OTD in Music History: Great opera composer Vincenzo Bellini (1801 - 1835) watches the final dress rehearsal for what would end up becoming his last opera, "I Puritani,” in 1835. (“I Puritani” premieres to great public acclaim the very next day, and it still remains in the standard repertoire.) In many ways the quintessential "bel canto" opera composer of the early 19th Century, Bellini was a huge celebrity in his own time -- his ravishingly long-breathed melodies earned him the nickname "the Swan of Catania." Many years later, at the end of his own legendary career as an opera composer, Giuseppe Verdi (1813 - 1901) looked back and praised Bellini's work for its "long, long, long melodies... such as no one else had ever written before." Richard Wagner (1813 - 1883) rarely admitted to liking any music but his own, and he similarly conceded that he was spellbound by Bellini's almost uncanny ability to match music with text and psychology. Franz Liszt (1811 - 1886) and Frederic Chopin (1810 - 1849) were also both devoted fans. A musical specialist, Bellini composed little else beyond his ten completed operas -- of which five, "Il pirata" (1827), "Capuleti" (1830), "La sonnambula" (1831), "Norma" (1831), and "I puritani," (1835), are still regularly performed today. Suffering from tuberculosis and in very delicate health for most of his short adult life, Bellini died just a few months after the triumphant premiere of "I Puritani” due to "an acute inflammation of the colon compounded by an abscess of the liver." PICTURED: An entrance pass that Bellini himself wrote out and signed, admitting two unnamed guests into the famous Parisian "Theatre Royal Italien" to watch the final dress rehearsal for “I Puritani.”
