The life of Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848) reads like a Nineteenth Century novel. Born in poverty, he grew up in northern Italy during the Napoleonic Wars. At the age of seven, his great musical talents were discovered by a teacher who did everything over the next nine years to see they were properly developed. Although Donizetti went through the usual struggles many young people experience when beginning in his field, by 1828 he was known all over Italy and beginning to be heard of abroad. He was about to marry a beautiful and accomplished woman with whom he had been in love for several years. In the next nine years, Donizetti composed a number of masterpieces, including two operas which have never left the repertoire since that time. Then his wife died. He moved to Paris, continued to enjoy great success, and reached the peak of his career when he was appointed Court Composer to the Austro-Hungarian Emperor. Then everything collapsed. A disease he had caught in early life gradually paralysed him and eventually drove him insane. He was shut up in an asylum for a while, and, after various misfortunes, taken home to Bergamo. During his last few months, he was cared for by friends. Soon after revolution broke out in Northern Italy in 1848, Donizetti died at the age of fifty. Is an English biography of Gaetano Donizetti needed? One would dare to say, yes! In the past fifty years, his status as a composer has been increasing as scholars and musicians become familiar with more of his work and appropriate ways of performiance. One of the main purposes of this book is to portray Donizetti, the man behind the music  During his lifetime, subjects of dramas, based on classical mythology, gave way to tales of human life, which became the norm as evidenced in many different spheres of life, including invention and a strong scientific and factual spirit abroad, all of which influenced the beginnings of the modern world between 1800 and 1850. Music in the late 18th Century style developed into something else – lighter, more ornamented and more personal in tone. Perhaps this is why Don Pasquale (1843) was the last important comic opera until Verdi’s Falstaff in the 1890’s. General histories of music or other reference books contain only a few bare facts about Donizetti – and the latter are often incorrect or incomplete. The field is perhaps ready for a biography designed for the ordinary opera-lover or general reader. One hopes the resulting book will be read by those to whom he is, at best, a name. He is a man worth meeting, who lived in a transitional period both musically and otherwise. His music is more than mere links in a chain that binds Rossini to Verdi. They have their own interest, individuality, and importance.