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Bellini's Idyllic Endings
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 2022
Abstract
This article takes its cue from the claim, made both in 1831 and in our own time, that Bellini's La sonnambula is a pastoral opera. Frustratingly difficult to define, the term ‘pastoral’ is at once both musical and literary, able to attach itself to everything from madrigal to oratorio to symphony across four hundred years. This article explores the various meanings of pastoral specific to the early nineteenth century and argues that its currency in music analysis today – as a topic, as a mode – is of little use when attention falls on the music of Italian opera. It concludes with an extended analysis of Bellini's handling of cadences in both La sonnambula and his other operas, insisting that it is here, in Italian composers’ repeated affirmation of the conventions of tonality, that the pleasures promised by the pastoral can be enjoyed today as much as they were two hundred years ago.
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References
1 See, respectively, the reviews published in the Corriere delle dame – here quoted in Vincenzo Bellini: nuovo epistolario 1819–1835 (con documenti inediti), ed. Carmelo Neri (Catania, 2005), 183 – and the Gazzetta privilegiata di Milano 74 (15 March 1831), 293.
2 Ritorni, Carlo, Ammaestramenti alla composizione (Milan, 1841), 61–2Google Scholar.
3 In book 6, chapter vii, Philip's performance of ‘Ah, perchè non posso odiarti’ is interpreted by Maggie as a sign of his continued attachment.
4 Julian Budden, Elizabeth Forbes and Simon Maguire, ‘Sonnambula, La’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie, 4 vols. (New York, 1992), IV: 452–4; John Rosselli, The Life of Bellini (Cambridge, 1997), 80–9; Smart, Mary Ann, ‘In Praise of Convention: Formula and Experiment in Bellini's Self-Borrowings’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 53/1 (2000), 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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8 Terry Gifford explains that ‘whether the author's choice of Arcadia is classical Greece, the only-just-disappeared Golden Age, the present Golden Age, a utopian future, an Alpine summit, Antarctica, Arden or the garden, that choice will be made with its contemporary audience in mind’. See his Pastoral (London, 1999), 81.
9 Senici, Landscape and Gender, 16.
10 The word is used by both Mary Ann Smart and Melina Esse. For a discussion of Bellini's change in direction in this period, see, respectively, their ‘Bellini, Vincenzo’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, 2nd edn, 29 vols. (Oxford, 2001), III: 194–212 and ‘Speaking and Sighing: Bellini's canto declamato and the Poetics of Restraint’, Current Musicology 87 (Spring 2009), 7–45.
11 This sentence is adapted from Virginia Woolf's essay on Spenser. See ‘The Faery Queen’, in The Moment and Other Essays (New York, 1948), 24–30.
12 Senici, Landscape and Gender, 21.
13 Rosselli, The Life of Bellini, 89.
14 Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets (London, 1820), 134.
15 Schiller's Complete Works, ed. and trans. Charles J. Hempel, vol. 2 (Philadelphia, 1861), 568.
16 ‘Gli Arcadi con que’ sdolcinati loro amori, e con que’ leziosi soprannomi di Tirsi, di Elpino, di Amarilli, di Dori, di Nice han fatto sì vile agli occhi degli Italiani la poesia che ciamossi bucolica o pastorale. … Se noi in fatto ci proponessimo di andar razzolando le poesie di questo genere dettate nella nostra età, nulla troveremmo che degno sia di particular menzione.’ Ambrogio Levati, Saggio sulla storia della letteratura italiana nei primi venticinque anni del secolo XIX, vol. 1 (Milan, 1831), 113.
17 Alpers, What Is Pastoral? 35.
18 Senici, Landscape and Gender, 4.
19 Senici, Landscape and Gender, 54.
20 Compare this moment to the similar melody that opens Guillaume Tell. Rossini must compose rather than merely record, thus the movement to the submediant after the first statement.
21 Rosselli, The Life of Bellini, 89.
22 Anselm Gerhard, ‘“Schweizer Töne” als Mittel der motivischen Integration: Gioachino Rossinis Guillaume Tell’, in Schweizer Töne: Die Schweiz im Spiegel der Musik, ed. Anselm Gerhard and Annette Landau (Zurich, 2000), 99–106.
23 Senici, Landscape and Gender, 54.
24 Alpers, What Is Pastoral? 79–93.
25 Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs (Princeton, 1991), 88–9.
26 Wye Jamison Allanbrook, The Secular Commedia: Comic Mimesis in Late Eighteenth-Century Music (Berkeley, 2014), 110.
27 Monelle, The Musical Topic.
28 For a supplement to Monelle's sources, see Andrew Haringer, ‘Hunt, Military, and Pastoral Topics’, in The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, ed. Danuta Mirka (Oxford, 2014), 194–213.
29 The full entry reads as follows: ‘PASTORALE, s. f. dinota o un componimento musicale di carattere semplice e campestre, ma tenero, per lo più in Tempo 6/8, con movimento moderato; o un dramma musicale che rappresenta qualche avvenimento dell'ideale vita campestre, ed in cui tutti i sentimenti espressi hanno l'impronto della semplicità ed innocenza rurale.’ Peter Lichtenthal, Dizionario e bibliografia della musica (Milan, 1826), 114.
30 Robert S. Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation Advances in Semiotics (Bloomington, 1994), 91–111.
31 Maynard Solomon, Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination (Berkeley, 2003), 75.
32 Caplin, William E., ‘On the relation of musical topoi to formal function’, Eighteenth-Century Music 2/1 (2005), 120CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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34 See Jander, Owen, ‘The Prophetic Conversation in Beethoven's “Scene by the Brook”’, The Musical Quarterly 77/3 (1993), 508–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Richard Will, The Characteristic Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Beethoven (Cambridge, 2002), 186. Charles Rosen's vision of pastoral should be included here as well – for Rosen, the Ländler rhythms and bagpipe effects in Haydn's symphonies could not be pastoral alone, so he transformed them into models of the ‘heroic pastoral’: Haydn's melodies, he tells us, ‘seem detached from all that they portend, unaware of how much they signify’. See The Classical Style, expanded edn (New York, 1997), 162–3.
35 Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven, 98.
36 Senici, Landscape and Gender, 3–4.
37 Alpers, What Is Pastoral? 28.
38 Quoted in David Wyn Jones, Beethoven: Pastoral Symphony (Cambridge, 1995), 83.
39 Italy's troubled relationship to European romanticism has been widely explored. For a representative essay, see Joseph Luzzi, Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (New Haven, 2008).
40 See the Gazzetta privilegiata di Milano 67 (8 March 1831), 266.
41 La buccolica di Virgilio tradotta in versi italiani (Rovereto, 1828).
42 Senici, Landscape and Gender, 45.
43 Senici, Landscape and Gender, 45.
44 La buccolica, 9.
45 See Wendell Clausen, A Commentary on Virgil, Eclogues (Oxford, 1994), xxv, and Smith, Peter L., ‘Lentus in Umbra: A Symbolic Pattern in Vergil's Eclogues’, Phoenix 19 (1965), 298CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
46 Gazzetta privilegiata di Milano 74 (15 March 1831), 294.
47 See, for example, L'Aminta e L'amor fuggitivo di Torquato Tasso; Il pastor fido del Cav. Batista Guarini (Florence, 1824). This review appeared in the Corriere delle dame (10 March 1831), 106.
48 Mention of shade and beeches seems to have been all but obligatory in pastoral works, as Alessandro Striggio's libretto for Monteverdi's L'Orfeo also testifies: ‘Mira ch’à sè n'alletta / L'ombra, Orfeo, di que’ faggi’, proclaims a shepherd at the start of Act II.
49 Manzoni, ‘Letter on Romanticism’, trans. Joseph Luzzi, PMLA 119/2 (2004), 307.
50 Giovanni Andres, Dell'origine, progressi e stato attuale di ogni letteratura, vol. 2 (Pisa, 1829), 279.
51 This, at least, was the claim made by Angelo Maria Ricci in his Della vulgare eloquenza, vol. 2 (Rieti, 1828), 26.
52 ‘[U]n intrigo facile e chiaro con uno scioglimento naturale, caratteri semplici ed innocenti, passioni tranquillo e non portate tropp'oltre, versificazione fluida e dolce, stile pure e naturale, ma familiare e piano.’ Andres, Dell'origine, progressi e stato attuale di ogni letteratura, 279.
53 ‘La decorazione rappresenta un paesetto in Provenza: un boschetto è da un lato, dall'altro una rustica abitazione, di fronte un torrente attraversato da un ponticello: in lontano poggi e colline.’ La regina di Golconda (Milan, 1830), 23.
54 Volmar shares his name with the husband in Rousseau's Julie, the work that did so much to advertise the Alps as a retreat for sentimental European readers.
55 Robert S. Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (Bloomington, 2017), 53.
56 This characterisation of pastoral is taken from Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal (Cambridge, MA, 1975), 1.
57 Stephen Rumph, Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics (Berkeley, 2012), 95.
58 Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, 67.
59 Allanbrook, Secular Commedia, 139.
60 Allanbrook, Secular Commedia, 145.
61 Allanbrook, Secular Commedia, 140, 145.
62 Allanbrook, Secular Commedia, 146.
63 Allanbrook, Secular Commedia, 139.
64 Quoted in Rossiniana: antologia della critica nella prima metà dell'Ottocento, ed. Carlida Steffan (Pordenone, 1992), 83.
65 Letter dated 8 April 1839. Here quoted in Paganonne, Giorgio, ‘Tra “cadenze felicità felicità felicità” e “melodie lunghe lunghe lunghe”: Di una tecnica cadenzale nel melodramma del primo Ottocento’, Il saggiatore musicale 4/1 (1997), 53Google Scholar.
66 Schmalfeldt, Janet, ‘Cadential Processes: The Evaded Cadence and the “One More Time” Technique’, Journal of Musicological Research 12/1–2 (1992), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
67 Paganonne, ‘Tra “cadenze felicità felicità felicità” e “melodie lunghe lunghe lunghe”’, 86.
68 Steven Vande Moortele, The Romantic Overture and Musical Form from Rossini to Wagner (Cambridge, 2017), 61 and Scott Burnham, ‘Making Overtures’, in The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini, ed. Nicholas Mathew and Benjamin Walton (Cambridge, 2013), 200.
69 Mention of the Bettelcadenz can be found in a review of a Milanese performance of La clemenza di Tito that appeared in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung 19 (1817), 176. David Kimbell, Verdi in the Age of Italian Romanticism (Cambridge, 1981), 81. Both are discussed in Paganonne, ‘Tra “cadenze felicità felicità felicità” e “melodie lunghe lunghe lunghe”’, 54.
70 Caplin, William, ‘The Classical Cadence: Conceptions and Misconceptions’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 57/1 (2004), 82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
71 Bellini's treatment of cadences has received little attention to date, even by those whose interests are more traditionally analytical. For an important and sympathetic treatment of Bellini in this vein, see Rothstein, William, ‘Tonal Structures in Bellini’, Journal of Music Theory 56/2 (2012), 225–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
72 This example, along with other imitations of the pifferari, is discussed in Monelle, The Musical Topic, 229.
73 See again Caplin, ‘On the relation of musical topoi to formal function’, 120.
74 The number is in B♭ major in the critical edition, though the scores published by Ricordi record it as being a whole tone lower. This discrepancy does not alter the analysis that follows, however; few conclusions about the number's pastoral quality could be drawn from either of these keys.
75 Indeed, in the scores published by Ricordi, Elvino's cavatina was often listed as a duet.
76 Whatever the libretto may say about Elvino being a ‘wealthy landowner’, questions of class and labour are of little concern in the world of La sonnambula: all inhabitants of this village have something of the shepherd about them.
77 See the review in L'eco 29 (9 March 1831), 116.
78 See again Smart, ‘In Praise of Convention’.
79 The comment – ‘tutto non è nouvo, ma nuovo n’è il Tutto’ – was made about the integration of cadences into Rossini's style. See again Steffan, Rossiniana, 83.