Vincenzo Bellini

Vincenzo Bellini was born in 1801 in Catania, a city on the east coast of Sicily, at the foot of the volcano Etna. He was the eldest of many children. His grandfather and his father were both church musicians in Catania, and they taught him. Many stories are told about him as a small child. It is said that he sang an aria at 18 months and wrote his first piece at six. These stories were written down long after his death, and nobody knows how true they are. At 17 the city of Catania gave him money to study in Naples, and he entered the conservatory there. His first opera for a public theatre, Bianca e Gernando, was performed in Naples in 1826, when he was 24. Donizetti, four years older and already a busy opera composer, praised it.

The next year, at 25, he wrote Il pirata (The Pirate) for La Scala in Milan, the most important opera house in Italy. It was a great success, and from then on he was famous. Most Italian composers of the time wrote three or four operas a year. Bellini wrote one. He asked for much higher fees than the others, and he got them, so he could take his time. In his whole life he wrote only ten operas, and he polished every one. The poet Felice Romani wrote the words for seven of them. In 1831, at 29, he wrote two of his most famous operas, La sonnambula (The Sleepwalker) and Norma. Norma is about a priestess in ancient Gaul who loves a Roman officer, the enemy of her people. Its aria Casta diva, a prayer to the moon, is one of the most famous arias ever written.

In 1833, at 31, he went to London, and then to Paris. In Paris he met Rossini, who was nine years older and the most famous composer in Europe. Rossini had stopped writing operas four years earlier and was now running the Italian opera house in Paris. At first Bellini thought Rossini was against him. But soon they became close friends, and Rossini gave him advice on his new opera. Bellini's melodies are unusually long. They go on and on without a break, as if the singer never needed to breathe. Chopin, nine years younger, became his friend in Paris and loved these melodies so much that he wrote the same kind of long, singing melodies in his own nocturnes. The German poet Heine, who met him in Paris, described him as a tall, slim young man with fair, almost golden hair and pale blue eyes. Heine wrote that the whole man looked "like a sigh in dancing shoes," meaning that he seemed sad and delicate, but always elegant. In January 1835 his new opera, I puritani (The Puritans), was performed in Paris. It was a huge success, and the King of France gave him the Legion of Honour. Donizetti, who was now his rival in Paris, came to hear it and wrote to a friend praising it.

Bellini was elegant and charming, but he was sensitive and easily hurt. He worried about rivals, and he was very superstitious. At a dinner in the summer of 1835, Heine told him, "You are a genius, Bellini, but you will pay for your great gift with an early death." Bellini was horrified and left the table. A few months later it came true. In September he fell ill with an infection of the intestines at a friend's house outside Paris. People were afraid it was cholera and stayed away. He died on 23 September 1835, almost alone, at 33. Rossini organised the funeral. Every musician in Paris came, and Rossini and other leading composers carried the coffin themselves. He was buried in Paris, and forty years later his body was brought home to Catania. Vaga luna (Beautiful Moon) is a small song he wrote in his last years for a young girl in Milan. It was published three years after his death. Verdi said that Bellini's melodies were "long, long, long, as no one had written before him." That is what everyone remembers about him. He wrote less than any other opera composer of his time, but his melodies, above all Casta diva, are still among the most loved in all opera.