The Life of Bellini

Life of Bellini

John Rosselli

Cambridge University Press, 1996

184 pages, $39.95

In the introduction to this volume, John Rosselli explains that the chief sources for Bellini's life are the letters to his Neapolitan schoolmate Francesco Florimo (1800-1888), whose dual purposes in his long life were to run the library at the Naples conservatory where he and Bellini were trained and to act, in Rosselli's phrase, "as, in effect, Bellini's widower" (p. II). Bellini died in Paris in 1835, and Florimo's preservation of his friend's memory and reputation culminated in the publication of Memorie e lettere in I882, a biography with an addendum of over two hundred letters. Unfortunately, the extant original letters from Bellini to Florimo, which are long and very frankly revealing, cover only January 1828 to March 1829 and July 1834 to September I835, with a few in between. Letters to others besides Florimo help fill in the gaps but are not as candid.

Why are there such gaps in the published Bellini-Florimo correspondence? As Rosselli tells us, Florimo burned many letters because he believed they shed an unflattering light on Bellini's affair with Giuditta Turina, a married woman. Another major problem is that Florimo clearly "faked" many letters that he chose for publication. As Rosselli explains, Florimo not only engaged in such typical nineteenth-century editorial practices as correcting and rearranging text without critical apparatus but "went further: he invented new matter that substantially changed the view of Bellini's feelings presented by his letters. He also recalled conversations some of which could not have taken place" (p. 7). Rosselli illustrates this by comparing versions of the only two "dubious" published letters that have fully known autograph originals. It becomes clear that Florimo was in the business of mythmaking.

In large part due to Bellini's early death at thirty-three, his reputation was surrounded by myths: that his music was only elegiac (whereas, like that of Chopin, another "elegiac" composer, it could be forceful and even bellicose); that he was, in Heine's infamous phrase, "a sigh in dancing pumps" (this description is from Heine's rather flattering portrait of Bellini in Florentinische Nachte [1837], although Rosselli does not tell us so); that he was not jealous of but in fact generous in spirit to...