La Storia siamo Noi: Vincenzo Bellini (ENG SUB)

Vincenzo Salvatore Carmelo Francesco Bellini (Catania, 3 November 1801 – Puteaux, 23 September 1835) was an Italian composer, one of the most famous opera composers of the nineteenth century.

Most of the information we have about Bellini's life and his work as a musician comes from the letters he sent to his friend Francesco Florimo, a fellow student in Naples. Considered, along with Gioachino Rossini and Gaetano Donizetti, the composer par excellence of Italian bel canto of the early 19th century, in his short life Bellini composed ten operas, the most famous and performed of which are La sonnambula, Norma and I puritani.

Bellini's music is a singular blend of Classicism and Romanticism. His training in Naples was Classicist, based on the models of Palestrina, the Neapolitan opera school (Pergolesi and Paisiello), Haydn, and Mozart, as well as a personal penchant for poetic values ​​such as harmony and composure. The pathos of his works, the importance of passion and emotion in the events depicted, was Romantic. The connecting point between these two tendencies is melody, which, without compromising classical sobriety, creates dreamy, sensual, and melancholic atmospheres, close to the Romanticism of the time. This talent for crafting melodies of the most limpid beauty still retains an aura of magic today, while his artistic personality is difficult to categorize within historiographical categories.

Tied to an ancient musical conception, founded on the primacy of song, whether vocal or instrumental, the Sicilian Bellini brought first to Milan and then to Paris an echo of the Mediterranean culture that Romantic Europe had idealized in the myth of classical antiquity. The young Wagner was so dazzled by this that he set his second opera, Das Liebesverbot, in Sicily, holding up the clarity of Bellini's singing as a model for German opera composers and attempting to imitate it in turn.

Within a sort of Bellini renaissance, the music of the Catanian composer attracted the attention of several avant-garde composers in the 20th century, such as Bruno Maderna and, above all, Luigi Nono, who reinterpreted it outside of operatic categories, focusing on a particular conception of sound, voice, and silence whose roots - according to contemporary musicology - are rooted in the music of ancient Greece and the Mediterranean area rather than in the modern European musical tradition.