Vincenzo Bellini – fresh from the success of I Capuleti e Montecchi in Venice – spent the July and August of 1830 on Lake Como biding his time. He was struck by the folk songs of the female workers at the textile mills as they made their way home. These idylls were to flavour his sixth and pastoral opera, La Sonnambula, ossia I due fidanzati Svizzeri.

The handsome, fashionable composer – dismissed by Heine as ‘a sigh in dancing pumps’ – was twenty-eight. He was seeing much of the famous soprano Guiditta Pasta, whose histrionic flair, and vocal power would shape his next three operas. Though attached to another (married) Guiditta (Turina), Bellini, ever ambitious, flirted with the idea of marrying Pasta’s daughter.