Dear Vocalisters:
With permission, I'm posting an interesting message sent recently to the Opera
list by its
listowner, Bob Kosovsky, who's a librarian at the NY Public Library for the
Performing
Arts. He reports a recent journal article on the opera composer Belllini's
"self-borrowings". I'm going to put at the top his commentary, which goes to
some
discussion we've had about opera composers and their desire to have words
understood. Most
of us think of the Bel Canto composers as not caring much at all about text,
but this
article sees it differently. At the end of the message is the official
abstract of the
journal article.
Peggy
> Subject: [OPERA-L] Bellini's self-borrowings
> Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2000 12:35:29 -0400
> From: kos@I...
> To: OPERA-L@L...
>
> The latest issue of that bastion of musicological thought, the Journal of
> the American Musicological Society (JAMS), contains a whopping three
> articles on operatic matters in Mozart, Bellini, and Wagner.
>
> This would have been unheard of twenty-five years ago. It attests to a
> great wave of change in the scholarly community to not only tackle issues
> in operatic literature, but also allowing them to take central attention.
> By having operatic discussions occupy most of the contents of JAMS, the
> editors have modified their usual search for topical diversity by letting
> the authors' range of research methods and techniques be the source of
> variety.
>
> I jumped to the article on Bellini first. Here's the title, author credits,
> and the published abstract (slightly modified):
>
> In Praise of Convention: Formula and Experiment in Bellini's Self-Borrowings
> By Mary Ann Smart
<see the bottom of this message for the abstract>
> Don't let the academic sound of the abstract sway you -- the article is very
> readable. I think even non-musicians, including those who don't read music,
> should be able to derive something from Smart's writing.
>
> For me, the most compelling idea presented was the notion that, as Bellini
> matured, when reusing his own music, he *reduced* the amount of
> ornamentation in his vocal lines. The reason was to allow the words
> to be heard more clearly. Smart shows how Bellini wanted to disassociate
> himself (to an extent) with the stereotype bel canto, and work towards a
> more complex integration of music and drama. Showing a borrowing from
> ADELSON E SALVINI ("Ecco, signor, la sposa") to LA STRANIERA ("Meco tu
> vieni, o misera") Smart shows how Bellini practically eliminated the
> lively melody from the vocal part and substituted an almost monotone line so
> that the lively melody would not distract attention from the import of the
> words.
>
>
> Bob Kosovsky -- Librarian
> Music Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
> kos@i... OPERA-L@L... ; rjkgc@c...
> ------My opinions do not necessarily represent those of my institutions-------
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> In Praise of Convention: Formula and Experiment in Bellini's
> Self-Borrowings
> By Mary Ann Smart
>
> Mary Ann Smart is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of
> California, Berkeley. She is author of the articles on Bellini and
> Donizetti in the Revised New Grove Dictionary and editor of the
> critical edition of Donizetti's last opera, DOM SEBASTIEN, which was
> premiered at Bologna's Teatro Communale in December 1998 and will be
> published by Edizione Ricordi (Milan). She is currently finishing a
> book on the relationship between music and staging in repertory
> stretching from the first French grand operas of the 1830s to Wagner's
> Ring.
>
>
> Abstract:
> In the 1880s, the realization that Bellini had extensively reused
> melodies from early or unfinished works in his most famous operas
> provoked a small aesthetic crisis in Italy. Although today such reuse
> of material is no longer looked upon as a scandalous breach of
> compositional integrity, scholars have been slow to examine Bellini's
> self-borrowings for clues to the evolution of his style or to his
> attitudes toward the relations between melody and drama.
>
> Most of Bellini's self-borrowings show the composer simplifying his
> melodies, reducing harmonic and melodic variety as if to distance
> himself from bel canto convention. At the same time, melodic
> convention is essential to understanding the borrowings, a fact that
> becomes particularly obvious in those cases where dramatic parallels
> between the two contexts of a melody are obscure or nonexistent. For
> example, the recast of a cheerful cabaletta in ZAIRA ("Non `e, non `e
> tormento") as a lament in I CAPULETI E I MONTECCHI ("Deh! tu deh! tu,
> bell'anima") relies on a resemblance between melodic figures
> conventionally used to imitate tears or laughter-but also critiques
> those conventions. An allusive relationship between refrains in IL
> PIRATA ("Lo sognai ferito, esangue, in deserta") and I PURITANI ("Qui
> la voce sua soave") similarly derives its logic more from a shared
> musical evocation of solitude and empty space than from any overt
> dramatic resemblance between the two scenes. The article argues that
> for Bellini self-borrowing was entangled with the looser techniques of
> allusion and reliance on melodic convention. For this reason, study of
> the self-borrowings provides a model for engaging with the musical
> language of early nineteenth-century Italian opera, redressing the
> tendency to dismiss its musical detail as "merely" conventional and
> thus unworthy of analysis.
--
Margaret Harrison, Alexandria, Virginia, USA
"Music for a While Shall All Your Cares Beguile"
mailto:peggyh@i...
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