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 As the years passed, as the world in which Bellini had lived and worked was superseded by a very different world, in which Italy had become a free and united nation, and in which the opera-houses of the peninsula were exploring a more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’.

There follows a fuller account of the Liszt work briefly described in Chapter 7.

The ‘Rẻminiscences’ are best conceived as falling into three linked movements:

I [Introduction and first movement: key centre G]

i. (bars 1–27) Tempo giusto G minor

An introduction: the chosen key is that of Bellini's Sinfonia but the material is that that accompanies the assembling of the Gauls for the mistletoe ceremony. Startling is the evocation of an Italian operatic tutti in four-part ff chords in the centre of the keyboard, almost as if Liszt were really trying to suggest the ‘red-hot lump of metal’ that Tovey liked to evoke in describing the brass writing in Verdi's early scoring. Note too that Bellini's timpani are replaced by quasi-side-drum (i.e. more military-sounding) rolls. In the third phrase Liszt changes Bellini's harmony to introduce diminished sevenths; these then dominate the fourth phrase, cast in the form of high spread (bardic?) chords. The music breaks down into a freely composed, cadenza-like link, making striking use of chromatic colour.

ii. (bars 28–88) Quasi andante G major etc.

This begins as a straight, though very rich, transcription of the introductory processional music from the Coro d'Introduzione – both its scene-setting music and its banda march. It is initially the pianistic colour of the transcription that is so arresting. Not content with simply reproducing Bellini's orchestral texture, Liszt thickens and darkens it, doubling each strand at the lower octave, and turning the throbbing pedal note into harp-like fifths, octaves and twelfths. He adds an additional chromatic nuance, where Bellini had already shown the way, at 38.

Medea

The tale of Medea is a harrowing one even by the standards of Greek mythology; of its various elements it is the Corinthian episode that has lingered most vividly in the appalled imagination.

Medea, a princess of Colchis, to the east of the Euxine (Black) Sea, was an enchantress and priestess of the moon-goddess Hecate. When Jason came to Colchis in his quest for the Golden Fleece, Medea fell in love with him, employed her magic arts to help him win the Fleece, then sailed with him as he made his escape from the enraged King of Colchis, her father. Their flight to Corinth was accompanied by horrid demonstrations both of her magical powers and of her ruthlessness, notably the murder and dismembering of her brother and the jettisoning of him overboard piece by piece to delay the pursuit of her father's ship (which out of religious duty was bound to gather up the floating limbs to givethem proper burial).

Medea bore Jason two sons, but once he was back in civilized Greece, he could not – despite all his vows – be happy to remain the husband of a murderous Asiatic enchantress, and entered into a contract of marriage with Glauce, daughter of the King of Corinth. Maddened with jealousy and contempt for Jason, Medea sent Glauce a poisoned coronet and robe, which killed her by burning away her flesh.

In the eyes of contemporary critics Bellini was a ‘philosophical’ composer; that is to say, a composer whose music, unlike that of his great predecessor Rossini, was intimately linked with the poetry he set. Sometimes this perception led to his being described as ‘the restorer of true Italian music’, faithful to the precepts of the classical training of the Naples conservatories – to those, for example, of one of his own teachers, Girolamo Crescentini, who declared, for all the world like some Renaissance humanist, that ‘il canto deve essere un'imitazione del discorso’ (song must be an imitation of speech) (Maguire 1989, p. 45). Bellini's relationship with his librettist Felice Romani was therefore the most critical artistic relationship of his career, more important to the unfolding and development of his genius even than his associations with Pasta or with Rubini. ‘If Romani had not been,’ remarked Francesco Regli, ‘Italy would have had no Bellini’ (quoted in Rinaldi 1965, p. 351).

When Bellini first met Romani, shortly after his arrival in Milan in the spring of 1827, he had been a practising librettist for some thirteen years, producing anything up to half a dozen librettos in a typical season, most of them for La Scala. He was a vastly more experienced man of the theatre than Bellini himself, and had worked with all the important Italian composers of the age. But from the first, Bellini exerted a special fascination over him, and prompted a greater measure of solicitude than any of the others with whom Romani had worked.

This is a series of studies of individual operas, written for the serious opera-goer or record-collector as well as the student or scholar. Each volume has three main concerns. The first is historical: to describe the genesis of the work, its sources or its relation to literary proto-types, the collaboration between librettist and composer, and the first performance and subsequent stage history. The history is itself a record of changing attitudes towards the work, and an index of general changes of taste. The second is analytical and it is grounded in a very full synopsis which considers the opera as a structure of musical and dramatic effects. In most volumes there is also a musical analysis of a section of the score, showing how the music serves or makes the drama. The analysis, like the history, naturally raises questions of interpretation, and the third concern of each volume is to show how critical writing about an opera, like production and performance, can direct or distort appreciation of its structural elements. Some conflict of interpretation is an inevitable part of this account; editors of the handbooks reflect this – by citing classic statements, by commissioning new essays, by taking up their own critical position. A final section gives a select bibliography and guides to other sources.

After the second performance of La straniera in February 1829, the Gazzetta privilegiata di Milano had remarked: ‘Amid the irruption of the Rossinian torrent, it is no small thing that a young composer should signal the first steps in his career by attempting a genre that could be called new for the present period. Not only is he the restorer of Italian music, but also – a modern Orpheus – he has resuscitated the beautiful melody of Jommelli, of Marcello, of Pergolesi, with beautiful song, with splendid, elegant, pleasing instrumentation’ (quoted in Weinstock 1972, p. 66).

Bellini enjoyed a notably successful career; of his ten operas only Zaira and Beatrice di Tenda failed to receive the most enthusiastic welcome from his contemporaries. As these comments on La straniera show, however, he was widely, and surely correctly, perceived as stepping aside from the mainstream of modern Italian music, so brilliantly represented by Rossini. To do that was to be, in some measure, controversial. Bellini's operas, particularly those produced in Milan, the spiritual centre of the Romantic movement in Italy, excited debate in a way that Donizetti's operas, or even Verdi's earlier operas, rarely did.

Togn and Pepp

We may begin with one of the most unusual tributes ever paid to an opera. Within a few weeks of the premiere, Carlo Angiolini, a Milanese dialect poet, published La Norma resiada (The Norma Debate), in the form of a ‘dialogh tra el Scior Togn e tra el Scior Pepp’ (Dialogue between Signor Tonio and Signor Peppino).

The evolution of the final Latin text of Oedipus rex is hard if not impossible to reconstruct. Cocteau completed his first draft in late October 1925, but this seems to have been the text he later published as an independent play called Oedipe-Roi, which coincides only in isolated passages with the eventual Latin. On the other hand, published French versions of Daniélou's text digress from the play even in many of the coincident passages, encouraging the speculation that they are indeed translations from the Latin rather than printings of Cocteau's French text as sent to Daniélou, which seems not to have survived. It would be useful to have the original French, if only to check the exact form of the text as it reached the translator, as this would presumably then reveal, beyond serious doubt, the form of Daniélou's text as it reached Stravinsky. This in turn would tell us to what extent the complicated scheme of line and phrase repetitions so characteristic of the score was Stravinsky's work, and to what extent it originated with the librettist or translator. Daniélou's text is not at all a routine Latinisation, but a skilful classical conceit in which assonance, interior rhyme, pleonasm, chiasmus, and other devices work so well towards the composer's musical intentions that it is hard to believe that there was no direct collaboration between them, as all the incidental documentation seems to suggest.

Like most very great artists, Stravinsky was by trade a synthesiser of experience. Works that seem to display the sublime detachment of pure art (whatever that may be) turn out to have complex origins in the social and intellectual life around him, origins which could hardly be guessed from the music but which, once known or suspected, can help us come to terms with complexities or even obscurities in the work itself.

There is nothing new about this; the nineteenth century offers several well documented parallels (Schumann, Wagner, Mahler). All the same, the case of Stravinsky is in some respects unique. The Romantics thought of themselves as outcasts, but Stravinsky really was an outcast. Stranded in Switzerland when war broke out in 1914, he was finally cut off from his Russian homeland by the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, and thereafter he made only one trip to Russia, in 1962. He moved from Switzerland to France, then later (in 1939) to the USA, and materially speaking he settled wherever he lived: he was no spiritual outcast, like Mahler, nor consciously part of a diaspora, like Schoenberg. But quite simply he was detached from his cultural roots, something which has always made life hard for exiled Russian artists, whether they are like Chagall and resort to recurrent images of old Russia, or like Solzhenitsyn and more or less cease to work creatively.