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 premi ...