Gaetano Donizetti; A Tenor's Composer

            Gaetano Donizetti grew up under very modest circumstances, born in Bergamo in 1797 to a pawnshop porter and tradesman.  He showed interest and aptitude for music at an early age and his first prominent music teacher was Johann Simon Mayr. Later the young Gaetano would study with Stanislao Mattei who composed church music and was also a student of Padre Martini. After his musical studies were completed, the young composer (at age 21) moved back to Bergamo where he began writing vocal and instrumental works primarily for amateur ensembles.

            Donizetti’s early operas include a number of pieces composed while the composer was still in his twenties and early thirties. These works include: Enrico di Borgogna (1817), L’ajo nell’imbrazzo (1824) Le Convenienze Teatrali (1827), L’esule di Roma (1827) and Elisabetta al castello di Kenilworth (1829). While a number of these are considered to be fine works they garnished only a modicum of popularity during their initial runs. L’ajo nell’imbrazzo has seen some revivals in the 20^th and 21^st century while the rest are notable for their early signs of novel experiments in comedic and musical elements.

            Gaetano Donizetti’s first major success came in the opera Anna Bolena composed for the Milan stage. The city of Milan had seen very little of the operas Donizetti composed prior to Anna Bolena therefore there was some recycling of musical material from previous works. This (from what I understand) was a relatively common practice for composers (and was used frequently by George F. Handel) as a means to both keep well crafted music alive and condense the amount of work on a composer.  The author William Ashworth states that:  “It used to be stated as fact that Anna Bolena was much more advanced than Donizetti’s earlier operas; that it demonstrated how he had worked his way through the Rossini-isms of his formative years to find his own style…” Therefore; it could be stated that Anna Bolena represents more a streamlining of Donizetti’s compositional process rather than a new blossoming of compositional originality.

            The two operas of Donizetti that are well known to me are: L’elisir d’amore (1832) and La Fille du Regiment (1840) both of which are comedies. The two works have spectacular and quite contrasting arias for the tenor. In L’elisir the piece “Una Fortiva Lagrima” is a very heartfelt slow, contemplative and yet, optimistic piece about winning the affection of a girl (interestingly written in a minor key which as sing Jerry Hadley put it “makes the audience think it is an aria of intense sorrow). Whereas La Fille du Regiment contains the piece “Ah Mes Amis” which most listeners know as part of Pavarotti’s standard repertoire to wow audiences with its four high C’s.  Of course it should be stated that operas are more than simply frames around catchy arias, but the individual arias do provide a more climactic atmosphere to the overall work which is why they stand out as much as they do.