Gaetano Donizetti

Charity paid for Gaetano Donizetti's education. Born in Bergamo to a family without means, he was taken into the free music school that Johann Simon Mayr had founded there, and Mayr's backing carried him on to Bologna and into the theatre. More than sixty operas came out of the three decades that followed, farce and historical tragedy side by side and often in the same year. For Paris he adapted himself to French forms in La fille du régiment and La favorite. He revised Dom Sébastien for Vienna in 1845 and died in Bergamo in 1848. L'elisir d'amore, on a libretto by Felice Romani, reached the stage in Milan on 12 May 1832, and Lucia di Lammermoor, which Salvadore Cammarano drew from Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor, followed at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples on 26 September 1835. Don Pasquale came last of the three, at the Théâtre-Italien in Paris in January 1843.