# Bellini bad at instrumentation / polyphony ?



## BBSVK (10 mo ago)

I have seen countless comments by famous people, that Bellini was not good at instrumentation or polyphony. I decided to finally ask here, because I saw yet another comment, a quote from Tchaikovsky, in another thread. 

Do you guys hear that? Does it make a difference to you? 

I sometimes think I hear the problem in the finale of Norma—if some actors do not sing the piano or completely shut up, it becomes chaotic. Otherwise, I do not hear anything "bad" at all and do not know what all the criticism is about.


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## Op.123 (Mar 25, 2013)

BBSVK said:


> I have seen countless comments by famous people, that Bellini was not good at instrumentation / polyphony. I decided to finally ask here, because I saw yet another comment, a quote from Tchaikowsky in another thread. Do you guys hear that ? Does it make a difference for you ? I sometimes think I hear the problem in the finale of Norma - if some actors do not sing piano or completely shut up, it becomes chaotic. Otherwise I do not hear anything "bad" at all and do not know what all the criticism is about.


I don't know what you see wrong with the finale of Norma, it's one of his best and most effective pieces of work, even Wagner loved it. His orchestration isn't great, but it's not awful, sometimes he has a good sense of sorority, and certainly writes melodies which fit with the individual instruments, the sorrowful cor anglais solo at the start of the pirata mad scene or the wistful, nocturnal iteration of casta diva by the flute. But Bellini's greatest strength was undoubtedly in melodic writing, the passionate remembrance of 'o cari accenti', the heartbreak in 'mira, o Norma', anger in 'tutti i romani accento' and rage 'Vanne, si, mi laschia indegno' etc. Everything is expressed through masterfully melodic vocal writing, and coupled with a real sensitivity to the text and the occasional moments of great compositional insight it's enough to make the works work, as either good operas, or in the case of Norma, great ones. They do really require excellent singing actresses and work best with bigger voices, so nowadays a successful production of a Bellini opera is rare indeed.


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## BBSVK (10 mo ago)

I love the Norma finale, know it by heart, but still do not have enough of it, it is the first thing I check every time a new recording of the opera appears on internet. I totally understand why Wagner would save it if the end of the world was coming. However, the last bars sound better to me on the recording with Caballe in Orange, where I don't hear Pollione's last words, than Callas 1955, where I can actually hear Mario del Monaco. That is the only thing I came up with while trying to understand what the hell the other musicians are complaining about. 

Bizet was trying to reorchestrate Norma (but gave it up), Verdi said unspecifically that Bellini was a genius with bad schooling, Tchaikovsky loved him in spite of supposedly bad orchestration, Philip Gossett believed he saw an uncertainty about orchestration in the manuscripts... Whatever.


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## RICK RIEKERT (Oct 9, 2017)

From very early on Bellini was criticized by some, especially in France and Germany, for his supposed lack of musical education. By cutting down orchestration to a minimum Bellini earned black marks that have followed him ever since. Berlioz was especially brutal in his estimate, calling Bellini ignorant and second rate. Rossini and others were more discreet but no less critical.

Some maintained that Bellini’s choices were both conscious and right. After the second performance of _La straniera_ in 1829 the _Gazzetta privilegiata di Milano_ remarked: “Amid the irruption of the Rossinian torrent, it is no small thing that a young composer should signal the first steps of 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 Jomelli, of Marcello, of Pergolesi, with beautiful song, with splendid, elegant, pleasing instrumentation”. From the very beginning of his career Bellini was widely, and correctly, perceived as stepping aside from the mainstream of modern Italian music, represented by Rossini. To do that was to be, to some extent, controversial.

Bellini knew what he was about. When it was suggested that he reorchestrate _Norma_ to meet French taste he wrote: “You are mistaken: here and there it might work , but in general I would find it impossible because of the plain and flowing nature of the melodies, which admit no other kind of instrumentation than what is there already: and this I have fully thought through”.

Whatever the perceived lack of complexity in Bellini’s orchestration, plenty of opera buffs see it as little when compared with his wonderful treatment of the voice. His critics largely overlook that the light instrumentation had the purpose not to suffocate the voice, which of course is of fundamental importance in opera.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

In the context of his "native style", he seems fine.
"On the other hand, for the French, Mozart was certainly not 'one of us' from a national point of view. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, before Berlioz's time, some influential critics - for instance, Julien-Louis Geoffroy - rejected Mozart as a foreigner, considering his music 'scholastic', stressing his use of harmony over melody, and the dominance of the orchestra over singing in the operas - all these were considered negative features of 'Germanic' music." -Benjamin Perl.
"The Germans have always been the greatest harmonists, and we Italians the greatest melodists" -Rossini.
This distinction between the German and Italian, I think is something originated in the 18th century. (By Germans, I mean actual Germans on German lands, not Gluck or Handel.) And of course the degrees to which the Germans and Italians adhered to their respective styles varied, and there were cases of one group being influenced by the other. I'm also yearning btw to hear dramatic works by Georg von Pasterwitz (1730~1803) of Salzburg, but none of them have been recorded yet. He is expected to exhibit characteristics like this teacher of Weber's to a degree-


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## BBSVK (10 mo ago)

RICK RIEKERT said:


> Berlioz was especially brutal in his estimate, calling Bellini ignorant and second rate.


I attended a lecture about The damnation of Faust by Berlioz. The teacher said, that Berlioz could do real miracles with the orchestra, he makes his top 3 composers in this particular aspect. But sometimes the emphasis is more on the combination of sounds, the color, rather than melody. Again, I don't hear it, the passage we heard at the lecture was a very melodical march. One day I need to get to know the whole piece properly. But it is possible, Bellini and Berlioz were the opposites in what they considered important and beautiful.


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## RICK RIEKERT (Oct 9, 2017)

Berlioz admired “Gluck’s school of dramatic expression and good sense” which meant first and foremost for Berlioz declamatory melody rather than melody embroidered with ornaments. Truth of expression meant structuring melody so as to enhance fidelity to individual words. For Berlioz, Italian opera was not art music but purely in his words “sensual” and “culinary”, “a sort of voluptuous emotion,” “noise acting with more or less force on the human system". Berlioz’s letters give us a glimpse of the “barely believable hatred and horror” of Rossini and his admirers that he admitted still colored his judgment when he launched a four-part study of Gluck’s _Iphigénie en Tauride_ in the Gazette musicale de Paris in 1834: “If it had been within my power to put a keg of powder under the Salle Louvois [home of the Théâtre Italien] and blow it up along with everyone in it during a performance of the Gazza or the Barber, I undoubtedly would have.” I venture to say such men are not like you and me.


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## BBSVK (10 mo ago)

RICK RIEKERT said:


> Berlioz admired “Gluck’s school of dramatic expression and good sense” which meant first and foremost for Berlioz declamatory melody rather than melody embroidered with ornaments. Truth of expression meant structuring melody so as to enhance fidelity to individual words. For Berlioz, Italian opera was not art music but purely in his words “sensual” and “culinary”, “a sort of voluptuous emotion,” “noise acting with more or less force on the human system". Berlioz’s letters give us a glimpse of the “barely believable hatred and horror” of Rossini and his admirers that he admitted still colored his judgment when he launched a four-part study of Gluck’s _Iphigénie en Tauride_ in the Gazette musicale de Paris in 1834: “If it had been within my power to put a keg of powder under the Salle Louvois [home of the Théâtre Italien] and blow it up along with everyone in it during a performance of the Gazza or the Barber, I undoubtedly would have.” I venture to say such men are not like you and me.


Hm, I consider Bellini true to the ideals of Gluck. He indicated ornaments in the score, but they were meant to express distress or extreme joy. He wanted the words to be understood, the singing was syllabic (not melismatic like in Rossini). His La Straniera is very declamatory and other operas have declamatory passages.


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## RICK RIEKERT (Oct 9, 2017)

BBSVK said:


> Hm, I consider Bellini true to the ideals of Gluck. He indicated ornaments in the score, but they were meant to express distress or extreme joy. He wanted the words to be understood, the singing was syllabic (not melismatic like in Rossini). His La Straniera is very declamatory and other operas have declamatory passages.


Berlioz preferred _La Straniera_ among Bellini's works. He writes in review, "..a stranger to orchestration, only slightly versed in the science of harmony, a musician of the second rank...but his deep sensibility is just and true." Berlioz muses whether Bellini's music did not after all "have the stamp of genius, of an ignorant genius, it is true, all spontaneity…”


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## BBSVK (10 mo ago)

RICK RIEKERT said:


> Berlioz’s letters give us a glimpse of the “barely believable hatred and horror” of Rossini and his admirers that he admitted still colored his judgment when he launched a four-part study of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride in the Gazette musicale de Paris in 1834: “If it had been within my power to put a keg of powder under the Salle Louvois [home of the Théâtre Italien] and blow it up along with everyone in it during a performance of the Gazza or the Barber, I undoubtedly would have.” I venture to say such men are not like you and me.


In another thread, there was a discussion about the musicians we would not like to meet in person, and if Bellini is on par with Wagner. I start to think, Bellini was one of the more normal composers. I still don't like his treatment of women he was romantically involved with, but that's about it. Tchaikovsky was disgusted by Bellini's paranoia from other musicians, but maybe there was a grain of substance in his discomfort.


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## RICK RIEKERT (Oct 9, 2017)

I was referring to Berlioz who seemed willing to burn down an occupied theater because he hated the music playing inside. It seems from Heinrich Heine's description that Bellini was not an especially alarming presence. Two years after Bellini’s death Heine wrote that, “his gait was so maidenly, so elegiac, so ethereal. The creature altogether looked like a sigh in dancing pumps.”


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## BBSVK (10 mo ago)

RICK RIEKERT said:


> I was referring to Berlioz who seemed willing to burn down an occupied theater because he hated the music playing inside."


I know. I meant to say that Berlioz was probably far more crazy than Bellini and that Bellini is probably out of competition for the most unpleasant person among composers. But I edited my post above to have a longer quote of your text, so that it is more clear.


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## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

RICK RIEKERT said:


> Berlioz’s letters give us a glimpse of the “barely believable hatred and horror” of Rossini and his admirers that he admitted still colored his judgment when he launched a four-part study of Gluck’s _Iphigénie en Tauride_ in the Gazette musicale de Paris in 1834: “If it had been within my power to put a keg of powder under the Salle Louvois [home of the Théâtre Italien] and blow it up along with everyone in it during a performance of the Gazza or the Barber, I undoubtedly would have.” *I venture to say such men are not like you and me.*


I am pretty sure, Berlioz would have agreed.  
As Jaime Lannister says in Game of Thrones: There are no men like me; there is only me!
(Berlioz might have been a bit more lenient and conceded Shakespeare, Goethe and Beethoven as "like him")


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

There was actually a failed attempt to assassinate Napoleon during his attendance of a performance of Die Schöpfung with gunpowder - another work Berlioz famously had a negative view (which grew increasingly negative as he got older) of.


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## BBSVK (10 mo ago)

hammeredklavier said:


> There was actually a failed attempt to assassinate Napoleon during his attendance of a performance of Die Schöpfung with gunpowder - another work Berlioz famously had a negative view (which grew increasingly negative as he got older) of.


It confirms my impression, that Bellini loved what Berlioz hated. This site says, that in Naples conservatory, he studied and memorized works by "Haydn, Mozart, Jommelli, Pergolessi, Paisiello" https://storienapoli.it/eng/2022/01/06/vincenzo-bellini-studi-napoli/


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## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

Berlioz was lucky that there was another, eventually more famous composer, slightly younger than himself who was so overbearing, presumptuous and extravagant that he put everyone else into second rank in this department, otherwise we would probably hold his arrogance more against him than we actually do...


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## BBSVK (10 mo ago)

Kreisler jr said:


> Berlioz was lucky that there was another, eventually more famous composer, slightly younger than himself who was so overbearing, presumptuous and extravagant that he put everyone else into second rank in this department, otherwise we would probably hold his arrogance more against him than we actually do...


Do you mean Wagner ? In the context of this thread, I was so surprised, that he, of all people, was the only one, who never joined the complaints about Bellini.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

BBSVK said:


> Do you mean Wagner ? In the context of this thread, I was so surprised, that he, of all people, was the only one, who never joined the complaints about Bellini.


Wagner must have conducted quite a bit of Bellini during his stint as music director of the opera at Dresden. He was in the best possible position to understand, and learn from, Bellini's virtues as a musical dramatist. He was also a better, more objective, judge of other people's music than some other composers (here's looking at you, Piotr Ilyich), and was quick to praise excellence where he heard it. It's easy to talk about Wagner's arrogance, but whatever that was in his case, it wasn't ignorance or crude prejudice. He wrote to Mathilde Wesendonck that as he was composing _Tristan_ he was inspired by Bellini, and he expressed admiration for that composer's melodic gifts and ability to say much with the simplest of means.


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## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

Yes, Wagner. Wagner was even more convinced of himself in a Jaime-way and he could be vile but also gracious and recognize qualities different from his own. Maybe because his agenda for Music of the Future concerned mostly himself, he could let other or older styles be.

Mendelssohn supposedly said about Berlioz that his tragedy was that with his trying too hard to become a raving madman he never succeeded...


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Kreisler jr said:


> Yes, Wagner. Wagner was even more convinced of himself in a Jaime-way and he could be vile but also gracious and recognize qualities different from his own. Maybe because his agenda for Music of the Future concerned mostly himself, he could let other or older styles be.


So grudging! Some people will never give old Richard a break. Far from "letting them be," he was deeply appreciative of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Bellini, Berlioz, Liszt, even Johann Strauss. And when he wasn't knocking Mendelssohn for being Jewish he could willingly concede his compositional mastery. Clearly he could tell a hawk from a handsaw.



> Mendelssohn supposedly said about Berlioz that his tragedy was that with his trying too hard to become a raving madman he never succeeded...


Wagner was much more generous, paying Berlioz the tribute of sending him an inscribed score of the _Tristan_ prelude. Berlioz didn't return the compliment.


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## RICK RIEKERT (Oct 9, 2017)

Kreisler jr said:


> Mendelssohn supposedly said about Berlioz that his tragedy was that with his trying too hard to become a raving madman he never succeeded...


I believe the difference in temperaments was too great for any real appreciation of Berlioz’s genius. There may also have been some jealousy, as there certainly was in Mendelssohn’s dismissal of Liszt as a half-witted showman. Mendelssohn found the _Symphonie fantastique_ (somewhat ambivalently) “disgusting” and “dreadfully boring…insipid and altogether without life”. Mendelssohn was very reserved in public about the French composer and his works, as Berlioz later found out, but he didn't allow it to affect the outward cordiality of their relations. Berlioz on the other hand thought Mendelssohn utterly charming in person, “a clear pure splendid soul…a great artist and a mind of exceptional distinction...one of the great musicians of our time.”


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

BBSVK said:


> It confirms my impression, that Bellini loved what Berlioz hated. This site says, that in Naples conservatory, he studied and memorized works by "Haydn, Mozart, Jommelli, Pergolessi, Paisiello" https://storienapoli.it/eng/2022/01/06/vincenzo-bellini-studi-napoli/


Seems like too much an over-generalization. What evidence is there Bellini "loved" all those composers, while Berlioz "hated" all of them? Did Bellini "hate" Gluck or Salieri?
I suggest having a look at:

"Mozartian Undercurrents in Berlioz: Appreciation, Resistance and Unconscious Appropriation" by Benjamin Perl www.academia.edu/7216838/Mozartian_Undercurrents_in_Berlioz

Salieri Les Danaïdes en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Dana%C3%AFdes#Music
"The opera, with its dark overture, lavish choral writing, many ballet scenes, and electrifying finale depicting a glimpse of hellish torture, kept the opera on the stage in Paris for over forty years. A young Hector Berlioz recorded the deep impression this work made on him in his Mémoires."  Antonio_Salieri#Middle_Viennese_period_and_Parisian_operas


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

19th century composers who had strong ideas of expressive individuality in their music were seen by some as lacking or inept in certain aspects (though I'm not necessarily saying these assessments are correct or fair);

"While praising his innovative orchestral technique, Ravel often found his harmony clumsy, and once observed that Berlioz was "a genius who couldn't harmonize a waltz correctly." [...] Ravel was critical of Wagner's thick orchestral texture and believed that Wagnerian influence in France was "pernicious" and would be "disastrous" if unchecked."
<Ravel: Man and Musician, By Arbie Orenstein, Page 123>

"Berlioz's approach to harmony and counterpoint was idiosyncratic, and has provoked adverse criticism. Pierre Boulez commented, "There are awkward harmonies in Berlioz that make one scream". In Rushton's analysis, most of Berlioz's melodies have "clear tonal and harmonic implications" but the composer sometimes chose not to harmonise accordingly. Rushton observes that Berlioz's preference for irregular rhythm subverts conventional harmony: "Classic and romantic melody usually implies harmonic motion of some consistency and smoothness; Berlioz's aspiration to musical prose tends to resist such consistency.""


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hector_Berlioz#Works





hammeredklavier said:


> The Rhythmic Weakness of Wagner
> Robert Ralph
> 
> 
> ...


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## Seattleoperafan (Mar 24, 2013)

Casta Diva would not be considered among the most beautiful of arias just from the melody alone, but the orchestration also plays a part. Quite frequently you will hear the aria without words on classical stations. Taken as a whole the big trio scene in Norma is great combination of melody, drama and the orchestral accompaniment.
I am most familiar with Les Troyens of Berlioz and I find the orchestra to be rich and sensuous. More than almost any other composer a short phrase of any of his music reveals his hand at work. His style is so unique. I think that is a great accomplishment. Brahms, Bach, Scarlatti and Wagner are about his only competition in this regard.


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## schigolch (Jun 26, 2011)

Orchestration means different things to different composers.

For composers like Vincenzo Bellini, the essence of the drama was in the voices, to be transmitted by the singers. Let listen to Bellini himself: "il dramma per musica deve far piangere, inorridire, morire... cantando". 

He actually wanted the words of the libretto to reach the audience, and being intelligible. 

Of course, he was in any case able to write some almost impossibly beautiful instrumental music, such as the prelude in B minor to the Second Act of Norma, but the orchestration of his operas was oriented to support, to complement, the singing. According to the Italian tradition, but also respecting his own individuality as a composer, his 'musica filosofica' as was considered by his peers during his lifetime.


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

Bellini died tragically young . It's impossible to know how his music would have evolved had he lived much longer . If Verdi had died as young as Bellini, he would probably be forgotten today . But there's no doubt about it ; Bellini showed enormous promise which he didn't live long enough to fulfill .


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