Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848)
One of the funniest things I have seen on an opera stage happened in the Princess Theatre, Melbourne, some time in the 1970s, during an Australian Opera performance of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore. Time may have muddled memory, but what I recall is that the quack doctor Dulcamara’s cart displaying his patent medicines was pulled by a donkey, and at a certain moment this animal stubbornly refused to take the stage. The medicine bottles were essential props for what was to happen next, so the cast had to improvise – being the troupers they were, they did so, to hilarious effect. Dulcamara was Neil Warren-Smith, Adina Cynthia Johnston, Belcore Ron Maconaghie, and Nemorino Robin Donald. Somehow, to the audience’s vast amusement, they invented a comic routine and achieved the necessary purpose.
Looking back, this episode seems less an operatic disaster than all a part of the performance, and that reveals something about the special character of this opera. Even before I saw L’elisir d’amore for the first time, a phrase from The Record Guide had stuck in my mind, about its semi-comic hero, Nemorino: ‘Tenors like Caruso, Gigli or Tagliavini, normally obliged to keep the humorous side of their personalities strictly under control, enjoy relaxing in this Buster Keaton-like part’. The same authors suggest that L’elisir d’amore might be called Don Pasquale’s country cousin. The wit of Donizetti’s other comic masterpiece may be more artful, but perhaps L’elisir d’amore is even more beloved – at any rate, it is difficult to imagine knockabout improvisation in the later work.
And yet the air L’elisir d’amore breathes is conditioned by great art; rustic, yes, but created by sophisticates, well aware of the genre in which they were working. The opening is indicative: the curtain rises on harvesters at rest in the noonday sun - this is the countryside of 18th-century literature, and we could be in Haydn’s The Seasons, or, more to the point, in a comedy by Marivaux. Indeed, the libretto by Scribe (for Auber’s opera Le Philtre), adapted for Donizetti by Felice Romani (though it in turn derived from an Italian original), is in a basically French genre – the tell-tale setting ‘in the Basque country’ is kept by Romani.
The crux of the plot is Adina’s slightly heartless sophistication, warmed and humanised by the genuine love of the simple Nemorino. Romani considerably modified the characterisation: Scribe’s Terezine (=Adina) is a coquette, and Guillaume (=Nemorino) her slow-witted suitor. The business of the village quack, with his love potion, is given a twist, presupposing the audience’s knowledge of the love story of Tristan and Isolde, which Adina is discovered reading to the harvesters. Lovesick Nemorino is all-too-ready to believe in Dr.Dulcamara’s fake elixir, whereas rational, educated Adina is over-confidently sceptical. The audience learns that the confidence Nemorino gets by drinking Dulcamara’s Bordeaux wine makes it a true elixir, and the plot contains enough plausibly engineered misunderstandings to maintain interest in how the dénouement will be achieved; it is, in fact, a very well-made play.
Most accounts of the making of the opera L’elisir d’amore dwell on the extraordinarily short time it took to put it together, when another composer had failed to deliver an opera for Milan’s Cannobiana Theatre. Donizetti expert William Ashbrook has proved that the fortnight sometimes claimed cannot be the truth, but in any case haste was common in the 1830s world of Italian opera. The best thing on this subject comes from William Weaver, a writer who enjoys the food of Italy as much as its opera. He picks up a comment from Berlioz, who attended one of L’elisir d’amore’s first performances, and remarked that Italians want a score like a plate of macaroni, that can be assimilated immediately without their having to think about it or even pay attention. Berlioz, says Weaver, was right about opera and pasta: ‘neither is any good when cold, and L’elisir d’amore was an especially rapid product; it had been, as Italians say of fast work – “cooked, served, and eaten”.’
No-one thought L’elisir d’amore underdone: the premiere was a brilliant success, and the critic Francesco Pezzi wrote, in the Gazetta privilegiata di Milano:
The musical style of this score is lively, brilliant, truly of the buffo genre. The shading from buffo to serio can be observed taking place in surprising gradations, and the emotions are handled with the musical passion for which the composer of Anna Bolena is famous. Orchestration that is always well thought-out and brilliant, constantly suited to the situation, an orchestration that reveals a great master at work, accompanies a vocal line now lively, now brilliant, now impassioned. To lavish greater praise on the composer would be unfair to the opera; his work does not need exaggerated compliments.
Donizetti wrote to his teacher Simon Mayr (modesty jostling with pride): ‘The Gazetta has reported on L’elisir d’amore, and is far too kind about it – believe me, far too kind’.
The opera ran for 33 nights to packed houses, and has never left the international repertoire. The success was the more surprising since Donizetti had been pessimistic about the abilities of the cast already engaged by the impresario, Lanari: ‘we have a German prima donna, a tenor who stutters, a buffo with the voice of a billy-goat, and a French bass who is not much good’.
For once the credit went to librettist and composer, though the cast wasn’t as bad as Donizetti made out. Felice Romani was the most admired librettist of the time; he wrote the books for most of Bellini's operas, and had already collaborated with Donizetti on Anna Bolena. Although Romani adapted most of his plots from the stories of others, the language in which he dressed them was of high poetic quality; Donizetti admired Romani’s knowledge and skill, and was obviously inspired by his graceful, elegant verses. To Romani and Donizetti together goes the credit for developing, in L’elisir d’amore, a type of romantic comedy for the times, based not on the old conventions of comic plot, but on character.
The mainspring of the opera's action is Nemorino’s love for Adina, which is touching rather than comic; a lower-class character, he is neither a figure merely of fun, or a buffoon. ‘She reads, studies, learns, there’s nothing she doesn't know’, sings Nemorino in his first utterance. ‘I always remain an idiot, I only know how to sigh’. Donizetti abetted Romani’s characterisation by his handling of the tenor voice, placing ardour and pathos in just the right registers – this ensures that Nemorino gains and keeps the audience’s sympathy.
Instead of being given big arias to show off their qualities to the public, Nemorino and Adina sing their solo passages in the context of ensembles and choruses. This gives the impression of opera composed continuously rather than as separate numbers – the absence of ‘stars’ amongst the original cast may have worked to advantage. Romani evidently wished to maintain the same manner of presentation right to the end, and he protested against Donizetti’s giving Nemorino his own number just before the dénouement: ‘Believe me, a romanza in that situation would slacken the drama. What has that simple bumpkin with his pathetic whimpering got to do with a scene that should be all jollity and merrymaking?’
But Donizetti insisted, and was proved right: Nemorino’s ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ became one of the best-loved of tenor arias, and it reinforces the impression that L’elisir d’amore is essentially Nemorino’s opera. Rather daringly, the aria is introduced by a solo for bassoon, an instrument whose typical plangency proves just right for Nemorino’s sentiment. Harold Rosenthal, in Opera on Record, was able to trace 70 separate recordings of this aria, and guessed that was only half the total. Perhaps the most famous of all is Caruso’s of 1904, rated by John Steane in The Grand Tradition as the greatest of Caruso’s recordings, and this aria’s finest ever.
Adina’s character is even more interesting than Nemorino’s. She changes radically, but by stages – throughout the opera we get glimpses of her sensitivity despite her striving to seem hard and fickle. Jealousy eventually makes her a kinder person; her aria ‘Prendi, per me sei libero’, when she tells Nemorino she has bought him back from his enlistment, is her high point.
The two stock figures, Belcore and Dr. Dulcamara, are less unusual, but with distinctive touches nevertheless. Dulcamara’s big patter aria tells us not only about his boastful quackery, but also – sympathetically – about the rustics who ‘buy’ his line. Donizetti was delighted with Romani’s inventiveness: ‘…where the devil did our friend Romani get hold of all those medico-surgico-pharmaceutical terms?…He’s a real joker, that one’.
Belcore is the miles gloriosus, the boastful soldier type from the commedia dell’ arte, as is clear from Donizetti’s martial music introducing him. The Belcore of Donizetti and Romani, unlike his model in Scribe’s libretto for Auber, loses his composure and becomes angry when he thinks he is being made fun of. The baritone Dabadie, who had sung that role (Jolicoeur) in Auber’s opera, must have enjoyed the added dimensions L’elisir d’amore gave him.
Most writing about this opera includes somewhere a comparison with Donizetti’s other comic masterpiece of 11 years later, Don Pasquale. L'elisir may be ‘not nearly so spruce or witty or ingenious’, Pasquale may be ‘musically denser, tighter, and more resourceful’. But which of these operas is more enjoyable? William Weaver considers L’elisir d’amore a sweeter, gentler opera. Its characters are very human. ‘There are many’, concludes Stelios Galatopoulos ‘who whilst appreciating fully the greatness of Don Pasquale, find L’elisir d’amore even more entertaining’. And your writer, remembering the endearing goings on of Neil Warren-Smith's Dulcamara, Cynthia Johnston’s Adina, and the others, agrees.
First published in Opera Australia, 1995