Vincenzo Bellini

Ten operas in ten years, and three of them still at the centre of the repertory: Vincenzo Bellini, born in Catania in 1801 into a family of church musicians, was taught by his father and grandfather before the Naples conservatory, where Zingarelli presided and Furno and Tritto took him through counterpoint. The student piece Adelson e Salvini brought a commission from the San Carlo; Il pirata, at La Scala in October 1827, made his name. With the librettist Felice Romani he then wrote La sonnambula and, on Boxing Day 1831, Norma — a first night received with indifference, and an opera that has been the summit of the soprano repertory ever since. Beatrice di Tenda strained the partnership past repair. I puritani, written for Paris and given in January 1835, was his last work. His orchestration is deliberately plain because the sense of the music lies in the vocal line: long, unhurried, harmonically postponed, phrased as breath rather than as figure. Chopin admired that writing above all else in Italian opera. He died at Puteaux, outside Paris, in September 1835, aged thirty-three. I Capuleti e i Montecchi, on a Romani text drawn from the Italian sources behind Shakespeare's play, was written for the 1830 Carnival at La Fenice in barely six weeks, which he managed by taking over a great deal of the music of the unsuccessful Zaira; it opened on 11 March and reached La Scala at the end of the same year.