Gaetano Donizetti

Gaetano Donizetti was born in 1797 in Bergamo, in northern Italy, in a windowless basement room, as he himself later described it. A free music school run by the composer Simon Mayr gave him his training, and he repaid it by becoming a professional of extraordinary speed: roughly seventy operas in about twenty-five years, written for theaters in Naples, Milan, Paris, and Vienna.

Speed did not mean carelessness. He handled broad comedy and high tragedy with equal ease, and his tragic heroines, above all Lucia with her famous mad scene, set the standard for a generation of singers. Illness ended his career in the 1840s, and he died back home in Bergamo in 1848.

The comedy L'elisir d'amore is the friendliest way in, with a tenor solo audiences wait all evening for. Then hear Lucia di Lammermoor for the tragic side.