Born in
Catania, Sicily, Bellini was a child prodigy from a highly musical family and legend has it he could sing an aria of
Valentino Fioravanti at eighteen months, began studying
music theory at two, the
piano at three, and by the age of five could, apparently, play well. His first composition is said to have dated from his sixth year. Regardless of the veracity of these claims, it is certain that Bellini grew up in a musical household and that a career as a musician was never in doubt.
Having learned from his grandfather, Bellini left provincial Catania in June 1819 to study at the
conservatory in Naples, with a stipend from the municipal government of Catania. By 1822 he was in the class of the director
Nicolò Zingarelli, studying the masters of the Neapolitan school and the orchestral works of
Haydn and
Mozart. It was the custom at the Conservatory to introduce a promising student to the public with a dramatic work: the result was Bellini's first opera
Adelson e Salvini an
opera semiseria that was presented at the Conservatory's theater.
Bianca e Gernando met with some success at the
Teatro San Carlo, leading to an offer from the impresario Barbaia for an opera at
La Scala. Il pirata was a resounding immediate success and began Bellini's faithful and fruitful collaboration with the librettist and poet
Felice Romani, and cemented his friendship with his favored tenor
Giovanni Battista Rubini, who had sung in
Bianca e Gernando.
Bellini spent the next years, 1827–33 in Milan, where all doors were open to him. Sparking controversy in the press for its new style and its restless harmonic shifts into remote keys,
La straniera (1828) was even more successful than
Il pirata, and allowed Bellini to support himself solely by his opera commissions. The composer showed the taste for social life and the
dandyism that
Heinrich Heine emphasized in his literary portrait of Bellini (
Florentinische Nächte, 1837). Opening a new theater in
Parma, his
Zaira (1829) was a failure at the Teatro Ducale, but Venice welcomed
I Capuleti e i Montecchi, which was based on the same Italian sources as
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
The next five years were triumphant, with major successes with his greatest works,
La sonnambula,
Norma and
I puritani, cut short by Bellini's premature death.
Bellini died in
Puteaux, near
Paris of acute inflammation of the intestine, and was buried in the cemetery of
Père Lachaise, Paris; his remains were removed to the cathedral of Catania in 1876. The Museo Belliniano housed in the Gravina Cruyllas Palace, in Catania, preserves memorabilia and scores.
rss feed