Donizetti: L'elisir d'amore (highlights)

Gaetano Donizetti was the leading composer of Italian opera in the short period between the early retirement of Rossini and death of Bellini and Verdi's first success with Nabucco in 1842. He was born in Bergamo in 1797 and had his early musical training there as a chorister under Simon Mayr at S Maria Maggiore. Through Mayr he received a very thorough musical training and was able to have his first opera, Zoraida di Granata, mounted in Rome in 1822. There followed a period in Naples, with operas for the Teatro Nuovo there and for the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. It was at the latter opera house that he established his international reputation in 1830 with the opera Anna Bolena. He confirmed this success in Milan two years later with the comedy L'elisir d'amore. In his later career he wrote again for Naples and, accepting an invitation from Rossini, visited Paris, where French grand opera had an influence on his style. Subsequent operas included a version of one of Sir Walter Scott's Waverley novels, which became Lucia di Lammermoor. Pressure of work, as he set out to follow the example of Rossini, who had been able to retire by the age of 38, brought a break-down in health, accentuated by an earlier syphilitic infection. He spent a period in an asylum near Paris, eventually returning home to Bergamo, where he died in 1848.

L'elisir d'amore was written in a remarkably short time, at the request of the impresario of the Teatro della Canobbiana in Milan, who had been let down by another composer and now needed a new opera to open his spring season, according to the later account of the librettist's wife only two weeks away. With the collaboration of the librettist Felice Romani, the work was completed, its text based in general on an existing French libretto by Eugène Scribe that had been set by Auber and staged in Paris a year earlier. Romani's wife claimed that the whole work was written within a fortnight, an obvious exaggeration, since it seems that Donizetti had already completed much of the opera some three weeks before it was to be staged, not to open the season, but to be staged as a later part of it. The opera was an immediate success, its continuing place in international repertoire comparable to that of Donizetti's other comic opera, Don Pasquale.