La campana sommersa

Best-known for his brilliantly evocative and rightly popular trilogy of tone-poems on Rome, Italian composer Ottorino Respighi was also a noted composer of operas. His gloriously lyrical and opulently orchestrated adaptation of Gerhart Hauptmann’s fin de siècle allegory Die versunkene Glocke (The Sunken Bell), the opera La campana sommersa is Respighi’s operatic masterpiece – a magical, if ultimately tragic, tale of the love between a mortal human and an immortal fairy.