Vincenzo Bellini

Born in Catania, at the time part of the Kingdom of Sicily, the eldest of seven children in the family, he became a child prodigy within a highly musical family. His grandfather, Vincenzo Tobia Nicola Bellini [it], had studied at the conservatory in Naples and, in Catania from 1767 forward, had been an organist and teacher, as had Vincenzo's father, Rosario. An anonymous twelve-page hand-written history, held in Catania's Museo Civico Belliniano, states that he could sing an aria by Valentino Fioravanti at eighteen months, that he began studying music theory at two years of age and the piano at three. By the age of five, he could apparently play "marvelously". The document states that Bellini's first five pieces were composed when he was just six years old and "at seven he was taught Latin, modern languages, rhetoric, and philosophy". Bellini's biographer Herbert Weinstock regards some of these accounts as no more than myths, not being supported from other, more reliable sources. Additionally, he makes the point in regard to Bellini's apparent knowledge of languages and philosophy: "Bellini never became a well-educated man". Another biographer, Stelios Galatopoulos, discusses the information presented in the précis and accepts some of the evidence for early compositions but expresses skepticism regarding the young Bellini's child prodigy status. He mentions that Bellini never became a "proficient" piano player and, when he later went to the music conservatory in Naples at an …

Estratto dalla biografia Wikipedia di Vincenzo Bellini — testo rilasciato con licenza CC BY-SA 4.0. Leggi la biografia completa →