“The yoke of the finales”: Donizetti’s experimental calling card

By Roger Parker Musicologist and Opera Rara Repertoire Consultant

A common narrative about Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848) places his serious operas of the 1820s, mostly written for the theatres of Naples, as – to be brief – the work of a journeyman, by necessity a follower of Rossini. The breakthrough then comes with Anna Bolena, written in 1830 for Milan and from there spreading throughout the Italian peninsula and to the major European capitals, thus paving the way for the great public successes of the next ten years, including Lucrezia Borgia and Lucia di Lammermoor.

Such a story, surely not by coincidence, chimes neatly with our present-day Donizetti repertoire, in which the first serious opera to receive regular revivals is indeed Anna Bolena. In other words, it congratulates contemporary operatic habits. However, a closer look at (and a closer listen to) some of those operas from the “forgotten” Neapolitan 1820s tells a different tale, one in which L’esule di Roma is, as it happens, a prime exhibit.

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As usual at this period, we know little about the opera’s genesis. Set in ancient Rome, it was based on Luigi Marchionni’s play Il proscritto romano (Venice, 1820), which in turn came from an earlier French play about Androcles and the lion (a tale already well known in Italy in many formats, which probably accounts for the rather sketchy denouement of the opera). First performed at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples on New Year’s Day 1828, it was immediately proclaimed a public success, and this in spite of the fact that the performance was attended by a large contingent of the Neapolitan court: royal personages whose presence often tended to subdue the reactions of their loyal subjects. During the ensuing season, it was performed a further 20 or so times and then remained in the repertory into the 1840s – a singular achievement in those swiftly changing operatic times. Part of the initial success must, of course, have been due to the principal singers, all of them much praised: tenor Berardo Winter as Settimio, the exile of the title; soprano Adelaide Tosi as his beloved Argelia; and, considered best of all, bass-baritone Luigi Lablache as Argelia’s father Murena, tortured by the fact that his machinations were responsible for Settimio’s banishment. However, the most extraordinary feature of the reception is that – although the premiere was played before an audience generally thought of as conservative and tradition-worshipping, forever thinking back fondly to the times when the “Neapolitan school” was at the forefront of Italian music – it was precisely the most innovative aspects of Donizetti’s new opera that caught the public’s and the critics’ imagination.

Central to this innovation is the character of Murena. Unlike the usual, unbending patriarch of stock melodrama, Murena is from the start a wavering, unstable figure, full of regrets and anxiety about his past iniquity. And, taking his cue from the libretto, Donizetti embraced this unstable aspect in his music for the character. Even in Murena’s most conventional moments, such as his two-movement aria embedded in the opening Introduzione, he is forever prone to unpredictable outbursts and unusual vocal effects. Both the slow movement and the cabaletta of this opening aria (“Per lui… nel mentre” and “M’appare mai sempre”) have virtually no trace of continuous lyrical line, the opening statements in both cases being little more than an accumulation of declamatory proclamations, with agitated orchestration only emphasising the sense of unease. Murena’s aria in the second act, “Entra nel Circo… Ahi misero”, takes this unconventional style to even greater extremes: the accumulation of guilt has by this stage cast Murena into madness: in a remarkable anticipation of Donizetti’s famous mad-scenes of the 1830s, his vocal discourse is built from disjointed fragments of recollection and horrified anticipations of the future his wickedness has set in motion.

In comparison with Murena, the two young lovers are by contrast more conventional characters. Argelia is the most obviously Rossinian in vocal style, particularly in the opera’s finale, in which the plot’s rather precipitate happy ending is celebrated by a so-called Rondò finale (“Ogni tormento, qual nebbia al vento”), with streams of soprano coloratura acclaiming the restoration of order to a dangerously unstable state. Perhaps not surprisingly, Argelia is at her most affecting in her second-act duet with her father, in which her gentle melodic idiom proves to have an eminently dramatic function in calming her troubled parent. Her exiled lover Settimio is a more complex case. His opening aria and duet with Argelia in the first act also present a character mostly reminiscent of Rossinian vocal ways, although with far less ornamental exuberance. But, at least as the opera was first performed, he virtually disappeared from the action in the second half of the opera, only returning at the very end to narrate his unlikely, lion-assisted escape from the Roman Colosseum. Small surprise, then, that in the opera’s very first revival, at La Scala Milan in July 1828, Donizetti balanced the character, indeed enriched it considerably, by providing Settimio with a “prison scene”, one that we include in tonight’s performance. A complex orchestral picture of the “oscuro sotterraneo” where Settimio awaits his sentence precedes a further two-movement aria in which he reiterates his love for Argelia and, at the last, defies fate in the face of death.

However, in spite of all these compelling arias and duets, there was one further number, in many ways the opera’s most daring, that caught the public imagination. As several reviewers pointed out, at the midpoint in the opera, at the end of Act 1, where tradition would have demanded a so-called concertato finale, with chorus, soloists and orchestra all coming together for a grandiose close, Donizetti broke with tradition and closed the act with a long Terzetto for the three principals, one in which – again – Murena’s instability dominates the vocal gestures to a remarkable degree. During this period in Italy, composers often defied audience expectations at their peril, but here the dramatic effect of the Terzetto was unprecedented. In a half-joking letter to his revered teacher Simone Mayr, Donizetti reported on the extraordinary reception of the piece, and mentioned that its success was encouraging him further in experimentation, in evading what he called “the yoke of the finales”.

That would be a project for the future, in particular for the remarkable sequence of further experimental works Donizetti wrote for Naples in the late 1820s. But there is no doubt that L’esule di Roma pointed the way. What is more, it proved to be by far the composer’s most popular opera of the 1820s: within six years it had been seen in more than 30 Italian cities, with additional premieres in London, Vienna and Madrid. Often, as was normal at the time, various parts of the opera were substituted in these revivals, in particular the tenor’s second act aria, which became a site in which singers felt they could insert a favourite number from elsewhere. But the Terzetto ending Act 1 continued to excite comment and admiration, demonstrating to an increasingly broad international audience that a new, innovative operatic personality had come into view. The stage was thus set for Donizetti’s triumphant decade to come.