Gaetano Donizetti

Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti was born in Bergamo in 1797 and trained under Simon Mayr, who secured him a scholarship and later a spot at Bologna's academy, where at 19 he wrote his first opera. An 1822 offer from impresario Domenico Barbaja brought him to Naples, where 51 of his operas would premiere over two decades. Success came first with comedies, then decisively with the 1830 opera seria Anna Bolena, which shifted the balance; still, his best-known works spanned both modes - L'elisir d'amore and Don Pasquale on one end, Lucia di Lammermoor and Roberto Devereux on the other. By 1836, chafing against Italian censorship, he turned toward Paris for larger fees and freer subject matter, spending much of the 1840s shuttling between Naples, Rome, Paris, and Vienna. Severe illness began closing in around 1843; by early 1846 he was confined to an institution for the mentally ill, and in late 1847 friends brought him home to Bergamo, where he died in April 1848, his mind gone.