Bellini: I Capuleti e i Montecchi  (Audio CD) 
by Anna Netrebko

I Capuleti e i Montecchi is one of the loveliest and most moving of bel canto operas, though not among the more frequently performed. When Anna Netrebko and El na Garan a sang Giulietta and Romeo in Vienna last year at the performances documented in this recording, critics were enthusiastic. They found that Giulietta suited Anna Netrebko especially well, and she could show to full advantage her rounded tone and creamy timbre in every register. The German opera magazine Das Opernglas wrote: She concentrates on shaping individual phrases seemingly without effort and with unerring security, never sacrificing tonal beauty and flexibility. Anna clearly loves singing the role as much as Bellini did composing it: There s a lot of piangere cantando [weeping while singing] in Giulietta s beautiful melodies , she says. Her music is so sad in this opera, even tragic, not at all like Gounod s Je veux vivre Juliette.
El na Garan a s velvety timbre with its hint of noble metal made the character of the young Romeo Montecchi come vividly to life. The Opernglas reviewer wrote: Her interpretation of the role is exemplary and has such elegance. And, indeed, the Latvian mezzo has a particular affinity with this trouser role: At the moment that I go into the theatre and put the costume on, I become Romeo. Every woman has a masculine side and every man a feminine side, and it s fun to test that part of myself onstage, to try to imagine how a young man might react in this situation. He s a young guy, so there are the hormones and the pride. There are basically two different aspects to the character: his love of Giulietta is very naïve, very enthusiastic, bright and sunny, but when he and Tebaldo are suddenly going against each other, there s also great courage and energy. It s a fantastic role.
Verdi praised the broad curves of Bellini s unprecedented long melodies , and so does Fabio Luisi, who conducts Deutsche Grammophon s star-studded new recording of I Capuleti e i Montecchi. Luisi singles out Bellini as the composer who did most for the development of the voice and of melody. Nobody before him and probably nobody after him has equalled this achievement.
Vincenzo Bellini was the supreme melodist of the great bel canto triumvirate that also included Gioacchino Rossini and Gaetano Donizetti: the three outstanding representatives of the early 19th-century Italian style whose name literally means beautiful singing . Singers have always loved Bellini s long-breathed vocal writing, and I Capuleti is the first example of that style we know so well from his later, more famous masterpieces La sonnambula, Norma and I Puritani.
Shakespeare s star-crossed lovers would seem ideal for a composer with Bellini s unique gift for tender, elegiac melody, but, in fact, the subject wasn t the composer s choice: Venice s Teatro la Fenice commission in January 1830 required him to set a libretto called Giulietta Capellio. Nor is Bellini s opera based on Shakespeare s tragedy, then still unknown in Italy, but rather on an 1818 Italian play that shared its 16th-century source. That explains divergences from Shakespeare in the opera s title, plot and characters. He was given only a few weeks to produce I Capuleti, which premiered on 11 March, so it isn t surprising that the habitually slow-working composer borrowed heavily from his unsuccessful opera of the previous year, Zaira. In recycling that opera s finest music, Bellini was also hoping to give it a longer shelf-life: Zaira, hissed at Parma , he quipped, got its revenge in I Capuleti.
Throughout the rest of the century, Bellini could still be heard regularly at all the great opera houses. Then his music fell out of favour. In 1935, a few works were brought out of mothballs in Italy to mark the