Donizetti

This new Dynamic opera, Elisir d’amore was performed in Donizetti’s native city of Bergamo, during the most important world festival dedicated to the Italian composer. The opera is set in a rural environment and the action takes place in a country farm. It is a brilliant comedy with many points of contact with semi-serious operas. The choice of this subject must have been strongly influenced by the successes of Vincenzo Bellini’s La Sonnambula.

Roberto Devereux stands as one of Donizetti's greatest achievements in dramatic opera, the other two being Lucrezia Borgia and Lucia di Lammermoor (in my realm of judgment). Like most lovers of bel canto and Donizetti, I'm led into this foray of musical richness through Lucia; which though a great opera, has been largely overperformed at the expense of his greater operas like Devereux and Borgia. Not venturing to extoll the relative merits of the operas mentioned here, I shall focus my review on this recording of Donizetti's seminal opera.

A native of Bergamo, Donizetti was, for nearly a decade after the early death of Bellini in 1835, the leading composer of Italian opera. He had his first success with Zoraida di Granata in 1822. There followed a series of nearly 60 more operas and a move to Paris, where Rossini had been induced to settle to his profit. His final illness confined him to a hospital in France for some 17 months before his return to Bergamo, where he died in 1848. Donizetti was not exclusively a composer of opera; he wrote music of all kinds – songs, chamber music, piano music and a quantity of music for the church.

The drama of 'Gemma di Vergy', like that of 'Anna Bolena', 'Maria Stuarda' and 'Roberto Devereux', unfolds at court, where reason of State interwines with sentiments of passion and love. Gemma is repudiated by her husband, the Count of Vergy, baritone, while the "antagonist" is Tamas (tenor), the Arab slave, locked in unrequited love. The vocal composition for the role of Gemma moves with sudden jumps between the central and the high regusters. "It is as difficult as three Normas put together", maintained Montserrat Caballé.

Imelda de'Lambertazzi (1830) was written just before Donizetti's first great international success, Anna Bolena, and it remains one of his many operas that has never made it into the repertoire. In his illuminating program notes, Jeremy Commons argues that Imelda was probably Donizetti's most forward-looking, even avant-garde opera; the composer was determined to create music that matched the demands of the drama, and therefore ignored many of the operatic conventions audiences had come to expect. It's no surprise, then, that it was badly received, and has rarely been revived.

Donizetti Edition with the Pleyel Quartet Gaetano Donizetti not only was very well acquainted with the Viennese models that then were dominant on the international market; at the latest since his study years in Bologna he had also been familiar with the most important exponents of Italian quartet culture. This is why his string quartets offer valuable insights into his education and early artistic development and are important documents attesting to the existence of a chamber music culture specific to Bergamo. In Quartets Nos. 4-6 conventional and innovative elements combine to form an astonishing synthesis.

Das wenigste, war man von Gaetano Donizetti, dem italienischen Opernkomponisten par excellence erwarten würde, ist die Vielzahl von Streichquartette, also der Gattung, die in ihrer puristisch-strengen Beschränkung auf das Wesentliche eigentlich in Italien nie so richtig Fuß gefasst hat. Und doch schrieb der junge Donizetti in seiner Lehrzeit in Bergamo 18 Quartette, die zum Besten gehören, was die italienische Musik in diesem Genre hervorgebracht hat. Es sind ernsthafte Auseinandersetzungen mit den großen Meistern Haydn und Beethoven, in den Donizetti zunehmend seinen eigenen Weg findet.

Das wenigste, war man von Gaetano Donizetti, dem italienischen Opernkomponisten par excellence erwarten würde, ist die Vielzahl von Streichquartette, also der Gattung, die in ihrer puristisch-strengen Beschränkung auf das Wesentliche eigentlich in Italien nie so richtig Fuß gefasst hat. Und doch schrieb der junge Donizetti in seiner Lehrzeit in Bergamo 18 Quartette, die zum Besten gehören, was die italienische Musik in diesem Genre hervorgebracht hat. Es sind ernsthafte Auseinandersetzungen mit den großen Meistern Haydn und Beethoven, in den Donizetti zunehmend seinen eigenen Weg findet.

While the German tradition observes a strict distinction between sacred and secular styles, the 19th-century Italian Mass can feel more akin to attending an operatic performance. Donizetti’s church music, consisting of at least a hundred items, has hardly been explored. Individual movements were often later recycled by the composer, in cantata-like fashion, to form a complete Mass, and it is this ad hoc technique that Franz Hauk has used to create a new work, the Messa di Gloria and Credo in D. This includes an expansive Qui sedes with its violin solo written for the famous violinist-composer Pietro Rovelli, and is completed with movements by Johann Simon Mayr from whom Donizetti learned his compositional craft in settings of sacred texts.