Book Description

This book is the first full-length biography in English of the composer of Don Pasquale and Lucia di Lammermoor. It is based on first-hand research in archives and libraries at the scenes of Donizetti's widespread activities. Operatically speaking, Gaetano Donizetti shared the first half of the Italian nineteenth century with Rossini and Bellini. Long active throughout Italy, he later turned his talents to the benefit of audiences in Pairs and Vienna. Attractive, humorous and enormously energetic, he won the affectionate regard of his colleagues and the intense devotion of numerous women, including his beautiful, but unfortunate wife. The story of Donizetti's life is worth telling for the illumination it sheds on operatic history and on the whole world of opera. He bridged the interval between the classical opera, with its rigid division into opera seria and opera buffa, and the romantic, dramatic operas of Verdi's middle period. His personal story of success that turned into final tragedy is an enthralling human document in itself. The reader meets the great, the well-remembered and the fascinatingly obscure in music, literature, politics and society. Among a total of nearly seventy operas which Donizetti composed, Lucia di Lammermoor, Don Pasquale and L'Elisir d'Amore have remained in the active repertoires of opera houses everywhere. His works were composed for a dazzling constellation of singers, including Grisi, Malibran, Pasta, Lablache, Mario, Ronconi and Rubini. Born into a poor artisan family in Bergamo, he ended his days laden with decorations and honors, a member of the legion d'honneur and the Academie des Beaux-Arts and an Aulic Councillor to the Emperor of Austria. Appendices include a complete annotated list of Donizetti's operas (with brief histories of their performances) and of his non-operatic compositions. They also offer a mass of other information, including a side glance at Giuseppe Donizetti, the composer's brother, who became musical director of Sultans and died at a pasha at Constantinople.