This article is linked to the field of urban anthropology. The aim of my work was to investigate the “Giardino comunale Vincenzo Bellini” in Catania as a turning point for the civic and cultural life ...within urban space. The study moved from the idea that “Giardino Bellini” is not only a central urban space due to its position and history, but also represents a perfect location for reading social dynamics which are crucial in the city life. A “Villa” – so is the Giardino Bellini better known by Cataneses – can therefore assume a great anthropological significance, which was studied through a placed and relationship-wise analysis. However, this was open to a diachronic perspective able to understand how civic memories converge in this space-urban hub.
A comprehensive guide to Bellini's LA SONNAMBULA (The Sleepwalker), featuring Principal Characters in the opera, Brief Story Synopsis, Story Narrative with Music Highlight Examples, and an insightful ...and in depth Commentary and Analysis by Burton D. Fisher, noted opera author and lecturer.
A comprehensive guide to Bellini's NORMA, featuring Principal Characters in the opera, Brief Story Synopsis, Story Narrative with Music Highlight Examples, and an insightful and in depth Commentary ...and Analysis by Burton D. Fisher, noted opera author and lecturer.
The arts can provide unique ways for determining how people not directly involved in medicine were viewing and informing others about physical and mental disorders. With operas, one need only think ...about how various perturbations of madness have been portrayed. Somnambulism has long been a particularly perplexing disorder, both to physicians and the laity, and it features in a number of operas. Two mid-nineteenth-century masterpieces are examined in detail in this contribution: Verdi's Macbeth and Bellini's La Sonnambula. In the former, the sleepwalking scene is faithful to what Shakespeare's had written early in the seventeenth century, a time of witchcraft, superstition, and the belief that nocturnal wanderings might be caused by guilt. In Bellini's opera, in contrast, the victim is an innocent girl who suffers from a quirk of nature, hence eliciting sympathy and compassion. By examining the early literature on somnambulism and comparing this disorder in these operas, we can see how thinking about this condition has changed and, more generally, how music was helping to generate new ways of thinking about specific diseases and medicine.
La straniera and to a lesser extent Il pirata (1827), which was also based on a Gothic text about an exile's impossible love for another, were described at their premieres as almost radical in their ...use of anti-Rossinian canto declamato, a strictly syllabic setting of words.2While commentators at the time noted - sometimes with considerable alarm - that Bellini had banished the sorts of melodiousness and ornamentation that distorted words in order to ensure their clear articulation, this has since become a celebrated fact. Canto declamato might, then, have liberated words from ornamentation and allowed them to be heard, but in tandem it created another sort of enclosure: this is not a traditional mad scene in the mould Bellini used in his later pastoral opera La sonnambula (1831), where judiciously placed flights of coloratura leave open the possibility that the heroine Amina can resist the forces which confine her.7Representational ambiguities in this aria are minimal by comparison. While Bellini could indeed have intended the distinctive balance of words and music in these works to be a model for composition writ large, Imogene and Alaide's roaming voices instead offer a rather more fantastic vision: that music can trace the elemental moves of Gothic texts. *. See Smart Mary Ann , 'In Praise of Convention: Formula and Experiment in Bellini's Self-Borrowings ', Journal of the American Musicological Society 53 (2000 ), 30.
I Puritani is the masterpiece that crowned the creation of the Italian composer Vincenzo Bellini, being remarked and appreciated for the richness of his melodicity and profound symbols filled with ...the inspiration and creativity of a creator. This was the last of the ten works composed by Bellini, whose disappearance was premature, at only 33 years, but the passion and talent with which he created revealed a work dominated by essence and emotion, which establishes a close connection between chant and the poetic text, providing new expressive valences to the lyrical universe. The extremely difficult and demanding vocal writing raises serious challanges, the Bel-canto style meaning not only a "beautiful chant" but also a difficult texture, a certain specific phrasing and a spread of spectacular acute tones.
The catalogue of Bellini's works in The New Grove Dictionary lists this aria as 'spurious and doubtful'.3In the autograph score of Beatrice di Tenda, now held at the Biblioteca musicale governativa ...del Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome, significant chunks of the outer numbers and framing pillars of the opera (i.e., introduzione and finale secondo) are not in Bellini's hand. The manuscript's 'tormented history' is evident, as much in the first as in the midst of the final scene of the opera.4In the latter instance, at the point of 'Angiol di pace', a second offstage intrusion returns the audience to the situation of 'Ah! non pensar che pieno'. Whatever its provenance, the four-voice choral adaptation was first published in tonic sol-fa notation in 1890 at Morija, a mission station set up at the foot of the Makhoarane mountain at the invitation of Moshoeshoe I, the 'greatest southern African of the nineteenth century' who consolidated a 'national language' - with the help of his vassal-missionaries - and gathered the diverse clans of the region into a people now known as the Basotho (see Fig. 1).7'Ah! non pensar' was issued as the second cantique chrétien in a book of choruses that attributed its contents to a mixture of European, native and anonymous authors. The collection was entitled Lipina tsa likolo tse phahameng, which translates as Songs of the Higher Schools (Morija Sesuto Book Depot, 1890), a volume so popular that it is still in print today.8Fig. 1 (colour online) The first phrase of 'Ah! non pensar' in Sesotho tonic sol-fa adaptation, inserted as a 'soprano solo' (on the third system of the left-hand page), during the course of the choral prayer: 'Prega!
Tonal Structures in Bellini Rothstein, William
Journal of music theory,
10/2012, Letnik:
56, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The operas of Vincenzo Bellini (1801–35) exhibit compositional traits that, in North American scholarship, have generally been associated with German composers, especially Wagner. Close analysis of ...passages from
, and other operas establishes the prevalence in Bellini of tonal pairing, usually (but not always) involving relative keys. The
or focal melodic pitch, long associated with Verdi’s operas, is found to play a unifying role in the second-act finale of
. Issues of reception history, text criticism, and analytical methodology are also discussed.
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