I Capuleti e i Montecchi

In the past, Verona had been torn apart by a centuries-old vendetta between the Capuleti and the Montecchi. The hostility between the two families had, however, ceased to affect daily life in the city, until Romeo Montecchi killed the brother of Giulietta Capuleti in a fight, making the rivalry flare up again.

First Act

Capellio calls a gathering of the Capuleti to warn them of an impending attack by the Montecchi, headed by Romeo. Capellio’s intended successor Tebaldo, the would-be avenger of her brother’s death, is to marry Giulietta the next day. A messenger arrives from the Montecchi (it is Romeo himself in disguise) proposing a marriage between Romeo and Giulietta as a way of making peace between the two families. When his offer is rejected, Romeo (still in disguise) threatens more bloodshed.

In Capellio’s palace, Romeo secretly meets Giulietta, helped by Lorenzo (counsellor to the Capuleti). Romeo urges her to flee with him, but she feels unable to abandon her family.

While the Capuleti prepare for the wedding of Giulietta and Tebaldo, the Montecchi launch an attack. In the tumult, Giulietta and Romeo come across one another again, but they are discovered by Capellio and Tebaldo, who recognise Romeo as the enemy.

Second Act

Lorenzo offers Giulietta a substance that will make her appear dead, promising her that Romeo will be by her side when she awakes.

Romeo and Tebaldo become embroiled in a fierce confrontation. Just before they come to blows, they hear the singing of a funeral procession and withdraw, convinced Giulietta is dead.

Upon seeing what he believes is Giulietta’s corpse, Romeo kills himself. While he is breathing his last, Giulietta regains consciousness. When she realises what has happened, she collapses. The Capuleti and Montecchi find the two and decide Capellio is responsible for the tragic turn of events.

The story of Romeo and Giulietta, the two main protagonists in I Capuleti e i Montecchi, is familiar to us mainly through William Shakespeare’s tragedy of 1597. However, the tale is actually much older. Indeed, Vincenzo Bellini and his librettist Felice Romani did not use Shakespeare as the basis of their opera but instead turned to very different sources, in part older ones. The result is a variant of the story that explores other concerns to those we are familiar with from Shakespeare. Dramaturg Nikolaus Stenitzer talked to the director Tatjana Gürbaca about her interpretation of the opera.

How would you describe the situation we find Romeo and Giulietta in initially, at the start of the opera? 
“The world that Bellini presents in his opera is a violent one. The people are trapped in a vicious circle of fighting, with the belligerent habits of the older generation dominating and destroying the lives of the younger generation. The more time I spend on this opera and think about it, the more I’m reminded of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen: a pact has been concluded from which it is not possible to escape, and there no longer seems to be room for love. You come to watch this opera expecting to see a great love affair but instead you feel that all the characters are already broken from the start. They seem to be living on the ruins of what once was.”

Violence as the core theme brings us to the setting you have chosen for your staging. In line with this idea, you show the Capuleti and Montecchi as two criminal organisations. 
“Which they were historically. They are based on the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, factions active from the thirteenth century to the fifteenth who amassed huge fortunes, in part through piracy. The Guelphs and Ghibellines are also in Verdi’s opera Simon Boccanegra. Society was being redefined in this period of history. Another aspect of I Capuleti e i Montecchi that fascinates me is how closely intertwined politics and private life are. There is this question of what the bigger picture does to each one of us, and vice versa.”

The libretto tells us that Romeo killed Giulietta’s brother and was forced into exile as a result. He himself says the murder took place in the heat of battle (“in battaglia”), but your interpretation suggests that Romeo and Giulietta jointly bear guilt for that event.
“I’ve looked more closely at the family relationships. I see Capellio as the head of a clan that is involved in matters that are not strictly legal. Lorenzo has been at his side for years as his counsellor — a consigliere, a role we are familiar with from the Godfather books and films. I imagine Giulietta as someone who was once a lively girl from a wealthy family who pushed the boundaries of what was permissible with her partying and love affairs. I think Romeo and Tebaldo were also part of that scene. Which family you belonged to wasn’t so important among that group of young people — until the day when an argument between Romeo and Giulietta’s brother got out of hand. Afterwards, everyone feels guilty: Romeo, Giulietta, and Tebaldo too. No one can undo the past.”

In this account, you are following the narrative that is already seen in Luigi da Porto’s version of the Romeo and Juliet story, his Historia novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti of 1530. At the start of the story, the strict divisions are no longer being observed so rigidly and the feud between the two families has ceased to play a major role in daily life. However, the subsequent course of events revives the centuries-old hostility between the families.
“In this small community, the families are dependent on one another and everyone ought to have an interest in maintaining the peace. But Capellio feels a line was crossed with the killing of his son, who was moreover the heir to the clan ‘throne’. Conflicts start when people feel personally aggrieved and when the egoism of an older generation comes to the fore — with fatal consequences. That in particular is what I think makes this opera so relevant today. We see conflicts around the world that are often driven by older men who plunge their countries into hopeless crises without any consideration for the consequences — crises that scar entire generations. What we need are politicians who invest in the future and create opportunities for the younger generation rather than simply trying to consolidate their own power and keep their wealth safe.”

When discussing Capellio and his egoism, that draws attention to another feature of the family situation in this opera, namely the absence of a mother figure.
“Capellio is a tragic character. He is a patriarch who sees everything slipping away from him: his business, his children. His life was centred on his family and now he no longer has that. The past is a place you can never return to. He is a cog in a machine that is spinning to destruction. Everything is in freefall. While he tries in vain to hold onto the principles of the past, his right-hand man Lorenzo chooses to act in ways that are remarkably short-sighted. Both men become embroiled ever more deeply in events that ultimately overwhelm them. And they miss the final opportunity for forgiveness. The opera gives an incredibly acute and detailed psychological picture of how the characters are bound to one another through the past and how they manage to fool themselves. Bellini draws characters that embody a great psychological truth: we are formed not just by what we do but also by our fantasies, memories and a self-image that does not always correspond to reality.”

Romeo sometimes seems to be caught in a feverish dream, and far from being able to confront the reality of his situation. Is that an atmosphere you had in mind for your staging?
“Absolutely. But that feverish aspect applies to all the characters. That’s because I feel everything is taking place in a stagnant situation where the spirits of the past are more dynamic than the people living in the present. It is like Hamlet in that respect. The disaster has already taken place, the characters are plagued by guilt and they can no longer escape one another. They are living out their remaining time together and constantly return to that point in the past where everything went wrong. They do not have the imagination to envisage an alternative future.

In amongst these developments, Tebaldo seems to offer a positive counterweight with his sensitivity: he is prepared to feel emotions, ask questions and possibly even consider other options without ever relinquishing his own humanity.”

Giulietta reflects on the past without a trace of sentimentality. At the same time, she speaks to Romeo of ‘honour’, an element in the classical tradition, which Felice Romani contrasts with Romanticism. How do you see Giulietta, the only female character in the opera?
“Giulietta is very clear-cut. She is the character who goes through the opera with her eyes open and her mind clear. She also realises how little chance there is of a future for her with Romeo. Love is a pleasure she can no longer allow herself. Of all the characters, Giulietta is the most realistic. Romeo is both disappointed and frightened by her incredibly down-to-earth attitude. She is like the calmness in the eye of the storm: war is raging all around her but every time we encounter her, all becomes still. She has to rely on her own resources, drawing on her personal thoughts and memories — that great inner conversation. This too recalls Wagner: she is like one of the Norns forever spinning thread. She appears entwined in a cocoon of what was and is, unable to see what will be. Only death seems inevitable.”

That also means she is the vessel for the memories in the story.
“Yes. For example, she is wandering alone through the palace at the start of the second act, as if she is the last person on Earth. The fighting has ended and she wonders whether anyone survived. Once again, she is the keeper of the memories, but in a very specific way. The passage of life here is like a skin that is shed and grows back, time and again: once I was this person, then something happened that transformed me and now I no longer recognise myself. How did I reach this point? The opera manages to give an impression of what human life actually involves: the great effort it takes to shape that life and the important role played by time — how everything changes, sometimes almost imperceptibly, until you suddenly find yourself in a place where you had never expected to end up.”

Original text: Nikolaus Stenitzer
English translation: Claire Wilkinson

Vincenzo Bellini had less than two months in which to compose his lyrical tragedy I Capuleti e i Montecchi for Teatro La Fenice in Venice. The lack of time meant he had to reuse music from previous works, but he was able to incorporate this music seamlessly into his new opera. The work was a huge success, consolidating Bellini’s position as one of Italy’s foremost opera composers. 

I Capuleti e i Montecchi is an excellent example of what we generally call the bel canto period in Italian opera. Bel canto required both virtuosity and flowing, lyrical vocal parts in long phrases. “Bel canto is of course a singing and music style, but it is more than that,” says the bel canto specialist Antonino Fogliani. “If we start with Rossini, it is clear that music for him is not about imitating the real world. Music is an ideal. Its purpose is not to repeat something from the natural world but to create something new. The idea that the emotions in the music — the spirit in the melody — are more important for the drama than the text was prevalent until the early Verdi. We use specific techniques, ornamentation and variations in bel canto to describe what the characters are thinking and feeling. In these operas, you have major ‘freeze-frame’ moments in which various characters can simultaneously express their individual feelings in the same piece of music. That is the miracle of bel canto.”

“The en travesti characters, whereby women sing male roles as is the case with Romeo in this opera, are related to that concept of the ideal. There were not many castrati in Italy after the eighteenth century, and the role of the young hero came to be sung by mezzo-sopranos and altos. That may be because these voices are closer to the unusual voice of the castrati and because women’s voices combine so beautifully, but you also sense that the opera is playing with gender and sexuality. The story has a male character, but you see a woman singing — and they were often attractive women — with a woman’s voice, but the texts are ones that would be sung by a man. What you get as a result is a striking ambiguity. This was an intellectual period that was much freer than ours in terms of fantasy and taste. I find that fascinating.”

Perfect dramatic match

I Capuleti e i Montecchi was composed in less than two months and Bellini took some of the music from his earlier operas Zaira and Adelson e Salvini. “It was common practice at that time to reuse music, especially if those previous operas had not been a great success. We know from his letters that Bellini wanted success and worked hard to achieve it. That is why he deployed the material in the best way he could; there is a perfect dramatic match between the music on the one hand and the action and emotions on the other. If you have more time, it’s easier to reflect on what would be most efficient or interesting, but in this case Bellini simply used his prodigious talent to compose the best possible opera in the short time available to him.”

The musical forms that composers used in this period often kept to specific formulas that can be at odds with modern views on what makes effective theatre. That is why many productions now leave out the formulaic repeats in the music, especially the cabaletta, the energetic final section of a number. “Coming back to my previous remark that this music is not about imitating nature, there is a sense of the ideal. And the effect of the musical forms is that you end up in a kind of circular motion, a special mental space. The repetitions are part of that, and you can make them interesting from a dramatic perspective in so many ways. The singer can vary the ornamentation, but modern practice is often for the conductor to use a different tempo for the repetition, making it slower for example, or using different dynamics. The first section is then what the character says without thinking, the instinctive response, while the repeat can be more reflective, thereby changing the viewpoint. If we don’t trust in and respect these forms, we turn them into something different. That is an option too, of course, because we are free to do what we want, but I prefer to respect the music as it was written.”

Melody supersedes text

Bellini always occupied a special place in a world in which numerous composers were competing for assignments and success, and he has been particularly admired by later composers for his exceptional talent in penning melodies. “If you compare Bellini with some of his contemporaries, it is noticeable that Bellini’s orchestral parts are perhaps less important in the purely instrumental sense. Both Rossini and Donizetti had made a thorough study of the German school of music and that emphasis on orchestral composition can be heard in their operas. When Rossini emerged on the scene, it was a real shock for people because he used the orchestra in such a virtuoso way. Both those composers make more sophisticated use of the orchestra than Bellini. Even so, his operas undoubtedly have some marvellous instrumental passages as well, such as the sinfonia at the start, and superb orchestral introductions, often with solo instruments, for example with the horn and the clarinet in Capuleti. There is also some virtuoso music for the strings in this opera. But while the orchestra is important, it is always at the service of the singing; Bellini places far more emphasis on the vocal parts in the drama.”

“Bellini’s operas stand out for their melodies. Of course, that’s what everyone always says about him, but it’s more than having a knack for composing good tunes. If you pay attention to his use of harmony, you will see how he manages to build the melody up perfectly with the support of the harmonies. He has a tendency to start the melody in a minor key, switch to a major key but revert to a minor key at the end. This reflects Sicilians’ melancholy attitude to life — and I should know because I am a Sicilian. The great Italian philosopher Manlio Sgalambro had a theory about Sicily. He said that its people have a tragic urge to sink into an abyss because they live on an island that could be swallowed up by the sea at any moment. In his opinion, Sicily only shows its true nature in and through art. I hear that in Bellini’s music too — that characteristic pain and nostalgia. No other Italian composer has this melancholy quality in their music. Bellini uses melody, more than the texts, to build up the drama.”

Personality

For I Capuleti e i Montecchi, the poet Felice Romani – with whom Bellini often collaborated – adapted a libretto he had previously written on the same story for the composer Nicola Vaccai. “Romani pared the drama down to the essential elements, left out certain parts of the story and presumably hoped the audience would fill in for themselves what had happened in the intervening period. But Bellini still managed to create a convincing drama thanks to his amazing music and melodies. However, this was an era in which the singer’s personality played an important role. That brings us to another interesting aspect of Bellini’s music: he was a great composer, but his music can become rather tedious if the singer is unable to convey the inner emotions.”

“When I was younger, I worked with the great conductor and musicologist Alberto Zedda. During an audition, a soprano gave a very chaste rendition of Giuletta’s wonderful aria ‘Oh! Quante volte’ from Capuleti, as if she was one of the nuns in Puccini’s Suor Angelica. ‘Why are you singing it like that?’ Zedda exclaimed. ‘You’re singing about sex; you want to make love to him!’ The singer has to understand the sensuality in the music, even if the text doesn’t make it explicit. Bellini’s music needs theatricality. You can sing Puccini's La bohème really badly and audiences will still be moved to tears because the music evokes and arouses emotions. That is different with bel canto. You need singers who can change the colour of their voice, even in the middle of short phrases. The music is technically challenging, but that doesn’t mean you have to sing it mechanically. You need outstanding technique but you also have to be an outstanding interpreter.”

Original text: Benjamin Rous
English translation: Claire Wilkinson