Gaetano Donizetti was born in 1797 in a cramped basement in Bergamo, the son of a pawn shop caretaker with no musical background. His one stroke of luck was Simon Mayr, a German composer who ran a charity music school and, when the boy's changing voice threatened to get him expelled, wrote a school play casting him as "the little composer" to prove his talent went beyond singing. This episode follows Donizetti through the meat grinder of the 19th-century opera industry, from a flopped Venice debut in 1818 to the 1822 Rome premiere where his lead tenor died days before opening and he rewrote the role for a mezzo-soprano.

We trace his rise after Anna Bolena in 1830, his Tudor operas and censorship-dodging historical settings, the famous mad scene in Lucia di Lammermoor, and the devastating loss of three children and his wife Virginia by 1837. ...