The first-born son of a modest family of musicians from Abruzzo, Vincenzo Bellini was born in Catania on 3rd November 1801, to Rosario Bellini and Agata Ferlito. His grandfather Vincenzo Tobia, originally from Torricella (Chieti), had moved to Catania in 1763, after studying at the Conservatorio di S. Onofrio in Naples. In the city of Catania, he served as ‘maestro di cappella’ for the city Senate and was employed by the noble Paternò Castello family of the princes of Biscari. His father Rosario was to follow in his parent’s footsteps, but did not achieve a leading position in the city’s musical milieu, barely managing to support his family with the income from his activities.
The musical education of the young Bellini was in line with his family tradition: having shown a precocious nature as a musician, his first compositions depended on the teachings of his father and grandfather and belonged for the most part to the genre of church music, which was by far the dominant one in the system of music production in Catania. Thanks to the reputation of his paternal ancestor, and the support of the city’s patronage, in 1819 Bellini obtained a scholarship from the Decurionate (Municipality) of Catania to attend the Real Collegio di musica in Naples. His teachers were some of the greatest exponents of the local tradition: from the elderly Giovanni Furno and Giacomo Tritto to the authoritative Nicola Zingarelli. Bellini deepened his knowledge of harmony, counterpoint and vocal technique through the study of both religious and theatrical scores from the 18th-century Neapolitan school, as well as instrumental works by Haydn and Mozart. Also decisive for his training was the listening to the works by Rossini, who at that time absolutely dominated the Neapolitan stage, as well as the more recent compositions of Spontini and Mayr and the first operatic attempts of Mercadante, Pacini and Donizetti. At school, he became close friends with a fellow student, Francesco Florimo, who was destined to become his main correspondent in letters. Alongside sacred and instrumental music, as the mainstays of his musical training at school, we find youthful lyricism in the vocal sphere, which also served to introduce him to the contexts of private Neapolitan society. His first printed composition, the arietta Dolente immagine di Fille mia, dates back to 1824.
To crown his cursus studiorum, in February 1825, Bellini presented his first theatrical work, staged in the theatre of the Conservatory: Adelson e Salvini, with a libretto by Andrea Leone Tottola, is a semi-seria opera which, according to Neapolitan custom, included spoken dialogue and a comic part in dialect. The success of this final essay led producer Domenico Barbaja to entrust Bellini with the composition of a serious opera for the San Carlo Theatre in Naples. With a libretto by Domenico Gilardoni, Bianca e Fernando was staged on 30 May 1826 with the title changed for reasons of political etiquette (i.e. Ferdinando was the name of the crown prince) to Bianca e Gernando. It was another success, after which Barbaja (who also managed theatres outside the borders of the Bourbon kingdom) offered Bellini a contract for the Teatro alla Scala. On 5 April 1827, the musician left for Milan.
Bellini stayed in Milan from 1827 to 1833, where he worked with the Genoese librettist Felice Romani on six new titles, a remake and a project that had remained in draft form, at a rate of about one opera a year: Il pirata (Milan, Teatro alla Scala, 1827), a new version of Bianca e Fernando (Genoa, Teatro Carlo Felice, 1828), La straniera (Milan, Teatro alla Scala, 1829), Zaira (Parma, for the inauguration of the newly built Teatro Ducale, 1829), I Capuleti e i Montecchi (Venice, Teatro La Fenice, 1830), the unfinished Ernani (autumn 1830), La sonnambula (Milan, Teatro Carcano, 1831), Norma (Milan, Teatro alla Scala, 1831) and Beatrice di Tenda (Venice, Teatro La Fenice, 1833). Having soon entered into the good graces of the best society in Lombardy and Veneto, the musician forged profitable professional relationships and forged those love affairs that had long fueled his literary reputation as a seducer.
Bellini left for Europe from Milan with a then supranational reputation: in April 1833 he was in London to attend the staging of three of his operas at the King’s Theatre, Il pirata, Norma and I Capuleti, and the success of the English version of Sonnambula at the Drury Lane Theatre, starring Maria Malibran. At the end of the summer he moved to Paris: in the French capital he heard Beethoven’s Symphonies live for the first time and consolidated his relationship with Rossini, who acted as artistic consultant for the Théâtre Italien, where Il pirata and I Capuleti were to be staged, and tried in vain to reach an agreement with the Opéra (where he attended the grands opéras by Meyerbeer and Halévy) and with the Opéra-Comique. In February 1834, however, he succeeded in being engaged by the Théâtre Italien: I Puritani was written on a libretto by Count Carlo Pepoli, a poet and political exile at his first theatrical experience, whom he had almost certainly met in one of the aristocratic salons that Bellini had taken to frequenting, as was his habit, and where he made the acquaintance of Chopin, Heine and Delacroix, among others. The triumphant première of I Puritani on 24 January 1835 consecrated Bellini’s reputation in Paris: King Louis-Philippe (married to a Bourbon of Naples) conferred on him the Legion of Honour. In the summer, while requests from the Opéra and various Italian theatres were coming in, the intestinal disease from which the musician had been suffering for some time manifested itself once again, leading to his premature death on 23 September 1835 while he was staying with an English acquaintance, Solomon Levy, in the Parisian suburb of Puteaux. Buried in the Parisian cemetery of Père Lachaise, Bellini’s body was transferred to Catania in 1876 and buried in the Metropolitan Cathedral.