Gaetano Donizetti (1797 – 1848): Don Pasquale
Gaetano Donizetti used to say that his early life emerged out of darkness. Not least there was the windowless basement apartment, located just outside Bergamo in northern Italy, in which he had grown up. “My birth is covered in mystery for I was born underground”, he once said. “You went down cellar steps, where no glimmer of light ever penetrated.”
A certain gloominess seemed to permeate much of his childhood. Although his father worked as the caretaker of a local monte di pietà (pawnshop), he struggled to feed his growing family from his meagre salary. Life in the Donizetti family was about hard realities, and young Gaetano’s early interest in music was largely disregarded. He later admitted that he was “never encouraged by my poor father, who was always telling me: it is impossible that you will compose, that you will go to Naples, that you will go to Vienna”. Gaetano would eventually prove him wrong on all three counts, even as his father urged him to drop his creative ambitions and become a village organist or schoolmaster instead. Eventually Gaetano managed to escape the dark, dreary discouragements of his early life: “like an owl I took flight.”
Donizetti’s life story is all the more striking given that he was no child prodigy. He was well into his thirties before he managed to write a genuine operatic hit. Up until then was no end of hard graft and setbacks to negotiate, along with the occasional humiliation, even as he always took these in his stride. His tough upbringing meant that he was never in danger of getting ahead of himself and he applied much the same attitude to his work as he did to life: pragmatic and even a little fatalistic. For most of his career, at least on the stage, he managed to smile equally at both triumph and disaster.
His creative career might not have happened at all had it not been for Johann Simon Mayr (1763 – 1845), a Bavarian-born composer of Italianate operas (quite successful in his day), and maestro di cappella of the main church in Donizetti’s hometown of Bergamo. Mayr would be nothing less than a guardian angel to Donizetti, both in his childhood and early professional career, offering selfless and unstinting support to the young man and introducing him to all the right people. He would remain a close friend and confidante throughout Donizetti’s life (the two men would die within three years of one another).
In 1807 Gaetano was enrolled in a free music school in Bergamo which had just been set up by Mayr – the Lezioni Caritatevoli di Musica (now the Instituto Musicale Gaetano Dontizetti). Although the ten-year-old Gaetano was initially regarded as a very average student, and his place at the school even questioned, Mayr saw something special in the boy and did his best to keep him on. Mayr would later cast him as one of the principal singers in an end of term musical comedy, not only giving him many of the best lines but also asking him to compose some of the music.
With Donizetti’s education at Mayr’s school set to end in 1815, Mayr managed to secure him a place at the Liceo Filarmonico in Bologna, despite some initial opposition from Donizetti’s own family. Here the young man would study operatic style and musical structures with Padre Stanislao Mattei, a Franciscan friar and noted musicologist who had also taught Rossini.
Donizetti by now knew that he wanted to write for the stage. But unlike his near contemporaries Rossini or Bellini*, his professional career did not start with a bang but rather stumbled along in fits and starts for more than a decade – with flashes of promise and progress alternating with regular setbacks.
*Vincenzo Bellini (1801 – 1835), probably Donizetti’s biggest operatic rival in his day, was the quintessential exponent of the bel canto (literally “beautiful singing”) style of writing. Verdi would forever rave about Bellini’s “long, long, long melodies such as no one before had written.”
From 1817 and 1821 Donizetti shuffled to and from Bergamo and any opera theatre that would have him. In this way, three early operas (Enrico de Borgogna, Una Follia and Il Falegname di Livonia) were accepted for production in Venice by impresario Paolo Zancia, while another, Le Nozze in Villa, was accepted in Mantua. Each was received politely by both audience and critics, but without leaving much of a lasting impression. Una Follia, for example, was only performed the once after which its score completely disappeared. One reviewer noted that “the vocal writing was not outstanding” and that the young composer still had much to learn: the same writer hoped the audience’s applause might “encourage him in the pursuit of his career, but let it not delude him.”
Spending time back in Bergamo appeared to do Donizetti little harm, as he was to further his education with a sudden whirlwind of string quartet writing. As ever, this was down to the influence of Mayr who had made a thorough study of the music of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, all still relatively unknown in Italy at that time. Both Donizetti and Mayr were frequently involved in chamber music evenings where music by the three Austro-Germanic masters was played. For a time afterwards, Donizetti wrote quartets obsessively, turning out no less than fifteen of them over the coming four years.
One of the fellow participants of these evenings, a friend named Marco Bonesi, would later offer a rare glimpse of the young, prolific Donizetti at work:
I was surprised when he produced quartets written alla Haydn, alla Beethoven etc… Writing them he never approached the keyboard, not even for an instant. He evolved his compositions at his desk in his room, as though he wrote a note to a friend…. [he could compose] in the midst of confusion [but] if he heard anyone playing or singing he would quickly break off his work, saying he could not continue.
Such an account may partly explain Donizetti’s sheer speed at turning out finished work in the future. Although somewhat less colourful in his methods than Rossini, Donizetti seems to have possessed much the same ability to always know exactly where he was going with each score. Sometimes he would further speed up the process by writing with both hands.
Donizetti still knew that his future lay in writing for the stage, and his first major breakthrough – marking the time when he would properly start to make a living composing operas, albeit precariously – came with his heroic melodrama, Zoraida di Granata. A tale of murderous intrigue and forbidden love set in fifteenth century Spain, it was produced in Rome in 1822, with one reviewer appreciatively noting “a new and very happy hope is rising for the Italian musical theatre. The young Maestro Gaetano Donizetti… has launched himself strongly in his truly serious opera, Zoraida. Unanimous, sincere, universal was the applause he justly collected from the capacity audience.” After a short run in the city’s Teatro Argentina, it would be revived the following year in Lisbon.
From this point onwards, Donizetti’s operatic endeavours would oscillate between three or four far-flung compass points in Italy. Now basing himself in Naples, his work would frequently take him to the theatres of Rome, Milan and Genoa. At this stage of his career, his comic operas (such as L’ajo nell’imbarazzo) would generally do better than his more serious ones (such as Emilia di Liverpool), and he found southern audiences more sympathetic to his work than those in the north.
The latter could sometimes give him a hard time. After some particularly patchy rehearsals had left him fearful over the reception of his first opera in Milan (Chiara e Serafina), he wrote to his old teacher Simon Mayr “I suggest you bring a Requiem [to the performance] for I shall be slaughtered, and thus the funeral rites will be taken care of.”
He branched out, once taking a year’s residency at the main theatre in Palermo (though bitterly regretting the experience afterwards), while also teaching at the conservatory there. In 1828, he signed a three-year contract with a Neapolitan impresario to turn out no less than twelve operas over the same time period. A year later he took over the directorship of Naples’ Royal Theatre.
Although Donizetti always loved creating a new musical score, he grew to intensely dislike the preparation side for each new operatic production. There he would have to deal with the intrigues, the petty jealousies, the demanding choreographers and the temperamental singers. He could neither be too precious about his scores nor his musical ambitions. Quite early on in his career he had come to accept that the only acceptable operatic model in 1820s Italy was Rossini. Many of the ups and downs of his early career can be linked the difficulties he faced in giving the public what they wanted.
According to his friend Marco Bonesi:
Straightforwardly [Donizetti] told me that he had to cultivate the Rossinian style, according to the taste of the day. If once he made his way a little, nothing would prevent him from developing his own style. He had many ideas how to reform the predictable situations, the sequences of introduction, cavatina, duet, trio, finale, always fashioned the same way. “But”, he added sadly, “what to do with the blessed theatrical conventions? Impresarios, singers, and the public as well, would hurl me into the farthest pit at least, and addio per sempre [goodbye forever]”.
Donizetti could stoically endure most setbacks – the last-minute mutilations to his score because of the whim of a singer or official censor, the sometimes hostile audiences and critics, even occasionally the practical inconvenience of not getting paid on time. “I am a man who is worried by few things”, he once told his father, before admitting that there was just one thing he could not bear: “that is, if an opera of mine goes badly. I don’t care about the rest.”
He would further expound on this point in a letter to Mayr:
My real displeasure is to see myself forgotten by everyone and to come to the close of an engagement without hopes of getting another… The trade of the poor writer of operas I have understood from the beginning to be most unhappy, and it is only necessity that keeps me bound to it, but I assure you, dear Maestro, that I suffer much from the type of beasts we have need of for execution of our labours.
Oddly for a man who worried as much about his reputation, Donizetti was always generous towards his musical contemporaries, even to direct rivals such as Vincenzo Bellini. Recognizing the competition between them, Bellini would often ask anxious questions about what Donizetti was doing and whether his music was any good, to the point of near paranoia. But Donizetti did not seem to have agonized in anything like the same way over his talented contemporary. His response to Bellini’s first opera, Adelson e Salvini – “beautiful, beautiful, beautiful” he told a friend – was entirely characteristic.
Donizetti finally secured international stardom in 1830 with his thirtieth opera, Anna Bolena (a tragedia lirica based upon the life of Henry VIII’s ill-fated second wife), with the work going on to being staged all across Europe throughout the 1830s and 40s. One factor behind his breakthrough was in having a libretto, written by popular poet Felice Romani, that had allowed him to further expand his dramatic horizons.
Indeed, the success of Bolena would encourage Donizetti to develop a more expressive, less ornamented style of melody, designed to enhance the drama and not the singer’s ego. It was all quite simple really, as he once explained jokingly to a librettist, “success consists of doing little and making that little beautiful, and of not singing a lot and boring the audience.” Donizetti’s ambitions for creating an ever-closer relationship between opera and drama would go beyond anything even Rossini or Bellini had achieved. In this sense, he is the truest precursor to Verdi.
The mature Donizetti would become particularly versatile in these later years, with an equal facility for turning out urbane, charming comic operas as for writing impassioned, romantic, sometimes gothic melodramas. Some musicologists have suggested that such versatility stemmed from his own complex and somewhat manic-depressive personality.
The only downside to these years of success was Donizetti’s habit of continually falling foul of the Italian censors, particularly the ones in his hometown of Naples. The latter explicitly disliked anything that challenged royalty or religion or anything that might “induce loathing or disgust in the spectator.” Party for this reason, Donizetti looked increasingly for libretti with foreign subjects, particularly ones from Britain. Aside from Bolena, he set other stories relating to the 16th century Tudors in his operas Elisabetta al Castello di Kenilworth (1829), Maria Stuardo (1834) and Roberto Devereux (1837).
Donizetti also knew how to make hay while the sun shone, turning out no less than 25 operas in the six and a half years after Bolena, now including taking his first commissions from Paris. Highlights from these years include one of his very finest comic operas, L’Elisir d’Amore (The Elixer of Love, which he claimed to write in eight days) and his much more tragic, Lucia di Lammermoor, based upon Walter Scott’s tale of ill-fated love in the windswept Scottish hills. Particularly striking in Lucia is the title character’s descent into madness, with Donizetti symbolizing her mental deterioration with wild flourishes of trills, virtuosic runs and high-pitched arpeggios.
With Rossini retired and Bellini dead after a sudden illness aged just 34, Donizetti was regarded as the greatest living opera composer in Italy by the late 1830s, if not in the world. Between 1838 and 1848 around a quarter of the operas produced in Italy were by Donizetti.
Despite his huge success, his personal life had been rocked by a series of tragic losses. Over an eight-year period he would lose both his parents and his three infant children. Worst of all was the death of his beloved wife Virginia in 1837, something that Donizetti never properly got over. “I’m alone on earth and still alive!” he lamented. He locked the door to Virginia’s old room and refused ever again to utter her name in conversation.
A mixture of bereavement as well as continuing frustration with the Italian censors finally persuaded him to spread his wings in 1838. For the next five years, his life, as frenetic as ever, would be divided between Naples, Paris and Vienna (he was even appointed Hofkapellmeister to the Austrian Hapsburgs – “12,000 francs for doing nothing” he joked). But there was now a new element to Donizetti’s workaholic nature – the sense that he was running out of time and had to make the most of things. He was showing the first signs of neurosyphilis, which he knew was soon going to incapacitate and eventually kill him.
His comic masterpiece Don Pasquale (premiered at the Théâtre-Italien in Paris) was written towards the end of this final surge, and it shows a master still at the top of the game. It is often cited, alongside Rossini’s Barber of Seville (and Donizetti’s own L’Elisir) as the greatest of opere buffe.
Donizetti had received the commission from the director of the Italien theatre upon his return to Paris in the autumn of 1842. He quickly set about the work and although the talented Genoese writer Giovanni Ruffini was assigned to produce the libretto, Donizetti would take such a firm hand over telling Ruffini what he could and could not write that the librettist would eventually withdraw from the whole production.*
*Ruffini and Donizetti are now diplomatically recognized as co-authors of the work.
The amusing, rather trivial plot revolves around four characters, all clearly drawn from the classic tradition of Commedia dell’arte, a form of theatre comedy originating from Italy in the sixteenth century. There is the greedy, narcissistic Don Pasquale, who desires a wife; the lovesick Ernesto; the scheming Dr Malatesta; and finally the angelic-looking but not so innocent Norina.
The opera shares a lot of the same manic energy as comic Rossini, with the same colour and wit, the same mischievous asides, the same virtuosic cross-conversations, the same glorious melodies. But in Donizetti’s hands the action is particularly fast-paced and there are even unlikely moments of pathos, not least as Pasquale gains a measure of self-awareness towards the end of the opera.
Pasquale would sadly prove to be Donizetti’s last great creative peak. By the time his final opera Don Sébastian was being produced later that same year (1843), he was already suffering from headaches as well as uncharacteristic lapses in memory and concentration. He suddenly appeared a much older man and having been so famously even-tempered throughout his career, he was now liable to blow a fuse at unpredictable moments.
By 1846 his mental condition had deteriorated to the point that a doctor declared him “no longer capable of estimating sanely the consequence of his own decisions and actions”. Donizetti was firstly placed in a secure institution in Paris before being moved to a nearby apartment, where he was allowed to receive visitors (Verdi being one of them). Finally, he was taken back to his birth-town of Bergamo, where he spent his final days in the home of a wealthy Baroness.
With his brain slowly ravaged by illness, Donizetti became a shadow of his former self – he was barely able to move or speak never mind recognize his own music. It was as if he had retreated back into the darkness he had so successfully escaped as a child.
Gaetano Donizetti died at the young age of 50, giving the impression of having prematurely burned out, exactly like Rossini and Bellini before him. But he had also scaled the heights and given the world much to remember him by.
Suggestions for further listening
A full performance of Don Pasquale from the Zurich Opera House can be found here.
For those curious about Vincenzo Bellini, Donizetti’s great rival, I would recommend his masterly tragic opera, Norma (1831).