Gaetano Donizetti

Gaetano Donizetti was born into a poor and unmusical family in Bergamo, Italy – it was as a choirboy at his local church school that he first discovered a gift for music. He went on to compose around 70 operas between the age of 19 and his death of syphilis at the age of 51, establishing a reputation as Italy's pre-eminent opera composer between the death of Bellini and the rise of Verdi. His first major success came in Rome in 1822, and moving between Rome, Naples and Milan, he found himself in demand all over Italy during the 1830s. Anna Bolena (1830) attracted attention as far afield as London and the USA, and the popularity of L'elisir d'amore (1832), Lucrezia Borgia (1833) and the romantic tragedy Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) took him to Paris, where in 1840 he composed La fille du régiment, to a French libretto. For the rest of his life he worked regularly in both Italy and France, and Linda di Chamounix (1842) and the farcical Don Pasquale (1843) were among the hits of his final decade before his health collapsed in 1846. Along with Lucia di Lammermoor (with its powerful "mad scene") and the sunny romantic comedy L'elisir d'amore, both works are regularly staged today, and Donizetti's huge catalogue is an endlessly fruitful source of recordings and revivals for lovers of opera in the bel canto tradition.