Romanza: “Dopo l’oscuro nembo” from Adelson e Salvini (1825)

This evening’s programme begins where it will end, in Ireland. Andrea Leone Tottola’s libretto for Bellini’s first opera, based on a story by Baculard d’Arnaud, gives no more detail about the setting than that the drama takes place in Lord Adelson’s castle in Ireland in the 17th century. Not that geographical precision is necessary, since the eternal triangle represented by Adelson, his fiancée Nelly and his best friend, the Italian painter Salvini, could be situated anywhere. An opera semi-seria, Adelson e Salvini ends happily, Adelson duly ending up with Nelly and Salvini reconciled to marrying her sister. But it turns out that way only after much complicated plotting and anxiety on all three sides. Nelly’s romanza comes from the first act at a point where Adelson is away abroad and, thanks to Salvini’s intereception of his letters, she hasn’t heard from him for a long time. Very early Bellini though it is, “Dopo l’oscuro nembo” is entirely characteristic, in its eloquently drooping vocal line, of his “melancholy muse.” There is a slightly superior version of the same music set to another romanza, “Oh! Quante volte,” in I Capulette e i Montecchi – which, however, is set in Verona, not Ireland.