Vincenzo Bellini Music Education Posters & Prints
for the music studio, arts and social studies classrooms, home schoolers, decor for office or home.

Vincenzo Bellini
b. 11-3-1801; Italy
d. 9-23-1835; France

Vincenzo Bellini, a child prodigy from a highly musical family, was a noted composer of Bel canto (beautiful singing) opera. His opera 'Norma' is considered the height of Bel canto, a vocal technique featuring extensive ornamentation of fast scales and cadenzas.

The death of a young, and apparently healthy Bellini, was a shock and great lost to the music world. His death was attributed to ‘an acute inflammation of the large intestine, complicated by an abscess of the liver’ according to the post-mortem report.

Norma is a tragedy based on The Infanticide by poet Alexandre Soumet.

Norma, a Druid priestess with two children by Roman proconsul Pollione, is being cast aside by Pollione for the temple virgin Adalgisa.

In her despair Norma is going to kill her children but then decides instead to put them in the care of Adalgisa. Then, when Pollione comes to take Adalgisa away to Rome, Norma and the Druids drags him to the lighted pyre and they die together.

La sonnambula (The Sleepwalker) is a “semi-serious” opera in a pastorial setting, with the sleepwalking heroine Amina taken to be a phantom that haunts the village.

• Opera Singer posters

I Puritani (The Puritans), Bellini's last opera, was first produced in Paris in 1835.

The time and setting are the 1604s English Civil War.

Queen Victoria often referred to I Puritani in her diary.