.
Xabier Anduaga’s Elvino burned hot and fast. His tenor flashed; his emotions followed suit. He loved absolutely, although he seemed baffled and withdrew when that devotion required maintenance. He may not be the most thrilling actor, but his vocal talent compensates. There is an impetuous clarity to his sound—bright, forward, almost impatient, as if each phrase were compelled into being before it had time to settle. In moments of desperation, he amplified his voice into urgency, though the volatility beneath the torrid surface was palpable. What he offered, finally, was not a fully realized psychology but a sequence of states, vividly sung: ardor, doubt, retreat, each arriving with disarming immediacy.
Rolando Villazón, a tenor turned stage director, took the Swiss village setting seriously. This was not the postcard Alps, all cowbells and smiles, but a watchful collective with a memory and a taste for certainty. Affection curdled quickly here. Love slid, almost imperceptibly, into surveillance. Amina’s sleepwalking was a public event, and everyone had an opinion.
At times Villazón’s staging pressed too insistently its point that communities enjoy their judgments; the addition of the lingering dancer who functioned as Amina’s “double” distracted from the opera’s subtleties. Bellini does not need emphasis. Under Riccardo Frizza’s baton, the orchestra breathed, listened, and supported the voices rather than competing with them. Innocence was restored but also altered. The sleepwalker awoke knowing where she had been, and Sierra’s final moments carried joy, radiance, and something else: distance. Happiness felt provisional.
The Met’s new staging of I Puritani was its first in half a century. Charles Edwards made his Met directorial debut after years as a designer; his moody, elegant production, which evoked a Puritan town hall with tiered wooden pulpits and pews and large windows through which characters escaped or entered, took few artistic risks.
The action unfolds during the English Civil War, but what transpires is more ambiguous than a conflict between opposing sides. The Puritan Elvira is betrothed to the Royalist Arturo, but on their wedding day he flees with another woman, a political prisoner he cannot abandon to her fate. In his absence, Elvira descends into a psychosis that becomes the opera’s true center, her grief circling with a patience that feels almost willful. The others—her uncle, even Riccardo, her previous betrothed—continue to speak the language of duty and allegiance, but Bellini’s music turns these divisions into a yearning for reconciliation, a wild hope that love might be the force that finally makes sense of politics, madness, war, faith, and peace. In the end the opera grants that reconciliation: Arturo returns, political clemency arrives almost miraculously, and Elvira’s mind is restored alongside social harmony. The resolution is so sudden, so complete, that it feels less like realism than collective wish fulfillment, Bellini suspending history itself in order to preserve the possibility of happiness.
Lisette Oropesa, perhaps the savviest bel canto singer of our time, is also an outstanding actress. Her Elvira—fragile, ferocious, unmoored—was a musical aurora borealis: luminous, unstable. She refracted emotion rather than simply carrying it, each phrase catching a different shade of feeling—first golden and remote, then burning with an almost reckless intensity. She understands, instinctively, control at the edge of collapse, and she rides that edge with unnerving precision. Coloratura passages flicker and dart, not as ornament but as agitation, the sound registering Elvira’s unraveling. And yet there are moments when she stills everything, draws the line into something eerily pure, as if time had briefly stopped to accommodate her grief. It was in these suspensions—these held breaths—that her performance lingered.
Lawrence Brownlee’s Arturo arrived with such ease and radiance that one briefly entertained the notion that high D-flats (and one F!) are not difficult at all. Though he is fifty-three, his instrument is gobsmackingly fresh, showing no signs of the fatigue that singers typically exhibit at his age. The tone retains its pliancy, its warmth and brightness, and the top notes—so often the first casualty—remain easily available, summoned without strain, without ceremony. What might, in another tenor, register as effort here reads as a natural buoyancy, a refusal to darken or sink.
But it was Artur Ruciński, without a doubt the most polished and technically proficient baritone singing today, who made my knees weak. The role of Riccardo is often treated as ballast designed to keep Bellini’s long, shimmering lines from drifting too far into the ether. Ruciński refused that assignment. What registered most in his performance was not volume or swagger, though he certainly applied both, particularly at the end of his Act One cabaletta, when he sustained a high G for nearly twenty seconds, which was both garish and spectacularly exciting. It was a form of tensile control, a way of drawing a line taut and holding it there. Here the legato Bellini asks for feels less like technique than temperament, and Ruciński supplied it with an intelligence that never winked at the audience and a faint melancholy that lingered long after the applause.
Bellini died in 1835, soon after the premiere of I Puritani, at an age when most composers are still only beginning to reveal their talents. What remains astonishing is not how much he accomplished in his brief life but the completeness with which he grasped opera’s peculiar compact between fragility and excess, intimacy and spectacle. Perhaps the shortest distance between melodrama and truth is just a beautiful melody.
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