8 - Critical fortunes since the Unification of Italy

Summary

It was typical of the young Richard Wagner that he did not merely enthuse about Norma: he reflected on it philosophically and found a way of placing it in a framework created by his own vision of operatic history. As the years passed, as the world in which Bellini had lived and worked was superseded by a very different world, in which Italy had become a free and united nation, and in which the opera-houses of the peninsula were exploring a more cosmopolitan repertory, Italian reactions to Norma also became more thoughtful.

We may remain for a moment with Giuseppe Rovani who, by the 1860s, had become the unofficial leader of the group of Milanese artists and intellectuals known as the ‘scapigliati’ – the ‘dishevelled ones’. As a novelist Rovani was a relatively old-fashioned figure; so he was as a musical connoisseur. But as a theorist of the arts he opened the eyes of his younger contemporaries to exciting new vistas, particularly by insisting upon those Baudelairean correspondances that mysteriously linked the various arts together.

In his most substantial aesthetic writing, Le tre arti of 1874, Bellini holds a place of honour. The first two paragraphs of the following excerpt are from the preface, in which Rovani explains his historical and philosophical presuppositions; the remainder is from the body of the book, the chapter entitled simply ‘Vincenzo Bellini’. Rovani's reflections on Norma are those of a patriot who had lived through the heroic decades of the risorgimento, and of a lover of traditional opera, who had experienced, and did not care for, the first stirrings of ‘music drama’.