Gaetano Donizetti

• 1. Introduction

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  Gaetano Donizetti died in Bergamo on the 8th of April 1848, seated in a large chair in the palace of a noble family, speaking only in occasional monosyllables, barely aware of the world around him. He was fifty years old. In his final months, when a tenor and a soprano sang music from his most celebrated opera, Lucia di Lammermoor, a witness reported that there was no sign of recognition at all.

  Here was a man who had written more than seventy operas. A man whose work had drawn standing ovations across Paris, Vienna, Milan, Naples, Rome, and London. A composer who, at his peak, was called "the sole reigning genius of Italian opera." By the time he was carried back to the city where he had been born, the mind that produced all of it was gone.

  How does a composer who began with nothing, the son of a pawnshop caretaker in a poor Bergamo quarter, reach the summit of European opera? And how does he fall so completely, so fast, at the very moment when his fame was largest? Those are the questions that run through Donizetti's life.

• 2. A Poor Boy from Bergamo

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  Andrea Donizetti, the father, was the caretaker of the town pawnshop in Bergamo's Borgo Canale quarter, just outside the city walls. The family had no tradition of music and very little money. Gaetano, born on the 29th of November 1797, was the youngest of three sons, and nothing about his circumstances suggested a future on the stages of Europe.

  What changed everything was a German composer named Simone Mayr. Mayr had become maestro di cappella at Bergamo's principal church in 1802 and, in 1805, founded the Lezioni Caritatevoli school to give young musicians a rigorous education that went beyond what ordinary choirboys received. In 1807, Andrea tried to enroll both his sons. The elder, Giuseppe, then eighteen, was turned away as too old. Nine-year-old Gaetano was accepted.

  His first months as a choirboy raised doubts. There was concern about a difetto di gola, a throat defect. But Mayr was soon reporting that Gaetano "surpasses all the others in musical progress" and argued successfully that the boy deserved to stay. He remained at the school for nine years.

  In 1811, when the young Donizetti was threatened again with having to leave because his voice was changing, Mayr staged a theatrical rescue. He wrote both the libretto and music for a small work called Il piccolo compositore di musica and cast his pupil as "the little composer." The character boasts, in the text Mayr wrote: "I have a vast mind, swift talent, ready fantasy, and I'm a thunderbolt at composing." The performance, on the 13th of September 1811, was Mayr's public argument that Donizetti's talent was worth the institution's continued investment. It worked.

  When the teenager's behavior became erratic, skipping classes and making a spectacle of himself around town, Mayr again stepped in. He secured two years of funding from the Congregazione di Carità in Bergamo, wrote letters of recommendation to the publisher Giovanni Ricordi, and arranged lodging in Bologna through the Marchese Francesco Sampieri. In Bologna, at the Liceo Musicale, Donizetti studied musical structure under Padre Stanislao Mattei. Everything that followed traces back to Mayr's repeated, patient interventions on behalf of a boy from a pawnshop family who had no obvious right to such chances.

• 3. Early Failures, First Triumphs

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  His first opera, Enrico di Borgogna, arrived not through a commission but through a chance meeting around April 1818 with a school friend, Bartolomeo Merelli. Donizetti composed the music first and found a theatre to accept it afterward. The premiere on the 14th of November 1818 at the Teatro San Luca in Venice drew a polite audience that seemed more interested in the newly decorated house than the music. The soprano Adelaide Catalani withdrew at the last moment due to stage fright, and sections of her music had to be cut. Even so, a reviewer noted that "one cannot but recognize a regular handling and expressive quality in his style."

  The real turning point came in Rome in January 1822, with the opera seria Zoraida di Granata. Getting it staged was itself a near disaster: the tenor cast in the leading role died a few days before the opening night on the 28th of January, and the role had to be rewritten for a mezzo-soprano. Despite this, the premiere was a triumph. The weekly Notizie del giorno declared: "A new and very happy hope is rising for the Italian musical theatre."

  Domenico Barbaja, the prominent impresario of the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, took notice. By late March Donizetti had been offered a contract not only to compose new operas but also to oversee productions of other composers' works. The first new opera he delivered in Naples, La zingara, ran for twenty-eight consecutive evenings in 1822, followed by twenty more in July. At one of these performances, Donizetti met Vincenzo Bellini, then a twenty-one-year-old music student. The two men would eventually share the summit of Italian opera, and then Bellini's early death would leave Donizetti alone at the top.

  Not every work succeeded. Alfredo il grande, given at the San Carlo on the 2nd of July 1823, prompted the local press to write that "one could not recognize the composer of La zingara." It received only one performance. But at Rome's Teatro Valle on the 4th of February 1824, the opera buffa L'ajo nell'imbarazzo was greeted with, in the words of contemporary accounts, "wild enthusiasm" and became his first genuinely lasting success. The scholar John Stewart Allitt observed that with a good libretto to hand, "Donizetti never failed its dramatic content."

• 4. Marriage, Loss, and Masterpieces

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  In May 1827, Donizetti announced his engagement to Virginia Vasselli, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Roman family he had come to know during his time in the city. They were married in July 1828 and settled in a new home in Naples. Virginia gave birth to three children; none survived. On the 30th of July 1837, Virginia herself died, from what was believed to be cholera or measles, though the scholar William Ashbrook speculated that her death was connected to a severe syphilitic infection.

  The years between Donizetti's marriage and his wife's death were also the years of his greatest creative surge. Anna Bolena, given on the 26th of December 1830 at the Teatro Carcano in Milan with the soprano Giuditta Pasta in the title role, made Donizetti instantly famous across Europe. London was the first European capital to stage it, at the King's Theatre on the 8th of July 1831. Performances spread "up and down the Italian peninsula" and then across European capitals, with revivals continuing as late as about 1881.

  L'elisir d'amore followed in 1832 and is now regarded as one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century opera buffa. Then came Lucia di Lammermoor, which opened in Naples on the 26th of September 1835 with a libretto by Salvadore Cammarano, the first of eight Cammarano would write for Donizetti. The opera drew on Sir Walter Scott's novel The Bride of Lammermoor and arrived at a moment when the continent was captivated by Scottish history, its feuds, folklore, and mythology. It became his most celebrated work, reaching, in the view of scholars, a stature comparable to Bellini's Norma.

  By late 1835, Rossini had retired and Bellini had just died, days before Lucia's premiere. Donizetti was, as contemporaries called him, "the sole reigning genius of Italian opera." Roberto Devereux, given at the San Carlo in October 1837, completed the trio of operas historians would later call the "Three Donizetti Queens," after Anna Bolena and Maria Stuarda. Two months after Roberto Devereux, Virginia was dead.

• 5. The Pull Toward Paris

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  From around 1836, Donizetti chafed against the censorship constraints that governed opera production in Italy and especially in Naples. The city's moral and political gatekeepers limited what subjects a composer could put on stage, and the restrictions were tightening. Paris offered not only greater creative freedom but larger fees and more prestige.

  The break with Naples came sharply in October 1838, when the King of Naples banned the production of Poliuto on the grounds that a sacred subject was unfit for the stage. Donizetti moved to Paris vowing never to deal with the San Carlo again. He offered the banned Poliuto to the Paris Opera, where it was set to a new four-act French libretto by Eugene Scribe and performed in April 1840 under the title Les Martyrs. It was his first grand opera in the French tradition.

  Before leaving Paris in June 1840, he had also overseen the translation of Lucia di Lammermoor into French as Lucie de Lammermoor, and written La fille du regiment, his first opera composed specifically to a French text. Both became successes. He was the first Italian composer to obtain a commission from the Paris Opera to write a full grand opera, a distinction the musicologists Roger Parker and William Ashbrook document with precision.

  Don Pasquale, presented on the 3rd of January 1843 at the Theâtre-Italien, was built around the specific talents of singers already under contract to the house, including Giulia Grisi, Antonio Tamburini, and Luigi Lablache. The critic Etienne-Jean Delecluze, writing in the Journal des debats on the 6th of January, called it one of those ovations "which in Paris are reserved for the truly great." It ran continuously until late March. The work stands today alongside L'elisir d'amore as the enduring proof that Donizetti's gift for comedy was fully equal to his gift for tragedy.

• 6. The Long Unraveling

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  By 1843, Donizetti was exhibiting symptoms his contemporaries struggled to name. The scholar John Stewart Allitt described him as a man whose "inner man was broken, sad, and incurably sick." He himself, in a letter to his brother-in-law Antonio Vasselli that year, referred to "a new illness contracted in Paris, which has still not passed." He laid out an ambitious schedule of new works across Vienna, Naples, and Paris even as the letter's tone acknowledged something irreversible was happening.

  Dom Sebastien, roi de Portugal, which opened on the 13th of November 1843, was his longest opera and the one on which he spent the most time. He described it himself as "a staggering spectacle" and was "terribly wearied by this enormous opera in five acts which carries bags full of music for singing and dancing." It stayed in the repertory at the Opera until 1845 and accumulated thirty-two performances. One evening later, on the 14th of November, Maria di Rohan opened at the Theatre-Italien and ran for thirty-three performances. Donizetti was producing at speed even as his body was failing.

  In August 1845 in Paris, he was formally diagnosed with cerebro-spinal syphilis and severe mental illness. Dr. Philippe Ricord, a specialist in syphilis, recommended that he stop work entirely and suggested the Italian climate might help. Donizetti ignored the first recommendation. That autumn he continued working on Gemma di Vergy for its Paris performance on the 16th of December.

  By February 1846, physicians who examined him provided a written conclusion that the composer "no longer is capable of calculating sanely the significance of his decisions." His nephew Andrea, who had traveled from Constantinople to Paris on his behalf, arranged for him to be taken to the Maison Esquirol at Ivry-sur-Seine, a facility outside Paris. Donizetti was told they were traveling to Vienna to fulfill a contract. He did not learn the truth until he was already confined. He wrote urgent letters to friends asking for help. None were delivered.

  The legal and diplomatic struggle to return him to Bergamo lasted more than a year. The Paris Prefect of Police ordered examinations, blocked the move, posted gendarmes outside his apartment, and cancelled his daily carriage rides. It took a formal complaint filed by his brother Giuseppe with the Austrian ambassador in Constantinople, and subsequent diplomatic pressure from Vienna to Paris, before Donizetti was permitted to leave. He and his small traveling party crossed Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland, came through the St Gotthard Pass, and arrived in Bergamo on the evening of the 6th of October 1847. The mayor was there to receive him.

  He died on the afternoon of the 8th of April 1848 after a serious bout of apoplexy on the 1st of April. He was buried initially in the cemetery of Valtesse. In 1875, his body was moved to Bergamo's Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, to a resting place near the grave of Simon Mayr, the German composer from Bergamo's principal church who had first recognized what the son of a pawnshop caretaker could become.

• 7. Beyond Opera

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  The operas dominate Donizetti's story, but the full catalogue runs far wider. He composed roughly seventy-five operas alongside sixteen symphonies, nineteen string quartets, one hundred and ninety-three songs, forty-five duets, three oratorios, and twenty-eight cantatas, plus instrumental concertos, sonatas, and other chamber pieces.

  His string quartets alone number nineteen, a body of chamber work that rarely enters conversations about his legacy but that demonstrates a composer engaged seriously with forms outside the theatre. The concertinos for individual instruments, including works for clarinet, English horn, flute, oboe, and violin, show a practical command of orchestral color that informed the instrumental writing inside the operas.

  The breadth also reflects the economic and social reality of a working composer in early nineteenth-century Italy. Church music, cantatas, and orchestral pieces were what patrons and institutions commissioned between opera seasons. Donizetti supplied what was needed. The composer who moved audiences to tears with Lucia's mad scene was writing piano waltzes and sacred Masses in the same years. Giuseppe Mazzini praised his operas specifically for embodying the spirit of the Risorgimento, reading them as expressions of Italian identity. His reputation, which fluctuated after his death, recovered steadily from the 1940s and 1950s onward, and today the four operas most frequently heard, Lucia di Lammermoor, La fille du regiment, L'elisir d'amore, and Don Pasquale, represent only the topmost fraction of a catalogue that his teacher Mayr, in 1811, had already bet everything on.