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Donizetti: Operas
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Donizetti’s first work to be staged was the opera Enrico di Borgogna (1818), which had a libretto (text) written by a childhood friend. His first public success came with the opera Zoraida di Granata (1822). From then on Donizetti composed several operas a year for opera houses and theaters in Italian cities, including Naples, Rome, Milan, Palermo, and Genoa. His style at this time was strongly influenced by the music of Rossini, and few of the early operas are still performed. In 1828 Donizetti married Virginia Vasselli, who died nine years later during an epidemic of cholera.
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Donizetti was a prolific composer, writing both comic and serious operas as well as solo vocal music. Throughout his career he battled with the powerful Italian censors to put his works on stage. Two of his best-known comedies, L'elisir d'amore (1832) and Don Pasquale (1843), are considered masterpieces of comic opera and continue to hold their places in the standard performing repertoire. Perhaps his most famous serious opera is Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), although Anna Bolena has enjoyed considerable success in this century through the efforts of such artists as Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland. Donizetti was well acquainted with the greatest singers of his day, and he created many of the roles in his operas for their specific vocal talents.
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This early Donizetti opera had a peculiar history. It was apparently written in 1828 for Naples (witness the tarantella in Act II), but for unknown reasons was not staged there. In 1830 the composer gave it to the famous tenor Giovanni Rubini, expecting he would take it to Paris and make the composer's reputation there, but again for unknown reasons, this did not happen, and the opera seems to have been lost until it was finally presented without attribution to Donizetti at La Scala in Milan in 1839. It then vanished from the repertory, and that's surprising, because while it is an immature work in which he had not yet found his own voice – the influence of Rossini is very clear – it represents him at his youthful and ebullient best and clearly presages the mature brilliance that we hear in such masterpieces as Don Pasquale.
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Like Rossini and Bellini before him, Donizetti moved to Paris later in his career, but not before creating such excellent operas as Maria Stuarda, Lucrezia Borgia, and L'Elisir d'amore for Italian stages. In Paris, his first effort for the Opéra was Les martyres, a recycled version of Poliuto, which had been banned by the Italian censors just months before. A marvellous, effective opera based on a play by Corneille, Les martyres points ahead to the grandeur of its better-known cousin, Samson et Dalila by Camille Saint-Saens. But Donizetti's crowning achievements in Paris were both written for the comic stage: La fille du régiment and Don Pasquale, the latter composed for the Théâtre Italien in a matter of two weeks. While composing Don Pasquale, Donizetti wrote: "When a subject is pleasing, the heart speaks, the head races forward, and the hand writes."
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Between 1817 and 1821, Donizetti received several commissions from Paolo Zanca. His first staged opera was Enrico di Borgogna in 1818. He wrote several other works during this period, including chamber and church music as well as opera. It was the success of his fourth opera, Zoraide di Grenata, that caught the attention of Domenico Barbaia, the most important theater manager of his time. Barbaia offered Donizetti a contract. The young composer accepted it and moved to Naples, which was Barbaia's primary business location.
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The youngest of three sons, Donizetti was born in 1797 in Bergamo's Borgo Canale quarter located just outside the city walls. His family was very poor with no tradition of music, his father being the caretaker of the town pawnshop. Nevertheless, Donizetti received some musical instruction from Johann Simon Mayr, a priest at Bergamo's principal church (and ... himself a composer of successful operas).
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