Leyla Gencer Archive

BEATRICE DI TENDA

Vincenzo Bellini (1801 - 1835)

Opera in two acts in Italian

Libretto: Felice Romani

Premièr at Teatro alla Fenice, Venice – 16 March 1833

10†, 12, 15 January 1964

Teatro La Fenice, Venezia

FIRST PERFORMANCE IN XX. CENTURY

Conductor: Vittorio Gui

Chorus master: Sante Zanon

Stage director: Enrico Colosimo

Scene and costumes: Piero Tosi

Filippo Maria Visconti Duke of Milan MARIO ZANASI baritone

Beatrice di Tenda his wife LEYLA GENCER soprano [Role debut]

Agnese del Maino beloved to Filippo ANTIGONE SGUARDA mezzo-soprano

Orombello Lord of Ventimiglia JUAN ONCINA tenor

Anichino friend of Orombello MARIO GUGGIA tenor

Rizzardo del Maino Agnese’s brother OTTORINO BEGALI tenor

Time: 1418

Place: The Castle of Binasco

† Recording date

Photos © FOTO ERMANNO REBERSCHAK, Venezia

Sketches / Drawings © PIERO TOSI

GENCER ALLA FENICE

BEATRICE DI TENDA

STAGIONE 1963 – 1964

https://www.archiviostoricolafenice.org/scheda_opera.php?ID=14375

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Beatrice di Tenda opera seria in two acts

Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan (baritone)

Beatrice di Tenda, his wife (soprano)

Agnese del Maino (mezzo-soprano)

Orombello, Lord of Ventimiglia (tenor)

Anichino, friend of Orombello (tenor)

Rizzardo del Maino, brother of Agnese (tenor)

Libretto by Felice Romani

Time: 1418

Place: The Castle of Binasco, near Milan

First performed at the Teatro La Fenice, Venice, 16 March 1833, with Giuditta Pasta (Beatrice); Anna del Serre (Agnese); Alberico Curioni (Orombello); Orazio Cartagenova (Filippo); Alessandro Giacchini (Anichino)

Bellini and Giuditta Turina left Milan after the last performance of Norma to travel south to Naples, where they attended a performance of I Capuleti e i Montecchi. Bellini then continued on to his hometown of Catania in Sicily with his friend Francesco Florimo. After a reunion with members of his family, the composer went to Palermo, the Sicilian capital, where I Capuleti was performed in his honour.

A one-act scenic cantata entitled Hi Fu ed il sará (What was and what will be) with music by Bellini and text by Jacopo Ferretti is thought to have been performed privately at a wedding in Rome in February 1832. However, no score has been found, and the piece was most probably a pastiche put together by other hands.

By the autumn of 1832 Bellini had signed a contract to compose a new opera for Venice, its première to be preceded by a production of Norma at the beginning of the season. As a subject, his librettist Romani had suggested Christine, ou Stockholme, Fontainebleau et Rome, a play by Alexandre Dumas about Queen Cristina of Sweden, which had been staged in Paris in 1830, but Bellini was not enthusiastic. Early in November he wrote to the soprano Giuditta Pasta, 'The subject has been changed, and we shall write Beatrice di Tenda. It was difficult for me to persuade Romani, but I succeeded.' Bellini and Pasta had apparently seen a ballet, Beatrice di Tenda, at La Scala in September, and Pasta had expressed her interest in it as a possible subject for opera. (She was, some months later, to sing the role of Beatrice in the première of Bellini's opera.)

Perhaps because the subject he suggested had been discarded, but also because, as usual, he had over-committed himself and was attempting to write libretti simultaneously for Coccia, Majocchi, Mercadante and Donizetti as well as Bellini, Romani was more than usually dilatory. When Bellini left for Venice early in December, he had not received a single line of verse from his librettist. The management of the Teatro La Fenice brought it to the attention of the Governor of Venice that Romani was failing to fulfil his contract, and the problem was passed on to the Governor of Milan with the result that Romani received a summons from the Milanese police. Reluctantly and indignantly, he made his way to Venice, and proceeded slowly to produce a scene or two of Beatrice di Tenda.

Bellini complained to a friend that his health was deteriorating because of his having to compose at great speed, for which he blamed 'my usual and original poet, the God of Sloth!" He was also apprehensive because he thought the company of singers assembled at the Fenice for the season was a poor one. His Norma had succeeded on the opening night of the season only because of Pasta. The rest of the cast had been mediocre.

On 17 February Bellini wrote that he despaired of finishing the opera, and that his morale was afflicted because of that 'sluggard of a poet'. The libretto continued to be squeezed out of Romani, piece by piece, and eventually, one month late, Beatrice di Tenda was given its première at the Teatro La Fenice on 16 March 1833. It was not well received. During Pasta's entrance aria some members of the audience thought they recognised a phrase from Bellini's most recent opera, and there were shouts of 'Norma! Pasta responded by turning to them in her Act I duet, instead of to Orazio Cartagenova, the baritone singing the role of Filippo, as she uttered the phrase, 'Se amar non puoi, rispettami!' (If you cannot love me, respect me!).

The five subsequent performances of Beatrice di Tenda were received more amiably. After the final one, Bellini wrote to a friend, 'I have been waiting for the journals to appear so that, hearing some opinion expressed, I could tell you about the reception of my new opera which, through a series of unhappy circumstances, has been as unfortunate as that of / Capuleti e i Montecchi. I am being blamed for the postponement of the première until the sixteenth of this month, whereas it was all the fault of the poet. Also, a powerful and noisy faction opposed to Pasta joined forces with one opposed to me, and so on the first night there was a huge noise of shouting, whistling, laughing and so on.' Although the audience called for the composer after four or five numbers which they liked, his Sicilian haughtiness, as he put it, caused him to remain in his seat 'as though nailed there'.

The situation was not eased in any way by Romani, who had appended to his printed libretto, available in the theatre, a note describing it as a 'fragment' whose plot, style and characters had been altered by circumstances beyond his control. "It requires', he wrote, "the full indulgence of the reader.' Shortly after the final performance of the opera, Romani published a letter in the Gazzetta privilegiata di Venezia, unfairly placing, in extremely flowery langu- age, the blame on Bellini for the delayed première. The result of this was, not surprisingly, the end of the friendship between Bellini and Romani. They did not collaborate again, nor did they ever meet, although they did eventually make peace with each other by correspondence.

Despite the cool reception it was accorded at its first performance, Beatrice di Tenda was by no means a failure. When, a year after the Venice première, it was staged in Palermo, Bellini wrote from Paris to a friend in Palermo, 'So my Beatrice was well received... I was convinced that some outside reason had induced the Venice audience to disapprove of it. I admit that the subject is horrible, but by colouring the music at times forcefully and at times sorrowfully I tried to correct and get rid of the disgust that the character of Filippo arouses.' There were performances at two theatres in Naples in 1834, at La Scala, Milan, in 1835, and in several other cities in Italy and abroad before the end of the decade. The first London performance was on 22 March 1836, and the first American production was staged in New Orleans on 21 March 1842. New York heard the opera for the first time on 18 March 1844.

Beatrice di Tenda disappeared from the repertory for the first third of the twentieth century, but it was revived in Catania in 1935 as part of the centennial commemoration of its composer's death, with Giannina Arangi-Lombardi as Beatrice. The opera was staged at the Teatro Massimo, Palermo, in January 1959 with Consuelo Rubio as Beatrice, and in 1961 at La Scala, Milan, with Joan Sutherland, who earlier in the year had appeared in three concert performances of the work in New York, when the role of Agnese was sung by Marilyn Horne. Other notable twentieth-century Beatrices have included Leyla Gencer (at the Teatro La Fenice, Venice, in 1964), Mirella Freni (Bologna, 1976), Cecilia Gasdia (Barcelona, 1987), and June Anderson (Venice, 1987, and in a concert perfor mance at Carnegie Hall, New York, 1988). The first and, so far, only twentieth-century production in Great Britain was staged at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, on 16 May 1975.

Apart from the scenario of the ballet which Bellini and his soprano, Giuditta Pasta, saw together at La Scala in the autumn of 1832, the principal source of Romani's libretto for Beatrice di Tenda was a play of the same title by Carlo Tebaldi Flores, performed in Milan in 1825. The plot is based on historical fact, details of which Romani could also have found in volumes of mediaeval Italian history, or in the novel Il Castello di Binasco by Diodata Saluzzo- Roero, published in 1819. The historical Beatrice di Tenda (1370- 1418), widow of Facino Cane (the leader of a band of mercenaries), married Filippo Visconti, Duke of Milan, who accused her of intrigue and adultery, and had her beheaded.

COMPLETE RECORDING

1964.01.10