Gaetano Donizetti 1797-1848

Gaetano Donizetti, son of a pawnshop caretaker and a seamstress, was born and died at Bergamo, like many of his opera characters, a victim of madness. To the older, baroque-based style known as bel canto (characterized by long, ornamented vocal lines), he added a dramatic urgency, especially in dialogue, that paved the way for Verdi and verismo. Like his colleagues Rossini and Bellini, Donizetti was primarily a melodist. Yet, out of his admiration for the classical masters Haydn and Mozart, he developed a sharp ear for orchestration - unobtrusive but sensitive - and for the dramatic shaping of concerted pieces along symphonic lines.

Extraordinarily prolific, Donizetti habitually overworked himself in the attempt to keep pace with demands from various opera houses. Though the total number of his operas has been estimated to be as high as seventy, the steadiness and the freshness of his lyric inspiration belie the fact that so much of it was created under hackwork conditions. Donizetti's construction of scenes relies on formula, but it is formula that works, and he imbues it with a pulsing inner life that often makes stock characters believable.

Until the bel canto revivial that followed World War II, Donizetti was known chiefly as the composer of one tragedy, Lucia di Lammermoor, and one comedy, L'Elisir d'Amore. Today these are frequently accompanied in the repertory by other operas of his, both serious and comic. The former category tends toward the pseudo-historical subjects so much in vogue at the time, the remote country of England holding a particular fascination for him: Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda, and Roberto Devereux all portray English rulers, and Elizebeth I appears in two of them. Lucrezia Borgia, set in Italy, and La Favorita, set in Spain, further pursue the fictionalization of people who actually lived, a sport popularized by Sir Walter Scott, whose Bride of Lammermoor inspired Lucia.