Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848)
For Australian audiences Lucia di Lammermoor leaves a lingering memory of Joan Sutherland in her bloodstained shift, and of the marvellous sounds that poured from her throat. Few, these days, have read Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor. If they do read it, prompted by curiosity about the literary source of Donizetti’s opera, they may be surprised. Probably assuming that, like most opera libretti, Cammarano’s Lucia di Lammermoor will be a travesty of its original, they will discover that the opera, as a dramatic experience, is actually more compelling than the novel.
Donizetti’s biographer Herbert Weinstock remarks bemusedly that in 1961-2 Joan Sutherland seemed to be making an international career of singing nothing but this role. Who could blame her, given the stunning success it had brought her? In retrospect we can see that Sutherland in the name part, and Maria Callas – different but equally remarkable – did much to revive the fortunes not just of Lucia di Lammermoor, but of bel canto romantic opera as a whole.
Lucia was a good place to begin such a revival – perhaps the best. This opera brought Donizetti the greatest triumph of his career, and the reception of its premiere, on September 26, 1835, at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, was one of the most enthusiastic in the long history of that opera house. Donizetti wrote to his publishers, Ricordi ‘It pleased. It pleased very much…every piece was listened to in religious silence and honoured with spontaneous vivas’. Lucia di Lammermoor became, in the words of another Donizetti specialist, William Ashbrook, ‘a symbol of romantic sensibility for more than one generation’. The opera is woven into two major 19th century novels – we presume it is as Lucia that Adelina Patti is appearing, in her St. Petersburg benefit performance, attended by Anna Karenin, in Tolstoy’s novel. Anna knows that her lover Vronsky will be there. The opera’s theme of doomed love is assumed rather than stated. The type of singing of Lucia and the spectacle is the setting – the focus moves from the bare shoulders of the prima donna, from her glittering diamonds, to Anna, ‘the poise of her head on her lovely broad shoulders and the restrained excitement and brilliance of her eyes’. Vronsky, angry with his lover, considers she is virtually acknowledging herself a fallen woman, throwing down the gauntlet to society. He is also aware that Anna is undergoing ‘the sensations of a man in stocks’. Patti’s vocalisation as Lucia, like that of a caged bird, provides a telling counterpoint – Lucia and Anna are each caught in an inescapable predicament.
Tolstoy’s novel dates from 1875-7. In Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) the connection between the opera and the heroine’s feelings is much more explicit. Emma Bovary and her husband attend a performance, at the opera house in Rouen, of Lucie de Lammermoor – Donizetti’s opera is sung in the French version he made to encourage performances in the provinces of an opera already popular in Paris. Emma Bovary, like most well-read people in her time ‘found herself back in the books of her youth, in the world of Walter Scott. She seemed to hear the skirl of the bagpipes echoing through the mist across the heather. Remembering the novel made it easy for her to follow the libretto. As she followed the plot phrase by phrase, elusive thoughts came back to her…she felt herself vibrating in her whole being, as if the bows of the violins were being drawn across her nerves’. ‘She recognised all the ecstasy and the anguish of which she had all but died. The heroine’s voice seemed simply the echo of her own consciousness, and all this fascinating make-believe a part of her own life’. Why, Emma asked herself in her adulterous passion, had she not resisted marriage, as Lucy had resisted? ‘She knew now the littleness of those passions that art exaggerates’ (Flaubert distances himself from the first dawn of romanticism, when such passions were so much of literature’s theme). Emma’s fantasy then shifts to imagining herself in the arms of the tenor singing Edgar.
This pair of literary reflections of Lucia di Lammermoor are complementary – in one the opera is the vehicle for the glamorous and virtuosic prima donna, Patti, in the other it is a drama of doomed love which can induce catharsis in its audience. Complementary themes, though in much of what is written about this opera they seem antithetical.
Sir Walter Scott is one of the literary phenomena of the ages. Reading him we may find this fame puzzling, yet it is universally attested. Hazlitt stated in 1825 that ‘Sir Walter Scott is undoubtedly the most popular writer of the age’, and Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1838 that the Waverley series of novels ‘swift following one on the other without end, was the universal reading; looked for like an annual harvest, by all ranks, in all European countries’. Continental writers were more influenced by Scott than their English contemporaries: his historical romances opened the way for the great historical novel of Alessandro Manzoni, I promessi sposi (1821-7), as indeed for Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Recognising that Scott’s achievement is not on that level doesn’t diminish his importance. His major contribution was to recreate the ‘life’ of past history. The Scottish novels combine atmospheric settings, wild scenery and details of costume (stage sets, if you like) and – what Scott admitted was his main interest – ‘marvellous and uncommon incidents’. All this was of the essence of early romanticism. At his best, Scott gave a living, human embodiment, in his novels, to great historical types and trends.
The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) was greeted as ‘a pure and magnificent tragical romance’. Scott’s son-in-law and first biographer J.G. Lockhart called it ‘the most pure and powerful of all the tragedies that Scott ever penned’. Yet reading the novel confirms Scott’s own self-criticism: ‘the writing out of a regular plot or plan – above all the adhering to [one] – I can never do’. The main elements of the tragedy have to be winkled out of a confusing mess of digressions, over-stuffed descriptions, and a huge cast of characters, many superfluous to the plot. ‘He plays with them’, wrote one reviewer in 1832 ‘and exquisite fooling it is, till the required quantity of letter-press is completed, and then he huddles up the catastrophe, and sends them about their business in a hurry’. Great is the contrast with the compulsively read Harry Potter books, well-plotted story-telling being one of their author J.K. Rowling’s strong points. In Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, Edgar makes his unexpected and climactic entrance on p.247 (in my copy) of a 269 page novel. This is the midpoint of the opera – as it needs to be, for the drama to be soundly constructed.
It is hard to imagine Harry Potter books turned into opera, yet it was the popularity of a powerful yarn that recommended Scott’s Bride to Donizetti and his literary collaborator, Salvadore Cammarano – that, and something else. After he had chosen this story for an opera, in 1835, Donizetti wrote to the impresario in Turin, about a proposed libretto which did not satisfy him: ‘I want love, without which operatic subjects are cold, violent love’. Donizetti leant towards romantic melodrama, and what was Scott if not melodrama? Cammarano, who came from a family long associated with the stage (a scene-painter and stage manager before he turned, in 1835, to writing librettos) was well-equipped to make an effective adaptation. He ruthlessly excluded anything unimportant, and simplified Scott’s story, to preserve the essential conflict. He fused in one personage, Lucy’s brother, all the forces of family and dynasty pressing on her to turn her away from love for Edgar Ravenswood and towards a pragmatic marriage. In the opera this formidable brother is called Enrico Ashton (though he has nothing in common with her brother Henry in the novel, an annoying but ultimately harmless child). Gone, along with most of Scott’s 30 characters, are Lucy’s father, her lawyer brother, and – most to be regretted – her mother, whose dominance over her husband and superior force screws the pressures that unhinge poor Lucy’s mind (The Bride of Lammermoor’s setting is not the only thing about it that recalls Shakespeare’s Scottish play). The psychologically-isolated characters in Cammarano’s libretto remind Ashbrook of those in a tale by Edgar Allan Poe.
As Cammarano proves in his best-known libretto, Il trovatore for Verdi, explanation of motivation was not his strongest point. The French adaptors of the libretto of Lucia di Lammermoor arguably strengthened the opera in this respect: they filled in some of Enrico’s motivation, giving causes for the feud between the Ravenswood and Ashton families. Cammarano’s gift was for striking scenes, and Scott provided the material for plenty of those. The librettist’s terse and energetic style gave these ‘marvellous and uncommon incidents’ conviction, at least in association with music. Scott had anticipated that readers might deem the events in his novel ‘overstrained, romantic and composed by the wild imagination of an author, desirous of gratifying the popular appetite for the horrible’. He insisted that his story was based on a true tale, and that tale matches in essentials the plot of the opera. This was what Donizetti needed. In some of his other operas, his composing facility tended to issue in a sequence of apparently loosely-related numbers. But, as Ashbrook points out, Donizetti’s scores reveal an almost direct ratio between the dramatic power of the libretto and musical cohesiveness, nowhere better illustrated than in Lucia di Lammermoor.
Cammarano’s economy was a blessing to Donizetti, since it left so much of the characterisation to be filled in by his music. We can speculate as to whether Donizetti met the aged and ailing Sir Walter Scott when he visited Naples in 1831-2, but what seems certain is that the composer as well as the librettist knew Scott’s novel. The delicacy and silvery tones of Lucia’s role, especially in ‘Regnava nel silenzio’ and the Mad Scene, may have been hinted at in Scott’s ‘the silver tones of Lucy Ashton’s voice’. Gary Schmidgall (Literature as Opera) also notices, as the key to why Lucia should sing coloratura, Scott’s description of ‘Lucy Ashton’s exquisitely beautiful, yet somewhat girlish features…informed to express peace of mind, serenity, and indifference to the tinsel of worldly pleasure’. This young girl erected ‘aerial palaces’ in her daydreams, ‘of strange adventures and supernatural horrors’. Lucy’s eventual mental collapse, with its fragmented return to her earlier mode of expression, is all the more affecting because it comes after she has revealed force of personality, in swearing eternal devotion to Edgar and suffering to maintain her vow.
The vocal brilliance of much of Lucia’s part is characterisation rather than a concession to the requirements of ‘canaries’ and their admirers. This is underlined when it is realised that Donizetti’s music for Lucia herself doesn’t support the tradition universally followed until recently. The role of Lucia, long considered ‘the vehicle par excellence of the coloratura soprano’, as composed by Donizetti lies within the range of a lyric soprano, and, for reasons we have seen, often needs a dramatic weight beyond a coloratura soprano’s power. Maria Callas sensed this as she developed her understanding of the role: ‘It is not a light role’, she observed ‘it is a dramatico-coloratura. In fact, Lucia is a very low role’. It was low for reasons other than Callas perhaps knew. When the opera was adapted for coloratura sopranos ‘Regnava nel silenzio’, the duet for Lucia and Enrico, and the Mad Scene were transposed down a tone from Donizetti’s original. This was to ease the added coloratura flights into the stratosphere, making them culminate in E flats, for example, in the duet and the Mad Scene, rather than Fs. The elaborate cadenza with flute obbligato in the Mad Scene – for canary-fanciers the vocal highlight of the opera – is a later addition of uncertain parentage, though no doubt Donizetti trusted to the improvisatory powers of the original Lucia, Fanny Tacchinardi-Persiani, to add a cadenza at this point. The transpositions upset Donizetti’s carefully planned choice and sequence of keys. Restoring the composer’s original intentions, as editor for a recording he conducted with Montserrat Caballé as Lucia, Jesús López Cobos claimed that ‘in the whole history of nineteenth century opera no work seems to have departed so far from the original!’
This, of course, is a tribute to Lucia’s continuing popularity throughout that century, when singers assumed they could adapt it to suit their strengths. Bel canto is singers’ opera, none more than Lucia di Lammermoor. But for all Donizetti’s facility (Lucia was composed in less than six weeks, and he wrote so quickly that someone watching him work could hardly believe he was writing music) he gave considerable care to form and to the orchestral parts of this opera. The conventional arias, cabalettas, and ensembles are there, but handled with imagination and with some originality. There is little that could be called Scottish colour, but much is atmospheric, such as the glistening fountain scene in the first act, with its solo harp, and the storm preceding the rise of the curtain revealing Edgar Ravenswood’s ruined Wolf’s Crag castle. Horns and funereal trombones are used evocatively, and Ashbrook justly observes that the music surrounds the action with a mournful atmosphere. Audiences of the romantic era preferred to get their frissons while time-travelling to exotic locations.
Before concluding with some reflections on Lucia di Lammermoor as Lucia’s opera, we should concede that her lover Edgardo is musically equally interesting, and dramatically arguably more so. This was no accident: whereas the first Lucia, Tacchinardi-Persiani, was at the beginning of her career, the Edgardo was already one of the most admired and sought-after tenors of his day, Gilbert-Louis Duprez. The intensity of declamation required by this role, the lyrical expression lifted to a power anticipating Verdi, were conceived for this singer, the first to cultivate ringing top notes sung ‘from the chest’. Having such a singer allowed Donizetti to follow the logic of Scott’s plot, by giving the last scene almost entirely to the tenor hero, the heroine being in no state to sing. Some vain prima donnas have since managed to have the final scene omitted, thus depriving audiences of the romantic catharsis of Edgar’s suicide. Dying characters sing, especially in romantic opera. A later singer of the part of Edgar, Rubini, emitted ‘a sob of fury from his trembling mouth’ as he cursed Lucia in the aria. This transformed Rubini, said the critic, into a tragedian, ‘admirable by dint of being a sublime singer’. Thus did bel canto reach its heights, and they could be dramatic heights. Edgardo’s final lyrical utterance is the cabaletta of his aria, and between its repetitions he stabs himself, whereupon the melody is given to the cello, while he, dying, sings only part of each phrase. Donizetti as musical dramatist has often been underrated.
Still, for many Lucia di Lammermoor is Lucia, and especially her ‘Mad Scene’. The most famous in a long line of such scenes, this is often taken for granted but is novel in its way – only by Donizetti’s time could such derangement and the horror and pity it inspires be acceptable in a wholly serious opera. A heroine who loses her wits, in public, has a counterpart in Edgar’s suicide on stage (a tragic ending, not the happy ending compulsory in the 18th century). Lucia, largely passive throughout the opera, is distanced here by her madness from her only decisive action – killing the husband forced on her (these and other related insights are Simon Maguire’s). Lucia, in the approved manner just then about to become old-fashioned, expires offstage. Lucy’s mad scene, daring though its inclusion may be in some respects, is not a gory, melodramatic spectacle – it is tempered by a positive aspect, not present in Scott: that she imagines Edgardo restored to her. The music evokes happier scenes from her past, but dislocated, like Lucia’s mind. Such a presentation of madness on stage was considered acceptable, and aroused less comment than Edgar’s suicide. What was newer was the inclusion of such a scene in a serious opera, rather than in an opera from the semi-serious genre, which is where it would have been found in the previous century – the most famous example being Paisiello’s Nina – or the girl [driven] mad through love (Naples, 1789). The particular character of Donizetti’s setting of Lucia’s madness is suggested by his intention that the solos played nowadays by a flute be played on glass armonica. Rubbing fingers on moistened glass created ethereal tones associated with mental instability, with a warning that ‘those of nervous disposition should not play the armonica’.
The more closely we study Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, the stronger grows the conviction that its enduring high standing, and its more recent revival, have less to do with fashions in singing and the cult of sopranos equal to its demands, and more to do with musical and dramatic qualities, which may actually improve on the literary original. These reasons are far from incompatible: the sheer delight in hearing bel canto singing can translate us into a world of theatrical escapism, only to find there a compelling drama. With delight in sound and emotion comes the pleasure of an insight into human nature. But you need a heroine who can be Lucia. If she can sing the music aright, she will be the character. Thank you, Joan Sutherland.
First published by Opera~Opera, 2006