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VINCENZO FRANCESCO BELLINI

Vincenzo Salvatore Carmelo Francesco Bellini (1801-1835)

Sicilian composer.
As a child did not show an inclination for music, she was in her blood. He had been sent by the old Don Vincenzo Tobia Bellini, his grandfather (native of Abruzzo, in Catania in the second half of the eighteenth century and became Kapellmeister of the Prince of Biscari) and then by his father, Rosario, (in his native Catania performed functions of master of chapel and music teacher, organist and composer) he appreciated musician, but always broke and struggling with life every day, so greedy.
Marrying Agata Ferlito, January 17, 1801, the young Rosario had put the house in an apartment on the first floor of the Gravina-Cruyllas palace opposite the church of San Francesco and with three balconies on the Via del Corso. But after the birth of Vincenzo (the night between 2 and 3 November 1801) and other children (Carmel, Francis, Michela, Giuseppa, Mario and Maria), the family, now numerous, was forced to move out to move into a home even more modest, in via S. Agostino, two steps from the house of Don Vincenzo Tobia, who for some time was giving lessons to the promising grandson, pulling him close behind even when played in aristocratic salons and churches, so in short time that kid, pretty and cute was known throughout Catania.

In 1819, Vincenzo obtained from Decurionate Catania a grant (scholarship) of 36 ounces per year and for the space of four years - 459 pounds - for further education in Naples, where he now dwells enrolling at the Royal College of S.Sebastiano music and having a masters G. Furno, Giacomo Tritto and Nicola Antonio Zingarelli. It was the latter, in particular, to direct it towards the melodrama of the Neapolitan school and instrumental works of Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
A prolific composer of sacred music, arias, instrumental and chamber music, Bellini completed the composition course presenting semi-serious opera, Adelson e Salvini (1825); the work was very successful and the Teatro San Carlo in Naples commissioned him immediately another, Bianca and Fernando (the title of which later became White and Gernando) set up in 1826.

With these successes Bellini repaid the trust placed by Decurionate Catania who had assumed the expenses of studies of promising youth, who from an early age had revealed a strong musical talent, so much to write just six years, his first composition (Gallus cantavit).And for the small circles of the nobility Bellini wrote his first arias and probably some instrumental track. In 1819 the jump in Naples with the fees paid by the City. They were years of hard study and even more serious and demanding compositions, which already revealed the cut of the talented musician and mature to take flight towards the best known theaters in the world.

Awards confirmed the following year (1826) when the San Carlo, the present King of Naples Francis I, his second work, Bianca and Gernando, had received unanimous applause, spontaneous, very encouraging even in the twenty-four performances to follow. And in fact, after the two works in Naples, here in Milan (1827); He landed at La Scala, called the impresario Domenico Barbaja, and on October 27 the same year presented a libretto by Felice Romani (who also wrote the verses for him for the next six works), The Pirate. A real triumph, which opened to the musician every street, making him forget so the unhappy Neapolitan flirt with Fumaroli Magdalene went to the mountain to the hostility of the girl's father (who died a few years later). With this work also began the fruitful collaboration of Bellini with the tenor Giambattista Rubini (which take place in baptism nearly all of his works), as will tight ties with Judith Pasta.Le most important works of Bellini born in the short span of time ranging from 1827 to 1835. it is a production certainly not abundant, and this not only for the short life of the composer, but especially for his understanding of the composition.

In contrast to the frantic prolificacy of the other composers of the time, forced by impresarios needs to exhausting tours de force, Bellini said he did not want to write more than one work per year, to pursue research completely. As he wrote in a letter, he was convinced that the success of a work depended "on the choice of an interesting theme, with warm accents of expression, by the contrast of passions". Careful management of his earnings put him in condition to implement this program.
Thus were born, one per year, the works that consecrated the fame of Bellini in Europe and that it is still today the purest exponent of Italian musical romanticism: Foreign (1829), I Capuleti ei Montecchi (1830), La Sonnambula (written in January and February of 1831 his first masterpiece of the Roman text. the opera's success was decreed on the evening of March 6, 1831 on the Carcano scenes of Milan, with Giuditta Pasta and Giambattista Rubini main performers. from Sonnambula in forward hatch to the composer through the streets of Europe's intellectual consensus) and Norma (1831).

The series of successes was only interrupted in 1829 by Zaira fiasco, composed for the inauguration of the renovated Teatro Ducale in Parma. After the interval of a trip to Sicily (1832) made with his friend F.Florimo, Bellini composed his penultimate opera, Beatrice Tenda (1833), which had very little luck, was greeted with little heat at the Teatro La Fenice Venice, marking the final break of Bellini with Turina and the Romans and, indirectly, its official entry into the worldliness' European.
In London and Paris, contested by the lounges, meeting Bellini 'Malibran, Heine, Chopin, Musset, Liszt and lego' friendship with Rossini who was generous with suggestions when composing the new opera, I Puritani and the Knights. In 1834 Bellini agreed to compose a work for the Theatre Italien in Paris, I Puritani, which was staged in 1835 and was his last work.