This comprehensive bibliography and research guide details all the works currently available on Vincenzo Bellini, the Italian opera composer best known for his work Norma, which is still regularly performed today at Covent Garden and by regional opera companies. 2001, the bicentennial anniversary of Bellini's death, saw several concerts and recordings of his work, raising his academic profile. This volume aims to meet the research needs of all students of Bellini in particular.

This comprehensive bibliography and research guide details all the works currently available on Vincenzo Bellini, the Italian opera composer best known for his work Norma, which is still regularly performed today at Covent Garden and by regional opera companies. 2001, the bicentennial anniversary of Bellini's death, saw several concerts and recordings of his work, raising his academic profile. This volume aims to meet the research needs of all students of Bellini in particular.

Norma is by common consent the finest of the ten operas composed during Vincenzo Bellini's short career, representing his genius more comprehensively than is usually the case with any single work by an operatic composer. This 1998 handbook provides the biographical and cultural context of the opera. It gives a full synopsis and an examination of the music and poetry, which is rooted in the aesthetics of early nineteenth-century Italian opera. Professor Kimbell suggests something of the impression Norma has made on our imaginations and sensibilities in the 165 years since it was first produced in Milan in December 1831. He considers the great interpretations of the eponymous leading role. His discussion also embraces Bellini's work more generally by presenting some of the critical reactions to his music.

This book is the first full-length critical biography in English of Vincenzo Bellini, and it completes the author's trilogy of biographies of the outstanding pre-Verdian composers of Italy, linking as it does the life of the creator of Norma and I Puritani with those of Rossini and Donizetti. Mercurial, talented, ruled by swiftly fluctuating moods, the young Bellini from the start of his college days in Naples kept up a voluminous correspondence with his friends that gives a particularly rich and intimate view of his character and development as he moved through the musical life of Italy, London, and Paris in the heyday of bel canto. The handsome and self-centered Sicilian prodigy, captured off guard by Heinrich Heine so wickedly as "a sigh in dancing pumps," died at the tragically early age of 33, having written ten operas. Of these, Norma, La Sonnambula, and I Puritani have never disappeared from the repertoires of leading opera houses for over a century, and new recordings by opera stars bear witness to the rising interest in his lesser-known works as Il Pirata and Beatrice di Tenda. He wrote for the greatest singers of his day - Malibran, Grisi, Pasta, and Rubini - and he was the darling of the salons of Europe. This book tells the story of a great composer of opera and a complex, curiously flawed young man, sometimes winningly charming, sometimes abrasive and fearful. Mr. Weinstock, with judicious skill, lets Bellini speak as often as possible in his own words, and the result is the fascinating and shaded self-portrait of an artist at work. The second part of the volume is devoted to a detailed analysis of the operas and the non-operatic compositions, with information about the original casts and subsequent performers of the roles. The book contains a wealth of illustrations, some of which have never before been available for publication.

'A sigh in dancing pumps' was Heine's view of Bellini. His physical beauty, boundless success and untimely death at the age of thirty-three combined to give Bellini instant mythical status. But both the facts and the fantasies were to be embroidered by Bellini's close friend and eventual biographer Francesco Florimo, who distorted the posthumous image of the composer to the extent of altering or destroying letters in his possession. In John Rosselli's account of Bellini's life and music, a new picture of the composer emerges. He provides a more accurate view of Bellini's personality, his relationships and his short but dazzling career in Naples, Milan and Paris. He introduces the operatic world of the early nineteenth century, the singers of Bellini's roles, and, above all he explains the writing and performance of the operas themselves.