Singing/Hearing the Outerness: An Analysis of Hermeneutical Perspectives on the Relationships between Bellinian and Sicilian Song
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Singing/Hearing the Outerness: An Analysis of Hermeneutical
Perspectives on the Relationships between Bellinian and
Sicilian Song
Francesco Del Bravo
Journal of Mediterranean Studies, Volume 21, Number 2, 2012, pp. 379-404
(Article)
Published by Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/671805/summary
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 2012 ISSN: 1016-3476 Vol. 21, No. 2: 379 –404
Singing/Hearing the Outerness 379
SINGING/HEARING THE OUTERNESS: AN ANALYSIS OF
HERMENEUTICAL PERSPECTIVES ON
THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN
BELLINIAN AND SICILIAN SONG
FRANCESCO D EL BRAVO
Free University of Berlin
A deep link between the music of Vincenzo Bellini and that of Sicilian and Mediterranean
cultures has been long hypothesized and suggested by musicologists.
A discussion and a synthesis of the central interpretations of the issue is made
throughout the paper, in order to find affinities and points of contact between different
studies, mostly independent of each other. According to them, such assumed relationship
can be identified both through element of similarity between Bellinian and Sicilian
melodies—arch like structure, metric irregularity, tendency to melismas, harmonic texture
based on modal elements in a well defined total harmony—and through an auratic approach
to their emotional dimension.
Expanding the analytical range in respect of Bellinian and Sicilian melodies will
enable us to redefine the whole question, acknowledging as its basic principle a certain
liquidity between purely poietic moments and others that are essentially receptive.
Musicologists have long postulated the existence of an intimate relationship
between the music of Vincenzo Bellini and that of Mediterranean cultures,
especially Sicily. Such relationships have been identified both in the creative
dimension of the composer and in the receptive dimension of his music,
both related to the places where he spent his childhood and youth, i.e.
Sicily (Catania: 1801–1819), and Naples (1819–1827), the city where he
attended the Conservatory of San Sebastiano.1 In the present paper, the
analysis carried out by different scholars of Bellinian song, Sicilian song,
and Bellinian-Sicilian song will be examined in order to understand their
methodological approach to the inquiry.
In a short essay of the year 1885, Michele Scherillo outlined these
fluctuations –between creativity and reception and between Sicily and Naples–
in a terse way, noticing how a passage of the famous aria ‘Ah! non credea
mirarti’ from La Sonnambula (1831) was appropriated by the ‘lazzaroni’
Copyright © 2012 Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta.380 Francesco Del Bravo
(Naples’ lower class people) in the equally famous Neapolitan song ‘Fenesta
che lucive’, first published in 18432 (see Ex. 1), and how, according to a
personal report of Francesco Florimo, Bellini’s closest friend during his
student years in Naples, the composer was said to have brought from Sicily
a lost notebook in which he had notated Sicilian poems that he was used to
strum and sing softly during his free time: ‘Florimo assures me that Bellini
made a hotchpotch of Sicilian poems and that he used to sing them softly
and strum them’ (Scherillo 1885/1990: 190). 3 The passage does not allow
us to understand whether the unordered florilegium contained musical notation,
but it clearly indicates that Bellini used it in a musical way.
Ex. 1. ‘Ah! non credea mirarti’ and ‘Fenesta che lucivem’ similar passage.
The resemblance between the two melodies involves only a few measures,
but the critical attention that it has already generated since the end of the
nineteenth century reveals a critical consideration of a deep connection
between the last pupil of the glorious Neapolitan School and the nebulous
‘pre-Classical period’ (Di Mauro 2008: 98) of Neapolitan song, as if the
Neapolitans were the favoured recipient of the composer’s creativity.4
The rather unclear reference in the same writing to a lost sketchbook with
annotated Sicilian popular songs—notice the reference to a whole area
and not to the city where Bellini grew up—implicates, on the other hand,
a critical suspicion about the possibility of a non-Neapolitan derivation
of Bellini’s musical language, whose roots were to be sought not in the
urban context of the city famous throughout Europe since the 18th century
for its conservatories and opera houses, but in a vast land surrounded by
the sea.Singing/Hearing the Outerness 381
In Search of Elsewhere
Allusions to an undefined and distant universe, in terms of both space and
time, as an explanation for Bellini’s ‘secret’ of his melodies is a constant
feature in the critical works on him that have followed one another since
the second half of the nineteenth century. For instance, in his 1868 monograph
on the composer Arthur Pougin quotes, without providing a reference, a
text by Paul Scudo in which it is argued:
Born in a blessed country, the ear enchanted since his childhood by the
gentle melodies that are repeated since centuries by Sicilian shepherds; the
heart full of such melancholy inspired, as in all the sun beloved countries, by
the evening shadows and the infinite horizon of the sea: a melancholy whose
expression can be traced in Theocritus, in some madrigals of the 16 th century
by Gesualdo, and mainly in Pergolesi and Paisiello; Bellini fuses such native
accents of his southern genius with the reverie, the nebulous and pantheistic
aspirations of German and English literature, forming an exquisite whole full
of charm and mystery (Pougin 1868: 212–213). 5
In Pougin’s view, the sun, the evening shadows, the horizon of the sea, ancient
Greek poetry, the romantic German and English literature, together with Gesualdo,
Pergolesi, and Paisiello constitute concrete categories (some of them structured
through a principle of opposition, such as in sun/shadow, southern/northern
genius) which may be used to analyse and interpret Bellini’s music.
In a 1899 introduction to a German translation of the La sonnambula
libretto, Carl Friedrich Wittmann asserts the following about Bellini’s melodies:
‘As for the form of its original melodies, they find reminiscence in the
delightful songs of his fatherland, that the stay in Naples did not let him
forget’ (Wittmann 1899: 32).6 Once again, the Sicilian melodies heard during
childhood and early youth survive as indelible memories in Bellini’s musical
mind, despite his prestigious education in the Neapolitan conservatory.
The search for an embryonic cause in Bellinian melodies has more
recently prompted Salvatore Failla to recognize the importance of the zampogna
a paro in this regard. The zampogna a paro is a double chantered pipe, a
pastoral instrument widespread throughout Catania. Its music, based on the
interaction between the static harmonies of the bass drones and the diatonic-
chromatic melodies of the double-reed chanters, has been considered by
the musicologist evidently the recondite source for Bellini’s inspiration
(Failla 1985).
Furthermore, the composer Luigi Nono, a great admirer of Bellini’s
music, identified in the ancient, stratified, multicultural universe of Sicily382 Francesco Del Bravo
absorbed by Bellini during his childhood, rather than in his sophisticated
and cultivated education at the Neapolitan conservatory, the hidden core of
his music:
What for me is a true outrage towards Bellini—and it is a strictly personal
opinion—is this way of relating him to Italian opera, because in such way it
is not possible to comprehend his huge breadth, not only as musician. Especially
when it concerns the voice or the chorus, such approach, typical as method
of an academic mentality narrowed from the same institution, disregards the
various cultures that are blended in Bellini under the influences of Greek,
Byzantine, Orthodox, Jewish, Spanish, and Arabic ideas. Nothing to do with
Italian culture, nothing to do with a singing codified in the stereotyped forms
of Italian opera. 7 (Nono 1987/2001: 430)
An important element that characterizes the writings of Pougin, Wittmann,
Failla and Nono is not only the identification of Sicily and Sicilian musical
culture as the basic factors for the understanding and explanation of Bellinian
melody, but also the absence of any written musical example or exact
reference to a specific Bellinian or Sicilian melody. As Sicily remains
indeterminate in its verbalization, Bellini also appears as an indefinable
composer standing apart from his time and from the opera houses for
which he composed his music.
In Search of a Contact
Pierluigi Petrobelli (2004) was the first who made an attempt to investigate
the relationships between the music of Bellini and that of Sicily from the
perspective of a written musical text, i.e. through the medium toward which
Bellini directed his compositional efforts and which allowed his music to
be performed, experienced, examined and/or discussed. In his essay, Petrobelli
observes that some essential features of Bellinian melody, mainly, his tendency
to treat melismas as constitutive elements of the melodic form and not as
ornamentations, the arch-like structure of the melody, and the prominence
of a slow ascending structure—can be traced to some Sicilian repertoires,
as in the case of the Siclian singer Annunziata D’Onofrio (b. 1925) studied
by Gaetano Pennino (1985). Although the repertoire of this Sicilian singer
was recorded and transcribed a century and a half after Bellini’s death, and
although it shows some features derived from the cultivated official tradition,
such as in the use of standard Italian words within the text instead of
Sicilian ones and the description of the songs as ‘romanze’ (romances), a
term used for salon and operatic music, this repertoire was integrated in aSinging/Hearing the Outerness 383
cultural context far away from opera houses and salons, thus indicating its
acceptance by the small village of Caronia, near Messina, where D’Onofrio
was born and where she lived and sung. Referring to the poetry, Pennino
has pointed out that:
It is logical to assume […] the existence in Caronia (presumably—according
to Annunziata—at the beginning of the last century [the 19 th century]) of one
or more creators of this poetical style, which seems to have been influenced
by a non-popular culture and which could have been conceived by individuals
partly educated or, in any case, in a more or less stable contact with the
official culture. (Pennino 1985: 15) 8
Paradoxically, the only example used by Petrobelli to argue for such
correlations is a transcription of a romanza sung by D’Onofrio (see Ex. 2),
thus leaving the written melodies of Bellini in a verbalized auratic dimension
and placing the chanted song of the famous Sicilian singer on inked paper.
The interpretative approach of Petrobelli suggests the existence of a
sort of aesthetic consonance between the musical style of an operatic composer
living in the nineteenth century and that of a folk singer who came after
him, thus shifting our attention to what sounds ‘Bellinian’ and ‘Sicilian’
without establishing a chronological connection between the two. In this
way, the analytical problem regarding an inextricable commingling between
‘cultured’ and ‘popular’ music posed by the case ‘Fenesta che lucive’ arises
again, showing how such distinctions were blurred in the context of nineteenth-
century Italian culture—a culture characterized by a widespread circulation
of operatic works whose fruition was related to the most disparate social
groups.
At any rate, the attempt at an analytical, rather than an evocative,
approach to the question can form the starting point for a survey of the
distinct interpretations that have been made of Bellinian and Sicilian melodies.
Since such interpretations have been centred on the analysis of melodies,
and thus only hint at some of their musical components, avoiding the
complex relation between text and music, I have decided to set aside from
the present enquiry a close examination of the musical setting of poetry.
Finding Bellini
In his 1859 essay on Giuseppe Verdi’s operas, Abramo Basevi (made an
interesting observation:384 Francesco Del Bravo Ex. 2. Annunziata D’Onofrio: ‘Sono tra mille affanni’ (transcribed in Petrobelli 2004).
Singing/Hearing the Outerness 385
the Verdian, as the Rossinian, melody is substantially consonant, while the
Bellinian one is rather dissonant, because in it the passing tones, the retardations,
the appoggiaturas, the sevenths and the false fifths are not ornaments but
rather are essential parts of the same melody. A clear example of this can be
found in Il Pirata on the words ‘Per te di vane lagrime’:
Ex. 3. ‘Per te di vane lagrime’, incipit.
The consonant melodies, being based on the fundamental tones, maintain a
vigour lacking in the dissonant ones, which are however more touching, by
reason of a certain anxiety introduced in our soul, an anxiety generated from
the acute need we feel for resolution of the dissonances (Basevi 1859: 17–18).9
Basevi’s considerations are of great significance and highly stimulating,
as they direct critical attention to the psychological perception of the melody,
analysed in terms of its temporal dimensions and within the harmonic
texture in which it is inserted.10
Not dissimilar observations were later made by Carl Dahlhaus, who in a
thorough analysis not of a single musical passage but of an entire aria
(again ‘Ah! non credea mirarti’, see Ex. 4) identified as characteristic features
of the Bellinian melody the metric asymmetry of the musical phrasing and
the deep relationship between the evident plainness (‘nobile simplicite’) of
the melody and its fluid continuity deriving from a sophisticated harmony
based on retardatons (Dahlhaus 1980/2003: 119–121).
Significantly, Dahlhaus made his observations of the Bellinian melodic-
harmonic conception with reference to an example of a melody deprived of
accompaniment, thus implicitly stating that the melody itself generates and
encloses its harmonization—although it should be considered that not every
retardation activated by Bellini is plainly identifiable by the bare melody.
Friedrich Lippmann (1981: 429), the scholar to whom the musicological
Bellini renaissance during the twentieth century can be ascribed, identified
the displacement of the melodic climax from the central to the final section
of an aria as the distinguishing component of Bellinian melody, later observing386 Francesco Del Bravo
Ex. 4. ‘Ah! non credea mirarti’, first part.
that in ‘Casta Diva’ from Norma the climax is reached through a slow
growth of harmonic tension (Lippmann 1990: 206).
More recently, Giorgio Sanguinetti (2003), moving from the analysis of
Basevi and Lippmann, has achieved an innovative melodic-harmonic analysis,
also based on Schenkerian principles, of ‘Casta Diva’, noting how its melody
establishes an intense movement with the harmony in order to create a
gradual increase of tension that flows into a double climax: the one melodic,
coinciding with the melodic peak, the other ‘structural’, coinciding with
the maximum peak of harmonic tension and displaced a beat after the
melodic peak, shortly before the beginning of the cadential section.
Similarly, in his accurate analysis of ‘Casta Diva’ Richard Taruskin
observes how the melody is organized on the basis of a deep tension based
on: 1) a contrast between the initial two well balanced four-bar periods and
the subsequent phrase of five bars lacking caesuras and internal repetitions,
with a whole measure in which the voice remains on a single note above a
changing harmony, a half step below the melodic peak; 2) a calculated use
of dissonances, which considerably grow in the phrase of five bars before
the reaching of the melodic peak, relenting then gradually until a final
indecision, during the cadential passage, between major and minor mode
(Taruskin 2010: 42–43).Singing/Hearing the Outerness 387
The features that have been identified by scholars as characteristic of
the Bellinian melody are thus: metric irregularity, the use of calculated
dissonances, and a growth of melodic-harmonic tension that finds its final
unleashing in two non-coincident climaxes. The Bellinian melody, in short,
can be defined as intrinsically asymmetric and structurally asynchronic.
Finding Sicily
Regarding the analysis of Sicilian melody, it has to be noted that it remains
difficult to establish which Sicilian music and which Sicilian songs could
have been heard by Bellini during his childhood and early youth: the first
anthology of Sicilian songs gathered using a methodological approach that
is sensitive to the anthropological and musical context was assembled by
Alberto Favara, who between 1898 and 1905 collected and transcribed,
both in urban and in non-urban environments, the songs sung by the people
during their everyday life (see Favara 1957). We know that Bellini was
first musically educated by his grandfather, Vincenzo Tobia Bellini, who in
1767–1768 arrived in Catania from Abruzzi as a maestro di cappella following
his studies at the Sant’Onofrio Conservatory in Naples.11 Bellini the grandson,
then, must have had a cultivated approach to the music, including popular
and folk, since his childhood.
A useful source, before the Favara-Collection, is the account of the
journey made by the German classical scholar Gustav Parthey, who in
1822 travelled through southern Italy, Malta and the Middle East, also
transcribing some songs collected—as he claims—in Naples, Sicily and
Malta and placing them in a musical appendix (Parthey 1834). The songs
seem to be part of that half-cultivated repertory typical of urban areas, in
which a music tradition created and consumed by all the different cultures
that were part of the city was circulating as a sort of lingua franca. The
texts have the form of the metastasian canzonetta (quatrains of settenari or
ottonari with various rhyme schemes, normally ordered in stanzas of two
quatrains); in some cases, the authors of the poetry are cited (Giovanni
Meli, Tommaso Gargallo, Metastasio, Nicola Valletta). Parthey himself in
the very short introduction to the appendix suggests the urban original
context of the transcribed repertory:
The following songs have been overheard near people mostly in Sicily, others
in Naples and Malta. Not all have the storyteller-like, uniform style that we
are used to hearing in the German folk-melodies; a good number of them
reveal a considerable influence of opera, so that it is not possible to define
them as genuine songs of the folk […]. The most colourful in terms of388 Francesco Del Bravo
orthography and rhyme scheme are some Sicilian ones in which the singer
take pains to declaim in literary Italian. (Parthey 1834,1: Musikbeilage)12
The intercepted melodies are noted on two staves, with an accompaniment
suitable for guitar or piano.
Since all the songs are strophic, a musical form used also by storytellers,
it is clear that the absence of ‘uniformity’ and monotony noticed by Parthey
when comparing them to the German songs has to be traced directly to the
melody of the songs and not to their formal organization. It is no accident
that the ‘proto-folklorist’ makes an interesting observation on the song
n. 12 care (Le care luci):
Ex. 5. ‘Le care luci’, incipit.Singing/Hearing the Outerness 389
‘N° XII (‘Oh cari oh fulgidi’) is evidently a Tyrolesan Ländler, brought to
Sicily by Austrian troops’ (ibid.).13 A song whose melodic accents coincide
with the (repetitive and regular) rhythmic ones and whose regular harmonic
rhythm follows the most elementary harmonic modulations—essentially a
dance song—is inevitably (‘evidently’) labelled as non-Sicilian, Tyrolean
to be precise; Basevi would have probably used the term ‘consonant’.
Although Parthey does not explain what it is that allows us to identify a
melody as a Sicilian one, some songs contain features that were in all
probability labelled as non-Tyrolean. If we consider the songs n. 3 (‘Lu
labbru’, poem by Meli) and n. 7 (‘Giacchi la sorte barbara’), for example,
we can notice how the melody implicates a peculiar harmonization in a
tonal context.
Ex. 6a. ‘Lu labbru’, incipit.
Ex. 6b. ‘Giacchi la sorte barbara’, incipit.390 Francesco Del Bravo
In ‘Lu labbru’, for example, after an A minor beginning, made somewhat
uncertain from the opening ascending fourths reaching the E, the C# at
meas. 4 activates an unexpected secondary seventh chord on the augmented
sixth grade modulating in G major, arriving two measures after, through a
chromatic passage in the melody, at a more soothing relative major chord
(C major), although in first inversion. The chord of meas. 4 as a double
dominant seventh chord of the relative major of the key tonality is not only
totally unanticipated, but creates a strong dissonance with the C# that it
harmonizes. The melody itself introduced by the C# has singular harmonic
implications if considered in its deployment throughout the time, swinging
between A major, D major and C major on the basis of a melismatic
passage containing a chromatic alteration. The whole song continues in
such melodic and harmonic fluidity, concluding on the dominant.
Similarly, the incipit of the A major song ‘Giacchi la sorte barbara’ is
characterized by a chromatic passage centred on E which, in addition to a
certain interval-resemblance with ‘Per te di vane lagrime’, generates a
dissonance with the pedal tone A by anticipating the E major chord of the
following measure, introduced on a first inversion before reaching the root.
The beginning of the song, in short, both through the melody and through
its harmonization, induces the listener to a ‘certain anxiety’, using Basevi’s
terminology, and undoubtedly attracted Parthey due to its ‘Sicilianity’.
Favara was also attracted by Sicilian songs due to their distance from
‘foreign’ (that is, German) music and their (postulated) intrinsic suitability
for (re)founding a new Italian music definitively considered as separated
from its roots:
… in Italy we all aspire to a new art, but on what path are we going? We
lingered first on the exhausted forms of an art approaching its end, later we
ate our fill on a totally foreign culture, in which we could not find our accent
(ad cantus). (Favara 1898/1959: 13–14)14
And also:
… the Italian artist has neither time nor disposition to hear and understand
that song which spontaneously emerges around him, that song which is the
legitimate voice of the community of which he is part and whose most deep
and general feelings that song reveals. […] it seems to me that the popular/
folk song has not yet exerted on our art its healing and vitalizing action, as
in the force of the law of nature it should. (Favara 1898/1959: 13)15
The search for a renewal of national music through a (re)discovery of its
roots, both sophisticated and folkloric, was an often discussed theme duringSinging/Hearing the Outerness 391
∨
the European fin-de-siècle period and the subsequent time—think of Leos
Janác∨ek or Béla Bartók. Favara gave its anthropological-musical project a
concrete stimulus by approaching Sicilian songs as parts of a whole culture
and not confining them within the ‘easy’ repertoire that could be represented
as being typically Sicilian. The songs were transcribed in modern musical
notation but without segmentation through bars16 and without accompaniment,17
and were published only posthumously in 1957 by Ottavio Tiby. After a
series of conferences and essays, 18 Favara decided to present some of them
in a form suited for a broad circulation, accomplishing two collections of
songs for voice and piano, complete with Italian translation. 19
A song on which Favara certainly focused his attention was the ‘Nota di
li lavannari’ (‘Mode of laundresses’, see Ex. 7a), which was analysed and
discussed in two essays20 and finally published in the first collection for
voice and piano, as song n. 6 (n. 293 in Favara 1957).
Ex. 7a. ‘Nota di lavannari’, “folk” version.
The melody presents a variety of interesting features for a tonal ear: it
begins by remaining for an indefinite time on an F and oscillates subsequently
between F and E (attracted from the E), moving finally to an A that,
through the cadence, is clearly perceivable as A minor; it continues with an
unstable passage including a surprising B-flat and ascends again to E,
before falling to A through a cadence on A minor, quickly left ascending to
B in order to terminate on a cadence of E major. The ‘cultivated’ version
(see Ex. 7b) respects such tonal fluidity, increasing it by means of a
harmonization that enlarges the intrinsic harmonic polysemy of the tones
around which the melody is organized. So, for example, the second cadence
on A (meas. 11–12) is harmonized not as A minor but as an F major
modulating, through a ‘Debussyan’ B major chord, to the final E major.392 Francesco Del Bravo
Ex. 7b. ‘Nota di lavannari‘. “cultivated” version.
As in ‘Lu labbru’, the melody of ‘Nota di li lavannari’ is rich in melismatic
and chromatic passages and does not finish with the tone that is perceived
throughout the melody as tonic. Although eighty years separate the transcription
made by Parthey from that of Favara, and although they are parts of two
basically different harmonic sensibilities, a Sicilian song in both cases
generated a particularly refined harmonization for a melody unable to be
easily absorbed in a tonal harmonic context or in a harmonic syntax based
on successions I-IV-V-I and on a harmonic rhythm centred on regularity.
In an essay of 1920 on the relationships between ancient Greek modes
and Sicilian songs,21 Ettore Romagnoli (1920/1959: 142–143) analyzed alsoSinging/Hearing the Outerness 393
the ‘folk’ version of ‘Nota di li lavannari’, noting how its incipit reveals a
derivation from the ipodoric mode and how the cadence on A minor (with
the G#) is probably a sort of adaptation to a modern tonal context, then
implicity stating that, as in ‘Lu labbru’ and in ‘Giacchi la sorte barbara,’ the
organizational principle of the harmony has to be sought in the melody. In an
essay of the following year, Romagnoli (1921/1959: 156–157) identified the
melodic modulation (‘metabole melica’, that can also be translated as ‘melodic
modal-modulation’) as the characteristic feature not only of the Sicilian
melody, but also as the basic melodic principle of Italian music in comparison
to German music, which, according to the scholar, tends to organize the
modulation more through the chords rather than through the melody, simply
adapted to the harmony. A century after Parthey, another scholar defined
Sicilian melody, and Italian melody tout-court, on the basis of an opposition
to the German one: Sicilian is that which does not sound as German. More
recently, after all, scholars have approached the implications on compositional
language of the difference between a harmonic system based on the rule of
the octave (the harmonization of the ascending and descending scale in the
bass typical of Italian eighteenth and early nineteenth-century music teaching),
and another based on functional harmony (typical of French and German
late eighteenth and nineteenth-century music teaching) (Holtmeier 2007,
Sanguinetti 2009, Sanguinetti 2012: 99–166), investigating on that basis
also the harmonic conception of Italian romantic opera composers (Rothstein
2008).
In Search of Semantics
If we attempt to synthesize the description and the analysis of Sicilian
melody made, more or less explicitly, by Parthey, Favara, and Romagnoli,
we can identify the following as characteristic elements of their interpretations:
harmonic indeterminateness generated from a melody based on modal
organization and melodic asymmetry that rebounds on harmonic rhythm.
Such characteristics are conceptually related to those we identified in the
analysis of Bellinian melodies made by Basevi, Dahlhaus, Lippmann,
Sanguinetti, and Taruskin: metric irregularity of the melodic structure,
abundance of dissonances generated from the melody, displacement of the
harmonic and melodic structure.
At this point, we have to observe that analytical interest in Bellinian
song has been focused on a narrow corpus of melodies: those that, since
their emergence, have been classified by tacit agreement as the ones that
only Bellini could have composed. With the exclusion of Basevi, who394 Francesco Del Bravo
relates his observation to a short passage of ‘Per te di vane lagrime’, the
melodies that recur throughout the analysis are ‘Ah! non credea mirarti’
and ‘Casta Diva’. They are, evidently, the most celebrated melodies composed
by Bellini, even though he also composed other melodies that, despite their
success, no one has classified as typically Bellinian. Famous melodies such
as those of ‘La tremenda ultrice spada’ (I Capuleti e i Montecchi), ’Ah!
non giunge uman pensiero’ (La sonnambula), and ‘Son vergin vezzosa’
(I Puritani) have never been considered as belonging to the quintessence of
the Bellinian style and analyzed as such (see Ex. 8a–c).
Ex. 8a. ‘La tremenda ultrice spada’, incipit.
Ex. 8b. ‘Ah! non giunge uman pensiero’, incipit.Singing/Hearing the Outerness 395
Ex. 8c. ‘Son vergin vezzosa’, incipit.
They seem implicitly to be part of that earworm-repertoire with which
Bellini, like his contemporary colleagues, was able to ensure a dramaturgical
effectiveness of the athletic performances of the singers; a repertoire to
which Nono seems to refer when speaking of ‘a singing codified in the
stereotyped forms of Italian opera’.
The melodies perceived as ‘absolutely’ Bellinian are thus those in slow
tempo and characterized by a remarkable emotional intensity, whose effect
on the listener can be traced in the remarks of Pougin and Wittmann. To
the already quoted arias we can add: ‘Dopo l’oscuro nembo’ (Adelson e
Salvini, borrowed in I Capuleti e i Montecchi as ‘Oh! quante volte, oh!
quante’); ‘Sorgi o padre e la figlia rimira’ (Bianca e Gernando, later
Bianca e Fernando); ‘Col sorriso d’innocenza’ (Il pirata); ‘Sventurato è il
cor che fida’ and ‘Ciel pietoso, in sì crudo momento’ (La straniera);
‘Deh! tu, bell’anima’ and ‘Vivi… vivi… e vien talora’ (I Capuleti e i
Montecchi); ‘Teneri figli’ and ‘Deh! non volerli vittime’ (Norma); ‘Ah! se
un’urna è a me concessa’ (Beatrice di Tenda); ‘A te, o cara, amor talora’
and ‘Qui la voce sua soave’ (I Puritani). Two instrumental melodies that
remain unsung can be added to the list: the melody for English horn at the
beginning of ‘Scena Imogene’ in Il pirata (Act II) and the one for oboe at
the beginning of ‘Scena e Romanza’ in La straniera (Act I). These correspond
perfectly to the famous account of Giuseppe Verdi on Bellinian melody:
‘Also in his most neglected operas, as Straniera and Pirata, there are
long, long, long melodies, such as no one has made before Him’ (letter of
Verdi to Camille Bellaigue, 2 nd May 1898, in Luzio 1935, Vol. 2: 312).22
Excluding from the list ‘A te, o cara, amor talora’—first composed, like
‘Per te di vane lagrime,’ for the gentle voice of Giovanni Rubini, a tenor
famous for his vocal extension in high range and his extraordinary vocal
agility—we can note how such arias are embodied in female voices and
emerge in the dramaturgy of the opera as moments in which the female
protagonist reveals to herself or to other characters, at any rate to the
listening public, a secret part of herself: a prayer; the sudden memory,396 Francesco Del Bravo
during a dark time, of a joyful moment; the love for someone that she
should not love; the experience of the realm of dreams during sleepwalking;
the experience of a psychotic delirium. Similarly, the two Rubini arias
concern the pain for a lost woman and a declaration of love.
Placing our attention on the Sicilian songs, we can note how a considerable
number of them relate to deep existential sorrow: the laments of convicts,
the laments of mineworkers, laments for the dead. Commenting on a woman’s
death lament, Favara reported an account of a sailor in order to explain
how the sorrow could become a song: ‘ “When we feel angst instead of
crying we sing, so that the spirit tormenting us can come out of us.” And he
added: “My children were crying for hunger and I was singing, so that my
tones accorded with their laments” ’ (Favara 1903/1959: 80–81). 23 The texts
of D’Onofrio’s romance, as noted by Petrobelli, also concern desperate
lovers, the loss of happiness, memories of distant joyful moments.24 ‘Fenesta
che lucive’, similarly, tells the tragic story of a girl who dies because of
unrequited love.
A semantic affinity thus exists between the dramaturgical moment in
which Bellini’s arias are sung and the existential one in which a part of the
Sicilian repertory emerges. If we include such considerations in the
experiential-context of the hearer of Sicilian and Bellinian music, we can
reasonably suppose that the hearing of a Sicilian song or of a Bellinian aria
activates analogous processes of perception and reception.
Conclusion: Singing Across, Hearing Beyond
From an analytical point of view, the relationship between Sicilian and
Bellinian music seems to be founded both on a number of structural aspects
of the melody in its intrinsic harmonic texture (metric asymmetry, dissonances
generated from the melody, structural displacement of melody and harmony)
and on the existential and dramaturgical context in which such melody
emerges (sorrow or passion so strong that it cannot remain unsung, an
epiphanic moment of the [female] protagonist).
Significantly, such aspects have been remarked on by scholars separately
investigating Sicilian (Parthey, Favara, Romagnoli, Pennino) and Bellinian
(Basevi, Dahlhaus, Lippmann, Sanguinetti, Taruskin) song, without any
intention to establish a hermeneutical link between them. The scholars
(Pougin, Wittmann, Failla, Nono, Petrobelli) who have attempted to find a
correlation between the two universes have placed one of them, i.e. either
Bellini or Sicily, in an auratic verbalization, thus allowing an association of
Bellini or Sicily with an indefinable—at any rate undefined—dimension.Singing/Hearing the Outerness 397
This tendency to establish a connection between Sicily and Bellini by
precisely leaving this connection substantially indeterminate can be traced
back to the second half of the nineteenth century, but is also detectable
during the following centuries, suggesting that such open-endedness may
be anchored in some constitutive features of both Bellinian and Sicilian
music and not strictly related to a particular receptive background.
The structural asymmetries of Bellini’s emblematic melodies and their
emergence at the high emotional moments of his operas in all probability
influenced their perception and reception by audiences, which labelled them
as not part of ‘common’ operatic music. During the nationalistic age, in the
context of an unrelenting search for an indissoluble communion between
artists and their native countries, such atypical features were ascribed to a
distant topos that could be effortlessly embodied by a present yet distant,
familiar yet exotic culture such as that of Sicily, a blurred boundary between
cultural and temporal flows and, at the same time, a secluded or, to be
more exact, isolated immanence. Notably, the same cultural connection
between the composer and his native country was also established afterwards
in non-nationalistic contexts, allowing us to infer that such an approach
seems to be more a symptom of a general difficulty in identifying a specific
Mediterranean culture than of an exoticist view. 25 Concerning the changing
views, if not visions, of Mediterranean culture and Bellini, we should not
forget that Friedrich Nietzsche attacked Richard Wagner with the battle cry
‘il faut méditerraniser la musique’ (Nietzsche 1888/1969: 10) and did not
regard Bellini highly, while Wagner, considered and treated in Italy and
Germany as the national enemy of Italian (Mediterranean?) music, was
famously a great admirer of Bellini. 26
The relationships detected between Sicilian and Bellinian music do not
by themselves allow us to understand whether these ‘Sicilian-Bellinian’
moments were in fact conceived by the composer as translations into an
operatic context of a musical culture different from such a context in order
to represent alterity, thus embodying a form of linguistic transfer of a
musical universe that could only find its way through the voice of a suffering
human being. The difficulty in understanding this is related to two basic
problems: the lack of any exhaustive knowledge of the Sicilian song that
Bellini could have heard during his childhood and youth in Catania, as has
already been pointed out, and the absence of any account by Bellini concerning
his relationship with Sicilian music and culture. The reported personal
account of Florimo, fifty years after the composer’s death, on the notebook
in which Bellini is supposed to have notated Sicilian poems that he used
to strum and sing softly, is the most concrete (!) extra-musical element for398 Francesco Del Bravo
our inquiry. In none of Bellini’s surviving letters27 (around four hundred)
can we find a reference to Sicilian song or music, even though we can find
mentions of singers or librettos (especially those written by Felice Romani,
his favourite librettist) as sources of inspiration; only the evocation, in a
letter to his friend Filippo Santocanale, of his ‘melancholic muse’28 (Neri
2005: 284) acknowledges a very vague linkage with Sicily, although the
association of Sicily with melancholy has been a recurring literary topos
since the nineteenth century but remains unformulated by the composer.
According to its etymology, the word ‘translation’ indicates a motion
across and beyond, and this concept perhaps represents the appropriate
approach to the whole question, allowing us to theorize on the one hand a
movement from a specific cultural context (Sicily and its music) to the
individual person (Bellini) and, at the same time, from the composer to a
broader context (operas, audiences in disparate cultural and historical
contexts), and on the other hand a movement from the various perspectives
of the hermeneutical community toward the examined object (Bellinian
and Sicilian songs) through a labelling process reflecting the projection of
analytical and cultural reception. In conclusion, we should note that Bellini
himself is part, if not the centre, of that translational context, being the
child who heard Sicilian songs sung by people, the child educated by his
grandfather in the compositional rules of the Neapolitan School, the student
at the Neapolitan Conservatory, and the celebrated operatic composer.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Cristoforo Garigliano, Goffredo Plastino and Marcello
Sorce Keller for their kind help in contacting Gaetano Pennino, to whom I
am extremely grateful for having generously provided the precious recording
of Annunziata D’Onofrio made by him. A special thanks to Martin Rodden
for his revision of the text.Singing/Hearing the Outerness 399 Notes 1. On Bellini’s biography see Pastura 1959 and Rosselli 1996. 2. The discussion of the origin of the famous song has involved such scholars as Salvatore Di Giacomo (1909), Giuseppe Cocchiara (1951–1953), Ottavio Tiby (1954–1956) and, more recently, Raffaele Di Mauro (2008), who discovered new sources and reconsidered the whole question. 3. ‘Il Florimo m’assicura che il Bellini s’aveva fatto uno zibaldone di poesie siciliane e che le canterellava e strimpellava spesso.’ All translations throughout the article are mine. 4. On the origin of Neapolitan song and its relationships with the popular and operatic world see also Scialò 1996, Macchiarella 1999 and 2000, Pittari 2004, Careri & Pesce 2011. For further musicological studies on Neapolitan song see Distilo 2008–2010. 5. ‘Né dans une contrée bienheureuse, l’oreille enchantée dès l’enfance par les mélodie plaintive que redisent depuis des siècle les pâtres de la Sicile; le cœur rempli de cette mélancolie sereine que vous inspirent, dans les pays aimés du soleil, les grandes ombres du soir et l’horizon infini de la mer: mélancolie dont on trouve déjà l’expression dans Théocrite, dans quelques madrigaux de Gesualdo au seizième siècle, mais surtout dans Pergolèse et dans Paisiello, Bellini mêle ces accents natifs de son génie méridional à la rêverie, aux aspirations brumeuses et panthéistiques de la littérature allemande et anglaise, et il en forme un tout exquis, plein de charme et de mystère.’ 6. ‘Was die eigentliche Form seiner Melodien angeht, so find sie Erinnerungen an jene entzückenden Lieder seines Vaterlandes, die der Aufenthalt in Neapel ihn nicht hatte vergessen lassen.’ 7. ‘Quello che per me costituisce un oltraggio a Bellini—ed è una mia opinione personale—è questa maniera di associarlo al melodramma italiano, poiché si arriva a non comprendere la sua grande generalità, e non solo in quanto musicista. Soprattutto quando si tratta della voce o del coro, un tale approccio, tipico di un metodo accademico estremamente limitato da parte dell’istituzione, ignora le varie correnti culturali che si sono mescolate in Bellini sotto l’influenza delle idee greche, bizantine, ortodosse, ebraiche, spagnole o arabe. Niente a che vedere con la cultura italiana, niente a che vedere con un canto che si codifica nelle formule stereotipe del melodramma italiano.’ 8. ‘È logico presumere […] l’esistenza a Caronia, (che potrebbe essere—a detta di Annunziata—gli inizi del secolo scorso [il XIX secolo]), di uno o più creatori di questo stile poetico che risente fortemente degli influssi di una cultura non popolare e che potrebbe esser stato ideato da individui mediamente acculturati, sicuramente in contatto, più o meno costante, con la cultura ufficiale.’ 9. ‘La melodia Verdiana, come quella del Rossini, è sostanzialmente consonante; laddove quella del Bellini è piuttosto dissonante, perchè vi signoreggiano le note di passaggio, i ritardi, le appoggiature, le settime, le quinte false ecc., non tanto come ornamento, quanto come parti essenziali della medesima:
400 Francesco Del Bravo
vedine un chiaro esempio nel Pirata sulle parole “Per te di vane lagrime”. Le
melodie consonanti, perchè stabilite solidamente sul basso fondamentale,
serbano un vigore, che manca alle dissonanti, le quali sono peraltro più
commoventi, e fanno più impressione, a cagione di certa ansietà, che inducono
nell’animo nostro, generata dal vivo bisogno che proviamo nella risoluzione
delle dissonanze.’
10. On Basevi’s theory for the analysis of melody and harmony see Sanguinetti
2000.
11. See Pasqualino 2005: 11–12.
12. ‘Die nachfolgenden Gesänge sind gröstentheils [sic.] in Sicilien, einige in
Neapel und Malta, dem Volke abgehorcht. Nicht alle haben die bankelsänger-
artige, einförmige Weise, welche wir an den deutschen Volksmelodien zu
hören gewohnt sind; bei vielen zeigt sich deutlich der Einfluss der Oper,
ohne dass man sie deshalb für ächte Lieder des Volkes ansprechen dürfte.
[…] Am Buntesten in Orthographie und Reim sind einige sicilianische, wo
der Sänger sich bestrebte, hochitalienisch vorzutragen.’
13. ‘N° XII (Oh cari oh fulgidi) ist offenbar ein Tyroleser Landler, durch die
Oestreichischen [sic.] Truppen nach Sicilien gebracht.’
14. ‘[…] tutti in Italia aspiriamo ad un’arte nuova; ma per quali vie tortuose ci
siamo noi messi? C’indugiamo dapprima nelle forme esauste di un’arte finita;
poscia ci siamo nutriti fino alla sazietà di una cultura esclusivamente forestiera,
dove non abbiamo potuto rinvenire il nostro accento (ad cantus).’
15. ‘[…] l’artista italiano non ha tempo né disposizione a sentire e intendere
quel canto che nasce spontaneo intorno a lui, quel canto che è la voce legittima
della comunità cui egli appartiene, e ne rivela i sentimenti più profondi e
generali. […] mi pare che il canto popolare non abbia ancora esercitato sulla
nostra arte quell’azione salutare e vivificatrice, che per legge di natura egli
deve.’
16. ‘The modern musical bar is, as literary versification, a restriction and impover-
ishment of the rhythm. […] The peasant subdivides his song in phrase-members,
in each of whose he puts only one melodic accent; in the phrase-member the
rhythmical combination can be countless, and the melodic accent can be at
whatever point of the phrase-member extent.’ (Favara 1898/1959: 21–22).
(‘La misura musicale moderna è, come la versificazione letteraria, una limitazione
ed un impoverimento del ritmo. […] Il contadino suddivide il suo canto in
membri di frase, in ognuno dei quali pone un solo accento melodico; nel
membro di frase le combinazioni ritmiche sono infinite, e l’accento melodico
può trovarsi in qualunque punto della sua estensione.’).
17. ‘The folk/popular song, emerged without any polyphonic harmony mark,
loses its original physiognomy if it is accompanied; it can carry at the most
the more simple and smooth chords or the faithful reproduction of its me-
lodic outline’ (Favara 1898/1959: 23). (‘Il canto popolare, nato vergine di
armonia polifonica, perde, se lo si accompagna, la sua libera andatura, la sua
originale fisionomia; tutt’al più può sopportare i più semplici e tranquilliSinging/Hearing the Outerness 401
accordi, o la riproduzione fedele nello strumento del suo giro melodico.’).
18. Favara’s writings on Sicilian music are: Il canto popolare nell’arte (1898),
Le melodie tradizionali di Val di Mazara (1903), Canti e leggende della
Conca d’oro, (1904, first pusblished in 1923), and Il ritmo nella vita e nell’arte
popolare in Sicilia (1905, first published in 1923). All have been collected
by his daughter (Teresa Samonà Favara) in Favara 1959.
19. Canti della terra e del mare di Sicilia, Milano, Ricordi, 1907, plate n. 111249;
Canti della terra…, Vol. 2, Milano, Ricordi, 1921, plate n. 118380. A third
volume has been edited, on the basis of Favara’s notes, by Ottavio Tiby
(Canti della terra…, Milano, Ricordi, 1954, plate n. 128543), who edited by
himself a fourth volume (Canti della terra…, Milano, Ricordi, 1959, plate n.
129781). The four volumes have been collected in: Canti della terra…, Milano,
Ricordi, 1987, plate n. 134349.
20. Favara 1898/1959: 24–25; Favara 1903/1959: 29–30 (see note 18).
21. On ancient Greek and Sicilian modes see also: Ottavio Tiby in the Introduction
to Favara 1959; Collaer 1982.
22. ‘Anche nelle opere sue meno conosciute, nella Straniera, nel Pirata, vi sono
melodie lunghe, lunghe, lunghe, come nissuno ha mai fatto prima di Lui.’
23. ‘ “Quando noi siamo in angustie, invece di piangere cantiamo; così lo spirito
che ci tormenta esce fuori di noi.” E soggiungeva: “I miei figli piangevano
per fame, ed io cantavo, e le mie note accordavano coi loro lamenti”.’
24. Pennino 1985: 14.
25. For further reading see Davis 1993, Abulafia 2001: xxiii–xxxi and Abulafia
2003.
26. On Nietzsche reflections upon opera and Mediterranean music see Venturelli
2003. On Wagner admiration for Bellini see Lippmann 1973.
27. The letters are collected in Cambi 1943 and, in an updated edition, in Neri 2005.
28. Letter from Paris, 11 April 1834.
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