Gaetano Donizetti was born on November 29, 1797, in Borgo Canale, a slum section of Bergamo, in Northern Italy, to a very poor family that had probably been in the fabric trade for generations. He received his musical education in the charity school for music, organized by the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, a landmark twelfth century basilica, to train boys for the choir. They had recently hired a new maestro di capella, the Bavarian opera composer Mayr, who reorganized the school to include instrumental training in cembalo and violin. Donizetti studied in the school for nine years and never forgot the debt he owed to Mayr, an important opera composer of the period, who contributed to an expansion of the opera orchestra that influenced both Rossini and Spontini.

After his studies at Santa Maria Maggiore, Mayr sent him for two years to Bologna to study counterpoint and fugue with the redoutable Padre Mattei, who had been Rossini's teacher and who famously said that Rossini's operas brought disgrace on his school. Although we tend to think of Italian composers as "light" compared to the Germans, in the early nineteenth century Palestrini and the polyphonic school were also well-known as "Italian" music, and were in fact the very foundation of serious musical study, much as the old masters were for painting. Mattei was associated with this tradition, and he despised the more popular and secular operatic forms.

Post-scriptum: In June 2002 I visited Istanbul and was interested in finding whatever trace Giuseppe Donizetti, Gaetano's brother, had left on the city. I already knew he had worked as a band conductor for one of the Ottoman sultans. I found out that he had worked for Mahmood II and introduced military band instruments into Ottoman music; for this the sultan made him a pasha. His son had tended Gaetano during Gaetano's long illness and descent into madness and eventual death. I found out that he was buried in the Cathédrale du Saint Esprit above Taxim Meydani, in the crypt. The tomb had the instription Donizetti Family, so his son and other Donizetti's may perhaps also be buried there. The sacristan, who had kindly opened the crypt for me, upon hearing that I was an organist in NYC let me play the excellent church organ, built in 1850 and still equiped with the original bellows (although of course they are not at present in use). It is an excellent tracker action instrument of the true French character, which means with good strong reads and flutes.

The natural character of Vincenzo Bellini was proud, arrogant and competitive compared with the generosity of Donizetti and Meyerbeer. His opera Norma was admired by Wagner, and is generally considered his best, although I find it somewhat bomastic and also padded with less than inspired material. There are in fact about five great numbers separated by stretches of boring recitative, much like Wagner's operas. In my opinion, Bellini's genius was more lyrical than dramatic, and I agree with Leoncavallo that Sonnambula was his greatest opera. Sonnambula is an operatic pastorale, invidiously and somewhat maliciously (and quite unfairly) compared by Leoncavallo to Meyerbeer's Pardon de Ploermel, and is a depiction not of towering passion and conflict but of the loves and misunderstandings of ordinary people in ordinary circumstances. Its three great arias for the soprano are both long and cogent--incredible static set-pieces that need the ultimate prima donna. The two duets with the tenor are full of refined lyricism and precise melodic detailing that inspired Chopin.

Jules Massenet was a more interesting composer than people nowadays think. He was a great man of the theater, and he practiced a form of verismo that influenced Puccini. It is significant that one of Puccini's first operas was Manon Lescaut, as if the young man was recognizing his need to define himself by his debt to and differences from the latest French school, rather than as Verdi did, that is starting off in a purely Italian tradition and than gradually becoming more international. Massenet was in a sense the first "popular" composer in that he wrote set-pieces that are really sentimental show-stoppers set in the midst of a serious psychological drama, much as Puccini would later do.

He owed a definite debt to Meyerbeer, a great man of the theater and composer who could also create a whole world out of musical evocations of the by-gone. Although the operas that we know him by today are largely known for their tenor set-pieces (like Werther and Manon) he wrote one of the most successful operas where the baritone has a more important role than the tenor, that is Thais. This is perhaps his greatest opera, and although it can seem (especially when Athanael was such by the great French Wotan Marcel Journet) possitively Wagnerian, it seems very French, both passionate and refined, when sung by a lyric baritone such as the original Athaniel, Faure.

It is perhaps in the tradition of Meyerbeer's Pardon de Ploermel, which also managed to make the baritone the hero. The problem in all such operas is what to do with the tenor, who by virtue of having a higher voice tends to dominate, especially in ensemble writing. Pardon is one of the longest three person operas ever written: here the tenor is a comic figure, but developed at such length that he acquires a human dimension. In Thais, the tenor (Nicias) is the worldly Philosophewho turns out to have more wisdom than the saint: the aesthete is more profound than the ascetic! His only having one big scene also helps the vocal balance.

Victor Massé is an important link between Gounod and Massenet. He wrote mostly Opéras Comiques but his one grand opera, Paul et Virginie is distinguished by a wealth of invention that is truly remarkable. The woman who created the rôle of Virginie, Marie Heilbron, was a French coloratura who later created the rôle of Manon in Massenet's Manon. The rôle of the tenor Paul was a starring vehicle for Capoul and is quite dramatic. Massé uses coloristic effects that anticipate impressionism by at least ten years, but his opera also shows the continuing influence of Meyerbeer in its treatment of the folkloric and ethnic element, which owes a good deal to Africaine and Pardon de Ploermel.