BEATRICE DI TENDA
Vincenzo Bellini (1801 - 1835)
Libretto: Felice Romani
10†, 12, 15 January 1964
Teatro La Fenice, Venezia
TEATRO ALLA FENICE DI 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
GENCER ALLA FENICE
Photos © FOTO ERMANNO REBERSCHAK, Venezia
Sketches / Drawings © PIERO TOSI
Note: The opera broadcast by RAI
GENCER ALLA FENICE
BEATRICE DI TENDA
STAGIONE 1963 – 1964
OPERA MAGAZINE
1963 December
CORRIERE DELLA SERA
1964.01.11
LA STAMPA
1964.01.11
OPERA MAGAZINE
1963 April
CORRIERE DELLA SERA
1964.05.23
RADIOCORRIERE.TV
1964.05.24
KOBBE'S COMPLETE OPERA BOOK
1976
THE BELCANTO OPERAS BY CHARLES OSBORNE
1994
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.
KOBBE'S COMPLETE OPERA BOOK
1997
BEATRICE
DI TENDA
Opera in two acts, text by Felice Romani. Première at la Fenice, Venice,
16 March 1833, with Gluditta Pasta, Anna dal Serre. Alberico Curioni, Orazio
Cartagenova. First performed Palermo, 1833: Naples, 1834, with Persiani:
London, 1836: Vienna. 1837: Paris, 1841: New Orleans, 1842: New York. 1844.
Revived Palermo, 1959, with Rubio, conductor Gui: New York (American Opera
Society), 1961. with Sutherland. Horne, conductor Rescigno; la Scala, 1961.
with Sutherland. Kabaivanska, conductor Gavazzeni: Naples. 1962, with
Sutherland; Venice, 1964 with Gencer conductor Gui.
Beatrice di Tenda is the composer's penultimate opera,
first performed just over a year after Norma and nearly two before I Puritani.
It was commissioned for the Carnival of 1833, and. by November 1832. Bellini
and Romani, in agreement with the great singer Pasta, had settled on Beatrice
di Tenda. By mid-December, Bellini, in Venice to produce Norma, had received
nothing from Romani and by the end of the month police action had been invoked
to persuade Romani to leave Milan to fulfil his contract. Between the beginning
of January and 16 March 1833, the normally slow-working Bellini received his
verses, set them, rehearsed the performers and produced the opera- to finish up
with something of a failure with the audience' and to have Romani apologising
to the public for the haste with which he had been constrained to work! The
similarity of the story to that of Anna Bolena (Romani's libretto was set by
Donizetti in 1830) is too marked to be disregarded.
The story is based on an event in Italian history.
Filippo Visconti, after the death of his brother and of their father Gian
Galeazzo, joined with the general Facino Cane to restore order, and in due
course married his widow Beatrice di Tenda, through whom he inherited army and
possessions. When the opera begins, Filippo is bored with Beatrice and has
fallen in love with Agnese del Maino.
Act I The
overture, which features Beatrice's fourth scene 'Deh! se mi amasti', brings us
to the courtyard of the castle of Binasco. The courtiers are amazed that Duke
Filippo has left the festivities early and hear from him that it is because of
his lack of sympathy with his wife, who presides over them. The voice of Agnese
can be heard singing from the castle ("Ah, non pensar che pieno sia'), and
Filippo, encouraged by his sycophantic entourage, mellifluously admits his love
for her ('Come t'adoro").
In her own apartments, Agnese awaits the result of an
anonymous letter of assignation she has sent Orombello. lord of Ventimiglia,
with whom she is secretly in love. In the course of their duet. Agnese comes to
understand that Orombello is in love with Beatrice, and her furious reaction presages danger for
the Duchess.
Beatrice, strolling in the grounds of the ducal palace
with her maids of honour, laments in a beautiful cavatina ('Ma la sola, ohimé,
son' io') and cabaletta ('Ah! la pena in lor piombo") her husband's
oppressive treatment of her subjects as well as his spurning of her love, which
had raised him to his present position as Duke. As she leaves, Agnese's
brother. Rizzardo, brings Filippo to the scene. He longs for an excuse to rid
himself of Beatrice but. now that he suspects her (falsely, as it turns out) of
an amorous intrigue, finds himself furious at the discovery. Their
confrontation, mildness itself at first on her side, is composed of insults and
accusations on his, culminating in his claim to possess proof that she is
plotting with their subjects to remove him.
The fourth scene takes place in a remote part of the
castle. Armed soldiers discuss the duke’s behaviour-love or anger, they say,
will soon force him to show his hand. Beatrice enters and kneels in front of a
statue of Facino, her first husband, from whom she begs forgiveness ('Deh! se
mi amasti un giorno') that she so soon forgot his memory in marriage with
another. She is, she says, by all forsaken - by all. cries Orombello, but not
by him! He knows her plight, knows too that her subjects venerate her still and
will with him at their head come to her aid. But Beatrice knows she can accept
no aid from Orombello, wishing to avoid all danger of compromising herself. As
Orombello kneels at her feet. Filippo with his entourage appears on the scene
to accuse her of furnishing him with proof of all his suspicions. A great
ensemble. Verdian in its thrust and directness, builds up as each character
protests his or her emotions, and the act comes to an end with Filippo, enraged
at Orombello's protestations of Beatrice's innocence, ordering them both to
prison.
Act II A tribunal
court inside the castle. A vigorous orchestral prelude leads to the revelation
by the gentlemen of the court that Orombello has succumbed to the pressure of
torture and confessed. Filippo is deaf to the pleas of Anichino, and at the
appearance of the judges he demands an exemplary sentence for the guilty woman.
When confronted with Orombello and the news that he has confessed. Beatrice
berates him for what she can only think is a futile effort to buy his life,
until, in a burst of revulsion, he proclaims that his confession was made under
duress and is false. An ensemble develops. with Beatrice voicing her thanks to
Orombello and to heaven. Orombello his newfound steadfastness. Agnese her
doubts and remorse. Anichino his certainty of their joint innocence, Filippo
his increased determination to make the charge stick. if necessary, through
further torture. There is a moment of pathos as Beatrice warns her husband that
heaven is watching his actions, then Filippo baldly states his conviction that
the law must run its course with maximum severity.
Filippo is face to face with his conscience. At first
he cannot understand how others can feel remorse where he cannot, then, as he
fancies he hears Beatrice's voice under torture, wonders whether he himself is
as obdurate as he tries to make out, finally discovering the truth about his
feelings as he learns from Anichino that, in spite of Beatrice's refusal to
confess under torture, the judges have agreed on her death warrant. which now
lacks only his signature. He cannot sign and so send to the block the woman who
saved him from the life of a wandering fugitive ('Qui m'accolse oppresso,
errante')-it is the one moment of humanity in a character otherwise drawn too
black for credibility. But Filippo's clemency is short-lived, and the news that
the people and elements of Facino's army are massing against him causes him to
sign the decree, insisting that it is not he but Beatrice's own villainy which
condemns her ('Non son io che la condanno").
A hall leading to the castle dungeons. Her maids of
honour have left Beatrice at prayer in her cell, but soon she emerges to tell
them that heaven has helped her triumph over the pain of her ordeal, that she
will die wrapped in virtue's mantle, while Filippo and her enemies await God's
punishment for their crimes against truth and justice. The appearance of Agnese
to confess her part in Beatrice's torment-it was she who stole her letters, and
with her own honour bought the death of Beatrice - leads to a change of heart
in Beatrice as, in a beautiful trio initiated by Orombello from his nearby cell
('Angiol di pace"), she grants Agnese her pardon.
A funeral dirge announces the guards who are to escort
Beatrice to the scaffold, and, as Agnese faints in anguish, Beatrice poignantly
asks for prayers for Filippo and Agnese and not for herself ('Ah! se un'urna'),
then in a brilliant cabaletta ('Ah! la morte a cui m'appresso") appears to
welcome the prospect of death as amounting to victory over the sorrows of
earth.
COMPLETE RECORDING
1964.01.10
Recording Excerpts [1964.01.10]
Ma la sola ahimé son io...La
pena in lor Act I Scene VI
Tu qui Filippo Act I Scena VIII/a
Qui di ribelli sudditi Act I Scena VIII/b
Deh! se m'amasti un giorno Act I Scena XI
Ah! Tal onta io meritai Act I Scena XII
Al tuo fallo ammenda festi Act II Scena V
Angiol di pace Act II Scene X
Deh! se un'urna è a me concessa Act II Scene XI Finale I
Eccomi Pronta Act II Scene XI Finale II
