CHAPTER XII.
DONIZETTI AND BELLINI.
DONIZETTI, Rossini's immediate successor but not supplanter, composed from sixty to seventy operas ("c'est beaucoup" dirait Candide) of which to this day three at least ("c'est beaucoup" dirait Martin), are still played regularly every season in London: Lucia, Lucrezia, and La Favorita. Of his two charming works in the light style—comic operas in which the composer never approaches the farcical, never once ceases to be graceful—neither L'Elisir nor Don Pasquale can be compared to the much more vigorous Barber. Nor has Donizetti produced any work so full of melody as Semiramide, or so dramatic as William Tell. But he rises to unwonted heights in the last act of La Favorite; which, composed for the French Académie, became naturalised in due time on the Italian operatic stage under the title of La Favorita.
Although the career of Donizetti was very much longer than that of Bellini, whom he preceded and whom he survived, he produced in proportion to the number of his works fewer by a great deal which have kept the stage.
Donizetti brought out his first opera Enrico di Borgogna at Venice in 1818, when he was twenty years of age, and Catarina Cornaro, his sixty-third (not to count two or three that were never produced) at Naples, in 1844, when he was forty-six.
Bellini brought out the first of his works performed in public, Bianca e Fernando (he had previously composed a sort of pasticcio for the school theatre of the Naples Conservatorio) at the San Carlo in 1826, when he was twenty-five years of age; and his last, I Puritani, at Paris in 1835. He had a career then, of but nine years, during which he composed ten operas, of which five were played with great success, and of which three, La Sonnambula, Norma, and I Puritani, forty-five years after their composer's death, still keep the stage. Stendhal (or perhaps it was Carpani) had foretold that Rossini, the composer of florid music, would be followed by a master whose melodies would be remarkable for extreme simplicity, and this prophecy was fulfilled in the case of Bellini.
Donizetti, like so many other composers, was not encouraged by his parents to adopt the career in which he was destined to obtain so much distinction. When, however, his father at last consented to his becoming a professional musician, he is said to have presented him with an ivory scraper, as if to impress upon him the necessity of practising the art of erasing. Probably no composer ever did less in that line than Donizetti; and though he wrote more accurately than many other Italian composers, one is frequently astonished to find in his works melodies of significance and beauty followed at haphazard by the merest trivialities. Donizetti never went to work without the paternal scraper by his side. The fluent composer, however, had no occasion to make use of it for scratching out notes; and it never seems to have occurred to him to strike out feeble passages, not to say entire pieces. What Donizetti's father should have given him was not a scraper but a pair of scissors.
Donizetti, born at Bergamo in 1798, was but seventeen years of age when he commenced his studies in his native town under Mayer, who, before the appearance of Rossini, was one of the most popular composers in Italy; and he finished them (so far as studies can ever be finished) at Bologna under Pilotti and Mattei, the latter of whom had some years previously been Rossini's instructor. Finding that Mattei gave him very few lessons at the Bologna Lyceum, where he was professor, the youthful and ingenious Donizetti contrived to obtain supplementary ones by making himself very agreeable to his master and by turning the conversation as often as possible to musical subjects. He even went so far as to play at cards every evening with Mattei's aged mother, a piece of benevolence for which he was rewarded by much instructive talk from the grateful son. While at the Lyceum Donizetti occupied himself not only with music, but also with drawing, architecture, and even poetry; and that he could turn out fair enough verses for musical purposes was shown when, many years afterwards, he wrote—so rapidly that the word "improvised" might here be used—for the benefit of a manager in distress, both words and music of a little one-act opera, called Il Campanello, founded on the Sonnette de Nuit of Scribe.
No composer, with the exception of Mozart, possessed a more remarkable memory than Donizetti. After two hearings of Allegri's Miserere, Mozart remembered the whole work so as to be able to write it out note for note; and Donizetti, wishing to procure for Mayer a copy of an opera which was being performed at Bologna, and which the impresario had refused to lend, had such a lively recollection of the music after hearing it two or three times that he was able to put it down on paper from beginning to end. Unfortunately the tellers of these stories omit as a rule to say whether the possessors of such wonderful mnemonic powers make notes while hearing the compositions, which, in rather a literal sense, they propose to carry away with them. A prodigious memory for small things as for great would be necessary to enable a musician in the present day to write out, even after a dozen hearings, an opera by Meyerbeer or by Wagner with all the changes of harmony, all the details of instrumentation. The operas, however, of Donizetti's youth were much simpler affairs than these latter-day productions.
Already known by many pieces of instrumental and religious music, Donizetti produced his first opera, Enrico di Borgogna, at Venice in 1818. This work obtained so much success that the composer was requested to undertake at once a second one for the same city. After writing an opera for Mantua in 1819, Il Falignamo di Livonia, Donizetti visited Rome, where his Zoraïde di Granata procured him an exemption from military service, which would otherwise have carried him off, and the honour of being crowned at the Capitol. He now produced a whole series of operas which owed their success chiefly to the skill with which he imitated the style of Rossini. Strangely enough it was not until Rossini had ceased to write that Donizetti, his immediate successor, exhibited something like a style of his own. In 1830, however, the in many parts highly-dramatic Anna Bolena was produced; a work which was long regarded as its composer's masterpiece. Donizetti wrote Anna Bolena for Pasta and Rubini, and it was first represented for Pasta's benefit in the year 1831. In the tenor air, Vivi tu, Rubini made a striking success; and it was in this opera, as Henry VIII., that Lablache first gained the favour of the London public. Anna Bolena was destined soon to be eclipsed by other works from the pen of the same composer; and it is now but rarely, if ever, heard. Many years, indeed, have passed since it was last performed in London with Mdlle. Titiens in the principal character. It contains an unusually large number of expressive, singable melodies; and many of its scenes possess more dramatic significance than belong as a rule to Rossini's Italian works. It marks a step in fact, in the movement from the style of Rossini, as exhibited in his Italian operas, towards that of Verdi; a movement in which Bellini, standing by himself, cannot be said to have had any part. Neither in his earlier operas does Bellini, like Donizetti, resemble Rossini, nor in his later ones does he, like Donizetti, approach what was afterwards to be known as the style of Verdi.
Lucrezia Borgia, written for Milan in 1834, was a distinct advance on Anna Bolena. This work, with Lucia and La Favorita, by which it was to be succeeded, must be ranked among Donizetti's most successful productions; and it has already been pointed out that the three operas just named are the only ones by which Donizetti is now represented regularly every year at our great lyrical theatres. Lucrezia Borgia is based on one of Victor Hugo's most dramatic plays; but the composer has not turned to so effective account as might have been expected, the great scene in which Maffio Orsini's drinking song is interrupted by the funeral dirge given to the procession of monks in the outside street. Like Verdi, some years afterwards, in Ernani and in Rigoletto, Donizetti counted too much on a musical effect which is naturally much more impressive in a spoken drama, where music, until this one scene, has not been heard, than in an opera which is sung throughout. Francis I.'s song, in the drama of Le Roi s'amuse, arrests the attention much more than does the Duke of Mantua's canzone in Rigoletto. The horn of Hernani is mysterious and terrifying in the play, while in the opera, heard after many other horns, not to speak of cornets, trombones, ophecleides, and all the instruments of the Sax family, it scarcely excites even a feeling of surprise. As regards Lucrezia Borgia, though the singers of the drinking-song and the chanters of the burial service have the scene entirely to themselves, yet the contrast between reckless life and inevitable death is less striking in a work where music possesses no special significance than in one where music has been introduced for the sake of impressiveness in the single scene where it is employed. Taking it, however, for what it is worth, Donizetti's successor, Verdi, would doubtless have made more of it than Donizetti himself has done. Maffio Orsini's brindisi is spirited, and characteristically voluptuous. But there is nothing very awe-inspiring in the chorus of monks at the back of the stage; and the two pieces bear no relation to one another—which they might perhaps with advantage have been made to do.