The two performances of Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor at the Teatru Manoel on 17 and 19 March brings back to the Manoel stage a masterpiece which has never waned in popularity, neither here nor abroad since its sensationally successful premiere in Naples on 26 September 1835. The Bergamasque composer Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848) wrote 64 operas and left an unfinished one (Le Duc d’Albe) before ill-health immobilised him for the last five years of his life. He wrote operas in every genre and Lucia di Lammermoor was his 46th opera and is the most popular of his serious stage works. Together with his comic operas L’elisir d’amore (1832) and Don Pasquale (1842), they are his most frequently performed operas.
Lucia di Lammermoor holds a special place in my heart, being the third of the three first operas I ever saw when I was only nine years old. Decades later I never tire of going to a performance of it and have seen it many times at different venues in Malta, Gozo as well as in Vienna and Florence. Set in 17th-century Scotland, it is a beautiful and a superbly crafted work, a tale of love, political ambition and expedience, duplicity, madness and tragedy. An essential part of its success is thanks to the libretto by Salvatore Cammarano (1801-52) who provided Donizetti with many libretti for the latter’s operas. He also collaborated, on a smaller scale, with Verdi and Mercadante.
This opera is typical of the bel canto era of Italian opera, epitomised by the works of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti. In post-Napoleonic Europe, the Romantic movement in drama and literature was often reflected in opera. Many composers sought suitable material for their operas in the novels penned by some of the greatest names in the field. Italian composers found a lot of inspiration mainly in the literary works of foreign authors and a very rich and much-sapped source were the works of Britain’s Sir Walter Scott and France’s Victor Hugo. Scott’s works fascinated Donizetti and his Italian contemporaries no less. Scott’s The Bride of Lammermuir was published in 1819 and had attracted Michele Enrico Carafa (1787-1872) who wrote Le nozze di Lammermoor (1829) to a libretto by Giuseppe Balocchi based on Scott’s novel. Calisto Bassi wrote a libretto for Luigi Rieschi’s La fidanzata di Lammermoor (1831) and just a year before Donizetti’s Lucia hit the opera world, Pietro Beltrame had written a libretto for Alberto Mazzucato (1813-77) who wrote another La fidanzata di Lammermoor. For Donizetti’s version of this story, Cammarano based his libretto via those of the three above librettists, whose names, works and composers they worked for are practically forgotten.
Donizetti’s three-act work triumphed, survived and flourishes because of many factors. It affords a spectacular opportunity for a singing-actress to display her worth, most notably in the famous Mad Scene and it also requires an equally convincing singing-acting tenorVarious dramatic climaxes are reached, such as in the duet between Lucia and her brother Henry Ashton, the famous sextet, the Mad Scene itself and the confrontation between Edgar, Lucia’s thwarted lover and Ashton. However the opera reveals its greatest dramatic strength in the final scene with the tenor’s Tombe degli avi miei, his suicide and extremely touching “Tu che a Dio spiegasti l’ali, o bell’alma innamorata” which only the stone-hearted could resist. The great sextet concluding Act II is still considered as the epitome of operatic ensemble writing.
There is a slightly different version of this work which was the result of Donizetti’s and Cammarano’s revison of it for a production in French for Paris in 1839. For many years, even in our islands, apart from other cuts, the dramatic Tower Scene between Edgardo and Enrico was omitted, something rarely done nowadays. About two years ago I was fortunate to see a complete uncut version of the original opera at Florence’s teatro comunale. This included a whole scene between Lucia and the cleric Raimondo (or Bide-the-bent), in which the latter exerts a lot of pressure upon Lucia to give in to what he knew her brother’s demands would be on her so as to marry Bucklaw, and which makes her even more vulnerable. There was also what is usually cut midway in what we have become accustomed to see and hear in the famous Mad Scene.
After an absence of some years from the Manoel stage, Lucia di Lammermoor will delight opera buffs in a production by the Silesian National Opera from the city of Opava in the Czech Republic. Opava’s opera house has a 200-year tradition behind it, founded especially so as to diffuse opera in what was left to the Habsburg Empire of the province of Silesia gobbled up by Prussia in 1740. It remained part of that empire until 1918 and has since been one of the leading opera houses of the Czech people. The good news is that this particular production of Lucia di Lammermoor won the prestigious Thalia Prize in 2005, under the musical direction of Damiano Binetti and artistic director Jana Andelova Pletichova. Both will respectively conduct and direct the performances at the Manoel. The same soprano who first sang the title role in this award-winning production, Katarina Jorda Kramolisova, will be singing it in Malta as well. Others taking part in the performances are Korean tenor Kim Kisun in the role of Lucia’s lover Edgardo of Ravenswood; baritone Jakob Kettner as Enrico Ashton, Lucia’s ruthless and ambitious brother; bass Dalibor Hrda as Bide-the-bent (also known as Raimondo), the Presbyterian minister; tenor Michal Pavel Vojta as the hapless Sir Arturo Bucklaw, Lucia’s husband whom she kills during their wedding night and soprano Ilona Kaplova as Alisa, Lucia’s confidante.
Conductor, artistic director, the cast and the experienced members of the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra will perform this great work on:
Thursday 17th and Saturday 19th March, both performances at 8pm.
Tickets: bookings@teatrumanoel.com.mt Tel, 2124 6389 Fax: 2124 7451
Visit also:
www.teatrumanoel.com.mt
