In the summer of 1835, at a Paris dinner party, the writer Heinrich Heine told Vincenzo Bellini that true geniuses like Mozart and Raphael die young and that he would be next. Weeks later, the 33-year-old composer was dead. This episode explores the short, dramatic life of the bel canto master who shifted opera away from vocal acrobatics and toward melodies mapped onto natural human speech and raw emotion.

The conversation covers his musical family in Catania, the municipal scholarship that sent him to the strict Naples conservatory, mentor Zingarelli’s lesson that music must sing, and the royal applause that launched his career. It follows his partnership with librettist Felice Romani, his demand that tenor Rubini truly act, the censorship that turned a Victor Hugo adaptation into La sonnambula, the paid claque that sabotaged Norma’s premiere, the police-enforced deadline that ended his collaboration with Romani, the triumph of I puritani in Paris, and how his executor Francesco Florimo curated his legacy by destroying letters.

• Why modern biographers doubt the prodigy manuscript claiming he composed by age six
• Changing one letter of an opera title to avoid using a royal name on stage
• Impresarios as theater venture capitalists who also ran the lobby gambling tables
• The newspaper war with Romani that functioned like an investor prospectus in the 1830s
• Fleeing his affair with Giuditta Turina rather than accept responsibility for its fallout