Gaetano donizetti composer

Gaetano Donizetti’s life bears more than a passing resemblance to an operatic plot. The curtain rises on a humble birth and years of drudgery. Then there is a dizzying ascent to greatness, before a final fall into madness, the result of syphilis rather than heartbreak.

Verdi operas

The composer celebrated for writing the famous ‘mad scene’ in nineteenth century opera had lost his reason and was unable even to recognise his own music. Donizetti was born in Bergamo, the son of a man who rose no higher than holding the door at the local pawnshop.

He was fortunate enough to find a patron in Simon Mayr, the maestro di capella at Bergamo cathedral. It was Mayr who overcame Donizetti’s father’s conviction that it ‘was impossible that one should compose’. Mayr secured the young Donizetti’s first professional commission, the melodrama Enrico di Borgogna, given in Venice in November So began 12 long years of apprenticeship.

The composer learnt his craft first in the opera houses of northern Ita