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May a just judgment from the stars down fall Upon thy blood, and be it new and open, That thy successor may have fear thereof: Because thy father and thyself have suffered, By greed of those transalpine lands distrained, The garden of the empire to be waste. Come and behold Montecchi and Cappelletti, Monaldi and Filippeschi, careless man! Those sad already, and these doubt-depressed!
Among the operas which she sung in at this early period under Lanari's management were Bellini's "I Montecchi ed i Capuletti," which the composer had just written for her sister Giuditta at Venice; "Il Barbiere," and "Giulietta e Romeo," written by Vaccai. She was pronounced by the Italians the most fascinating Juliet ever seen on the stage.
In which city they had their first stronghold in Italy, aided therein by the great family of the Montecchi, Montacutes, Mont-aigu-s, or Montagues; lords, so called, of the mountain peaks; in feud with the family of the Cappelletti, hatted, or, more properly, scarlet-hatted, persons.
Suddenly, however, she made her reappearance at Dresden in the rôle of Romeo in Bellini's "I Montecchi ed i Capuletti." She had lost a good deal of her vocal power and skill, yet her audiences seemed to be moved by the same magic glamour as of old, in consequence of her magnificent acting.
Its success was extraordinary, and the managers of La Scala commissioned him for another work. In 1828 "La Straniera" appeared, quickly followed by "Zaira" , which failed at Parma, and "I Capuletti ed i Montecchi," a version of "Romeo and Juliet," which made a great success at Venice in 1830.
All the associations of the place centre in and radiate from Dante and his unearthly poem, so much of which was written here or hereabouts. It is extraordinary how he has appropriated the memories of the place, even down to Romeo and Juliet who by virtue of their immortalized loves belong as much to our times as to their own by the single well-known line: Vieni a veder Montecchi e Capelletti.
He himself confesses that 'if any one should compare this score with that of "Die Feen" he would find it difficult to understand how such a complete change in my tendencies could have been brought about in so short a time. The incident which turned his thoughts into this new channel was a performance of Bellini's 'Capuletti e Montecchi, in which Madame Schroeder-Devrient sang the part of Romeo.
He was in a mood to be amused. Everything diverted him the faint pulsing of a guitar-string in an adjacent garden at midnight, or the sharp clash of gleaming sword blades under his window, when the Montecchi and the Cappelletti chanced to encounter each other in the narrow footway. Meanwhile, Hamlet brushed up his Italian.
We must not omit to state that under Bartolomeo, the third of the Scaligers, that tragic end was put to the rivalry of the great families, Capelletti and Montecchi, which served Bandello as the foundation of one of his most popular novels, and Shakspeare as the plot of Romeo and Juliet.
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