Bottesini is remembered mainly as a double-bass virtuoso and as a conductor, but he was also a composer of some success; apart from several works for the double-bass he also wrote seven operas.
The best known, Ero e Leandro, was premiered at the Turin Regio in 1879 to great success.
The opera has only three characters: the priestess of Venus, Ero, soprano; Leandro of Abìdo, tenor; and the perfidious Ariofarne, high magistrate of Thrace and King of the Sacrifices. The score, stylistically comparable to the late Verdi, certainly reveals unusual attention to orchestration and uses a richly chromatic language, not without influences of the Wagnerian style that was then catching on in Italy too. It may be set alongside operas like Ponchielli’s La Gioconda and Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele, often showing a high quality of melodic inspiration though never indulging in facile lyricism. It thus stands as a worthy addition a repertoire - the repertoire of Italian opera of the second half of the nineteenth century - that is still largely unexplored in many aspects and certainly destined to reveal, in future, many pleasant surprises.

Ero e Leandro is an essence of sensibility, of forms’ accuracy and the product of a strong artistic personality which wants to respect tradition and knows how to do it.