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Like so many successful composers before and after him, the young Vincenzo Bellini found music to be a golden ticket \u2013 the passport out of a restricted life to travel opportunities, wealth, and a broadening of cultural horizons.<\/p>
Vincenzo Bellini was born into a musical family on 3 November, 1801, in Catania, Sicily. He showed exceptional musical talent from an early age and was tutored by his grandfather Vincenzo Tobia.<\/p>
There was no family money: Bellini\u2019s immediate forefathers were musicians too, but of the jobbing kind, more craftsmen than artists. Playing the organ, teaching and, in his grandfather\u2019s case, composing music in the service of a local nobleman gave them an influence that extended no further than the local community in Catania, Sicily. <\/p>
The surrounding hills were alive with the sound of folksong, and of course the church required a never-ending supply of quotidian liturgical music. But, for an aspiring opera composer, opportunities were few. Vincenzo showed exceptional musical promise, however, and a petition to the local council resulted in him being granted the funds to take up a place at the Naples Conservatoire, where his grandfather had studied before him.<\/p>
In 1819, he duly won a scholarship to study at the Real Collegio di Musica in Naples. He was taught by Niccol\u00f2 Zingarelli, though regular visits to theatre familiarised him with the operas of Rossini.<\/p>
To a 17 year-old arriving across the water from Sicily, Naples was a metropolis of unimaginable riches. At this time, in the 1810s, it was one of the most highly respected musical centres on the Italian peninsula (Italy would not be a united country for a half-century yet), boasting an extraordinary reputation for music education and a superbly well-endowed opera house, the San Carlo. <\/p>
Bellini attended regularly and immersed himself in the operas of Rossini<\/a><\/strong>, though was encouraged by Zingarelli to eschew the current vogue for coloratura<\/a><\/strong> and emulate the simpler style of earlier composers such as Paisiello.<\/p> From Naples, Bellini would move on to other, progressively more important cultural centres. Success with a juvenile opera (the short Adelson e Salvini<\/em>) led to an opportunity to put an opera of his own on the stage at the San Carlo. <\/p> That work, Bianca e Fernando<\/em>, impressed the theatre\u2019s impresario Domenico Barbaja so much that he passed Bellini\u2019s name on to his associates at La Scala<\/a><\/strong> in Milan. Bellini was commissioned to write an opera with the leading librettist of the day, Felice Romani: a tremendous coup for a young man just out of music college. The resulting work, Il pirata <\/em>(1827), was a triumph.<\/p>