In the eyes of contemporary critics Bellini was a ‘philosophical’ composer; that is to say, a composer whose music, unlike that of his great predecessor Rossini, was intimately linked with the poetry he set. Sometimes this perception led to his being described as ‘the restorer of true Italian music’, faithful to the precepts of the classical training of the Naples conservatories – to those, for example, of one of his own teachers, Girolamo Crescentini, who declared, for all the world like some Renaissance humanist, that ‘il canto deve essere un'imitazione del discorso’ (song must be an imitation of speech) (Maguire 1989, p. 45). Bellini's relationship with his librettist Felice Romani was therefore the most critical artistic relationship of his career, more important to the unfolding and development of his genius even than his associations with Pasta or with Rubini. ‘If Romani had not been,’ remarked Francesco Regli, ‘Italy would have had no Bellini’ (quoted in Rinaldi 1965, p. 351).

When Bellini first met Romani, shortly after his arrival in Milan in the spring of 1827, he had been a practising librettist for some thirteen years, producing anything up to half a dozen librettos in a typical season, most of them for La Scala. He was a vastly more experienced man of the theatre than Bellini himself, and had worked with all the important Italian composers of the age. But from the first, Bellini exerted a special fascination over him, and prompted a greater measure of solicitude than any of the others with whom Romani had worked.