Word: bellinis
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...needle everyone into proper trim for her production of Bellini's 1 Puritani, Caldwell was working 20 hours a day with the cast and crew of her Boston Opera Group. She had read armloads of 17th century histories. She had studied the score and plugged herself into her nocturnal-education tape recorder so often that I Puritani had seeped down into her subconscious and kept drifting out all day in soft, idle humming. In pursuit of her ideal of "vital musical theater," she had directed acting, lighting, costuming, singing and playing through weeks of strenuous rehearsal...
...concert season to prepare for her U.S. stage debut in the role. Through artful cajolery and the promise of a creative hand in the production, Caldwell had both Sutherland and her husband, Richard Bonynge, working at double time. The results showed it: though normally a phlegmatic actress, Sutherland made Bellini's gloriously mad Elvira anguished and giddy, impish and frenzied, wild-eyed and playful. Showing a new command of her coloratura range, Sutherland moved against shifting configurations of chorus and cast until the audience erupted in gasps and bursts of applause...
...give themselves historic tutors, the brethren drew up a list of 57 "immortals" whose ideals resembled their own. Among them were Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc, Opera Composer Giovanni Bellini, and Coventry Patmore, a minor romantic poet. These models supplied them with literary and moral inspiration. The brotherhood even published a little magazine, The Germ, in 1850 "to encourage and enforce an entire adherence to the simplicity of nature...
...revered, but in the last years of his life he could scarcely find work enough to sustain him in Venice and had to rely on lesser commissions in the provinces. The Florentine art historian, Giorgio Vasari, erroneously considered Carpaccio a mediocre follower of Giovanni Bellini, and that judgment stood until the 18th century, when critics began to see some merit in his sense of fantasy. But the rise of neoclassicism, which abhorred fantasy, cast him into limbo again, and it was not until Ruskin that he found a new champion. His output had been small compared with that...
...mixed colorless Italian and Spanish songs with minor arias by Cilea, Caccini, Massenet, Lalo, Puccini, and Bellini, and since the Puccini was "E Lucevan le Stelle," which is barely music, Bellini was left as the tallest of the pygmies. An usher told me that Tagliavini has been singing these bleak, unimaginative programs for years...