BELLINI - I Puritani
I Puritani was premièred on 24th January 1835, and met with the most unequivocal triumph of Bellini’s career: within the week King Louis-Philippe conferred on him the Légion d’honneur.
If I puritani had lapses of dramatic logic, no matter: it was in a language the French didn’t speak, and Bellini would tidy things up for Italian consumption, to which end he put out feelers to Romani, whilst preparing an alternative version to be mounted in Naples for Malibran. At his leisure, still in Puteaux, he began to consider Scribe’s play Gustave III (which would eventually become Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera). And on 23rd September that year he died, six weeks short of his 34th birthday.
Who knows what course mid-19th-century Italian opera might have taken had Bellini lived, for the score of I puritani is full of innovations. Scarcely a single aria is allowed to come to a full, applause-seeking, close – which may account for the opera’s relative unfamiliarity – and many of them develop unexpectedly into complex ensembles. Verdi himself would not compose with such formal sophistication until Aida, written more than 35 years later. But in the short term, the trend towards seamless musical continuity that Bellini had introduced was abandoned in favour of the structural status quo.

5 0999 5 09149 2 0 (3 CDs)
5 0999 5 09149 5 1 (Digital Download)