Vincenzo Bellini e la sua poetica creativa nella ricezione del mondo musicale francese contemporaneo

Analyzing Vincenzo Bellini's aesthetic and creative poetics in the light of his Parisian reception in the 1830, many features stand out in a more evident way.Critics were still influenced by Rossini's 'sublime' style, whwn Bellini's operas proposed a new dramaturgy, rich in neo-classical echoes, full of melancholic melodies developed in conformity with a closer relationship between text and music. During the Parisian sojourn, Bellini presents himself as an artist nostalgically related to his country and in the same time attracted by the brilliant, chaotic excitement of the French capital. Like Chopin, Bellini considered art und music as a natural extension of life, as opposed to another attitude, which assigned to the artist (Berlioz, Delacroix, and Liszt) a social mission. Diaries, commentaries, critics and reports by Hector Berlioz, Henri Blaze de Bury, Eugène Delacroix and Léon Escudier contribute to outline the controversial reception of Italian opera and of Bellini's production. On one hand, the composer is considered as the result of the decline of taste, of the decadence of operatic tradition in Italy; on the other side, the pureness of his melodic invention is analyzed as the most important feature of his musical dramaturgy, full of romantic impetus and of neo-classic nostalgia. As for Bellini's compositional process, Berlioz and Liszt further underline the birth of a new vocal virtuosity, tightly bound up with the presence of a new generation of singer and a new conception of the 'belcanto', a style adapted to the expression of moving sentiments. Bellini's 'esprit de noctambulisme', the contemplative ecstasy, the nocturnal inspiration of his operas, is finally connected with Chopin's poetics, with a mystic conception of nature, considered as a presence of the divine in a heroic representation of life.