Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848)
Donizetti is an opera composer coming back into his own. We in Australia know this well, as Richard Bonynge, the musical director of our national opera company (1976-1986) , is one of the leaders of the Donizetti revival, and has given us productions of Lucia di Lammermoor, Lucrezia Borgia, and now Don Pasquale. The revival, which gained much of its impetus from the commitment to Donizetti of Maria Callas, of the Turkish soprano Leyla Gencer, and of the conductor/musicologist Gianandrea Gavazzeni, has revealed many of the strengths and beauties of bel canto opera, and shown Donizetti to be a highly inventive musical craftsman, with seemingly endless melodic reserves, considerable finesse as well as command.
Nevertheless, there remains strong prejudice to be overcome, all too clear in the received idea of Donizetti in most standard histories of music. Don Pasquale, Donizetti’s supreme achievement in the field of opera buffa, is the one opera of his always excepted from this prejudice. No less thoughtful and learned an authority than Alfred Einstein writes of Donizetti that ‘his masterpiece, to be sure, remains a pure opera buffa , completed in eight days ; a work which stands in the middle between Rossini’s Barber and Verdi’s Falstaff, strangely individual and quite of equal rank with them.’ But Einstein seems to regard Pasquale as a fluke: ‘this kind of more or less timeless work could have come into being at a favorable moment almost any time…Donizetti worked so quickly that it was almost pure chance whether a work of his became a success or a fiasco’.
As we shall see, Einstein unwittingly perpetuates here the exaggerated legends of Donizetti’s facility. He could hardly avoid excepting Don Pasquale from his general dismissal of Donizetti’s works – it was his greatest triumph, rapturously received at its first performance by public and critics in Paris. Yet even there it had to overcome a prejudice: reluctance of critical opinion that it should succeed and even, it seems, resistance from the orchestra of the Théâtre des Italiens.
French envy
As Donizetti biographer William Ashbrook suggests, the historical prejudice against Donizetti among non-Italians dates from the years of his Parisian successes. His ease in dominating every important lyric stage in Paris brought him envy as well as popularity – linked with his success among society hostesses, his handsome appearance, his ready wit and easy manner, and his attractiveness to women. The jealousy of the musical world is all too obvious in Berlioz’s comments: ‘M. Donizetti seems to treat us like a conquered country; it is a veritable invasion. One can no longer speak of the opera houses of Paris, but only of the opera houses of M. Donizetti.’
The success of Don Pasquale, written in Italian for the Théâtre des Italiens, confirmed that of La Fille du régiment, given at the Opéra-Comique in 1840, concerning which Mendelssohn surprised his friends, who expected him to lend his authority to their low regard for Donizetti’s art. He said it was a delightful work and he would have liked to have composed it himself. No doubt his reaction to the comparably deft, amusing, and well-made Don Pasquale was similar – at any rate it was in Mendelssohn’s native Germany that the opera was to achieve its most lasting success and popularity: it has never left the repertoire.
The prejudice against Donizetti is partly based on outsiders’ misunderstanding of the ‘opera industry’ of early 19th century Italy. This was Donizetti’s livelihood and taught him his craft, but it also imposed some restrictions his move to Paris helped him escape. Paris offered wider horizons, a freer choice of subjects, and a more sophisticated audience, based on the large Italian population there, for whom Donizetti’s triumphs were a symbol of national success.
Tailored to the singers
Composing Don Pasquale, Donizetti was tailoring an opera to the talents of four Italians who were the most famous singers of their day, perhaps of any day: soprano Giulia Grisi, the tenor simply known as Mario, baritone Antonio Tamburini, and bass Louis Lablache. Donizetti, who described them as a cast incomparable for singing and acting, gave them in Don Pasquale a symbol of their identity as a quartet and of their supremacy; it was the only opera in which they regularly appeared together. The name ‘the Great Quartet’ was originally applied to the cast of Bellini’s I puritani in 1835, in which the tenor was the celebrated Rubini, replaced by Mario in 1839.
The original edition of the score of Don Pasquale described their respective roles aptly and succinctly:
Don Pasquale, elderly bachelor, cut out along antique lines, economical, credulous, obstinate, a good fellow at bottom (Sigr. Lablache). Doctor Malatesta, a man of expedients, jocular, resourceful, doctor and friend of Don Pasquale (Sigr. Tamburini) and even closer friend of Ernesto, nephew of Don Pasquale, youthful, enthusiastic (Sigr. Mario), requited lover of Norina, young widow, impulsive nature, impatient of contradiction, but genuine and affectionate (Sig’a Grisi).
Fittingly, in view of the dénouement of Don Pasquale, Grisi in 1844 married Mario, the most admired tenor of his day, a Piedmontese aristocrat who entered music as an amateur. The excellence of this singing couple was unquestionable, but the truly extraordinary members of the quartet were the two basses, whose careers grew out of opera buffa and were largely confined to it. They were famous, Henry Pleasants tells us in The Great Singers, for the ‘lightness and agility of their movements, their accomplishment as comedians, their versatility, their musicianship, and their extraordinary popularity’ – a rare combination! Their association with Donizetti had already begun by 1839 in his Elixir of Love , in which Tamburini played the braggart Sergeant Belcore, and Lablache the quack Doctor Dulcamara.
Luigi Lablache as Pasquale in the 1843 premiere. Artist:
Fortunate the composer who has such interpreters, but Pasquale‘s continuing popularity in all kinds of opera houses shows that it by no means wholly depends on singer-actors of this calibre. Much more germane is the quality of the libretto. Over the authorship of this libretto much ink has been spilt, without telling us much about its virtues. For years it was wrongly attributed to one Michele Accursi, an homme d’affaires connected in some capacity with the Théâtre des Italiens, and who was involved in that theatre’s dealing with Donizetti. This Accursi, who posed as a political exile, and had been involved with Mazzini’s movement for political liberation in Italy, was actually a double agent – a counter-spy who sent detailed reports to the Vatican on the activities of the Italian exiles in Paris. It may have been he who put Donizetti in touch with the actual drafter of the libretto, Giovanni Ruffini, another Mazzinian.
Ruffini and Donizetti chose to re-work the book of an old opera, Ser’ Marc’Antonio written by Angelo Anelli for the composer Stefano Pavesi, first produced at La Scala in 1810 and remaining popular for 20 years in France and Italy. Ruffini turned out a skillful and amusing text, but not without constant interference from Donizetti, who made many suggestions and changes, so much so that the fastidious Ruffini was unwilling in the end to allow his name to be put to the libretto. For reasons unclear it appeared with the initials M.A., presumably Accursi’s, hence the misunderstanding about its authorship.
In some books one still finds the libretto attributed to Donizetti himself, which is at least closer to the truth – Donizetti’s own participation in writing it is the most useful information to be gleaned from this story. The composer had considerable literary facility, translating two of his operas from French to Italian and often writing letters in comic verse – he had a hand in the librettos of at least three of his own operas, displaying a flair for operatic comedy, as well as a vein of satiric humor also found in his letters.
Since it is generally held that Don Pasquale is the only work amongst subsequent operas in the buffo genre worthy to rank with Rossini’s, The Barber of Seville in particular, it puts Donizetti’s achievement in perspective to ask how much the libretto contributed. Ruffini and Donizetti simplified and eliminated many of the characters of Ser’ Marc’Antonio, their model, reducing the protagonists to four. Dramatic material not essential to the main plot was dispensed with; the result is a superbly balanced little social comedy, taken from everyday life, and originally played in contemporary dress, as drawings of the production confirm. It is dominated by conversation and action.
More than knockabout comedy
To describe the plot, as is sometimes done, as conventional commedia dell’arte does it an injustice: Donizetti was following Rossini in giving opera buffa a more carefully considered basis than the knockabout comedy and improvisation it inherited from the commedia. A reduction of the purely farcical elements in comedy, and the portrayal of a wide range of human emotion had already been introduced into Italian theatre in the 1750s by the playwright Goldoni and his musical collaborator Galuppi. Donizetti had before him the additional and immeasurable benefit of his knowledge of the operas of Mozart, given him by his teacher the Austro-Italian composer Giovanni Simone Mayr (1763-1845).
The plot of Don Pasquale in broad outline is one that seems to have appealed to dramatists and composers across the ages. It is rather startling to note the similarity with Richard Strauss’s Die schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman) (1935), whose libretto by Stefan Zweig is based on a play by Ben Jonson (1609) and whose central character is an old sea-dog who, having escaped from an exploding ship, cannot bear noise, and whose nephew and sole heir comes to live in the house with his friends, who are singers in an opera company. The sea-dog disinherits his nephew and asks his barber to get him a silent, obedient wife; the barber, taking the nephew’s part, brings him a silent woman, actually a singer and wife of the nephew, and who, as soon as the mock marriage is celebrated, turns into a fearsome chatterbox.
What gives Donizetti’s comedy its distinctive character, however, is the composer’s treatment of the story. In Don Pasquale, just as in The Elixir of Love – sometimes called ‘Don Pasquale’s country cousin’ – some of the most famous moments in the comedy are not comic at all. For example, when Norina, confronting Pasquale’s futile refusal to let her go out to the theatre on her ‘wedding night’, boxes his ears, the old man poignantly realises that he is ruined and finished. Norina is almost unable to sustain her play-acting, so sorry does she feel for the harshness of the lesson she is inflicting on him.
Donizetti’s music lets us know, as Ashbrook points out, that his characters have beating hearts, and the temporary relief he provides from the comedy throws it into even higher relief. If we compare Rossini and Donizetti’s buffo operas at this point, we will find that Donizetti, particularly in his heroines, presents more rounded and sympathetic characters than, say, the rather minx-like Rosina of The Barber of Seville. Buffoonery is mixed with pathos, and a further ingredient absent from Rossini is romantic sentiment; the nephew Ernesto may be a less interesting character than the poor lovesick Nemorino of Elixir (whose aspirations battle with his sense of personal and social inadequacy) but Ernesto’s emotions are made real and sympathetic in a series of lyrical solos of great beauty – and finally in the duet for the lovers. The sensitive romance of this notturno makes us believe in the lovers’ devotion to each other, in the midst of a stratagem which could easily seem heartless and cynical. It is not inapt to draw a parallel with Susanna’s aria in the garden scene in The Marriage of Figaro, where she reveals the genuineness of her love for Figaro.
It’s time we took another look at the legend of Donizetti’s facility: of course, he was professionally proud of his ability to meet seemingly impossible deadlines, and several times helped an opera management out of a hole by completing a new piece in a few days. Careful examination of Donizetti’s working methods, however, shows that he often devoted laborious care to his operas. Of Don Pasquale he wrote in a letter ‘it cost me more than 10 days of labor’, implying more than the usual time; in fact, it was a little less than a month. In the process he re-used a considerable amount of music from previous compositions, but like Handel covered his traces so well that this material seems all of a piece with the rest, as well as appropriate. The sketches for Ernesto’s aria ‘Cerchero lontana terra’ resemble Beethoven’s sketches in their painstaking adjustment of detail, to perfect the melodic craftsmanship.
A thoroughly trained musician
Donizetti was a thoroughly trained musician, whose master Mayr had formed him in the best traditions of Viennese classical music; his own familiarity with Beethoven’s music is revealed in the speech he made on election to the Institut in Paris in 1842, where he mentions with admiration Beethoven’s symphonies, Septet, Christ on the Mount of Olives, and Fidelio.
Far from being, as is often averred, a survival of opera buffa when it had passed its best days, Don Pasquale, as Julian Budden says, recovered the classical heritage of Mozart for Italy. In many respects it is original in its musical treatment, featuring a new style of conversational recitative with occasional string chords underpinning the modulations, whereas composers of opera buffa recitative at the time were still using a continuo instrument.
Even in a routine performance of Don Pasquale some of the subtleties of Donizetti’s handling of the orchestra will stand out, such as the long trumpet solo whose mournful sound paints Ernesto’s despair, in the introduction to his aria (it has its parallel in the bassoon solo introducing Nemorino’s ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ in Elixir). If one compares Donizetti’s orchestration with that of his Italian opera-writing contemporaries, its sparseness is striking – but with that sparseness goes great tact in making the orchestra the best possible companion to bel canto singing. Other operas, not Don Pasquale, justify Wagner’s jibe that Italian composers use the orchestra like a big guitar.
Irony is represented in fully musical terms, as in Dr. Malatesta’s ‘Bella siccome un angelo’, where the sincerity of his praises of the supposed Sophronia is undermined by accents and staccati self-consciously stressing the delivery. There is a marvelous moment in the Act II finale, one of Donizetti’s greatest ensembles, when, the moment the mock marriage has been completed, there is a sudden change of key, and Sophronia changes from the pretended shy convent girl into the dominating tormentress of Don Pasquale, whose surprise and distress is immediately underlined by chromatic inflections. In the quartet which develops, the three upper voices (the conspirators) maintain their lyrical course, undeflected from their play-acting by Pasquale’s growls and rumblings beneath – a perfect blend of the buffo genre with the sentimental comedy.
The chorus of servants in Act III is original in conception and subtle in its two-part structure; it ends quietly to prepare the atmosphere for the dénouement . Donizetti also uses the chorus imaginatively to contribute to the mood of Ernesto’s lover’s serenade; and the chorus’ offstage singing was complemented by Lablache, at Donizetti’s request, playing the guitar behind the scene to accompany Mario’s singing.
Mentioning Lablache again we come full circle to the great original cause of Don Pasquale’s success – the opportunity it provides for the gifted buffo singer-actor. This can be experienced in the freshness of novelty in Théophile Gautier’s description of Lablache’s performance:
In the most fluttering manner, wearing a house-coat of white dimity, nankeen trousers, and a black silk bonnet…to receive this angel of youth and beauty (Sophronia), Don Pasquale makes a most extravagant toilette: a superb peruke the colour of mahogany dressed with ridiculous curls, a green frock with engraved gold buttons, which he could never fasten because of the enormous rotundity of his figure. All this gives him the look of a monstrous beetle that wants to open his wings to fly and cannot succeed. With the most gallant air, he advances with popping eyes, his mouth heart-shaped, to take the girl’s hand. She emits a cry as if she had been bitten by a viper’.
‘Lablache’, said Jenny Lind, a fellow-singer not much given to praising her colleagues, ‘is a genius. And what a voice! Oh God in Heaven! And the most perfect actor you could ever see.’ He and Tamburini must have brought the house down with their garrulous plotting duet, as have the best of their successors ever since. And the perfection of the masterpiece Donizetti gave them to display their talents was no fluke.
First published by Opera-Opera, 1986.