Martha Eggerth heads the cast of Casta Diva, but the central character is famed Italian composer Vincenzo Bellini, here played by American actor Phillips Holmes. Paying but scant attention the facts, ...

In the recent film The Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher leaves Number 10 for the last time to the sound of “Casta Diva” from Bellini’s Norma. The filmmakers obviously saw parallels between Norma, a ...

In the same year that Darwin set sail in his Beagle, Bellini rocked the Milan opera world with not one but two operas. The Sicilian was just thirty years old and at the absolute pinnacle of his ...

The operas of Vincenzo Bellini, with the sweet melancholy of his long, long melodies and the elaborate refinement of his technique, had an effect that went well beyond the genre: he had a huge pull on ...

In the spring of 1835, the poet Heinrich Heine met the composer Vincenzo Bellini at the fashionable salon of the Princess Belgiojoso in Paris. The two men did not, it would seem, hit it off. Heine, a ...