Donizetti got rolling about 10 years after Rossini, so they were roughly contemporary, but unlike Rossini, he didn’t quit.  Donizetti has 75 or so operas on the books, running almost all the way up until he died at age 51, while Rossini stopped when he was 37 and enjoyed a long retirement, another 40 years.

It’s pretty hard to count Donizetti’s operas, though, because he left a few of them unfinished, and also he kept going back and making changes to his earlier work.  Some people count the revisions as new operas, and I guess this is a matter of contention, though not for me.

Big names in the opera world: Lucia di Lammermoor, Elizir d’Amore, Daughter of the Regiment, maybe Don Pasquale.  Should we count the “Three Queens” series? Huge winners in the Bel Canto rankings, and deservedly so) but what else did Gaetano Donizetti have in the race?

For a guy who’s on the books with a huge number of operas, he’s known for a very short list of hits.  And probably anyone who’s impressed with the knockout music of the big winners, would reasonably wonder what they are missing in the also-rans.

What can we learn about these forgotten works, and how many of these would we want to see on a stage during the coming half-century?  These questions deserve answers.

Enrico di Borgogna - 1918

Yep, the music is there already, and this is just his fourth attempt at opera.  You can sit for a 2-hour dose of fun Donizetti and have a great time. Sure, you can hear Rossini in here, and no surprise, because that composer already had about 20 of his on the stage by the time Donizetti came up with Enrico, at the age of 21.

It’s difficult to avoid being influenced in your opinion of an opera, when you start with the information that this one had a weak early reception, and then was mostly ignored for 200 years.  Is this a masterpiece in hiding (like Rossini’s forgotten gem, Bianca e Falliero)?

I don’t think so. To me, the story line looks like something I myself would suggest, if someone needed a bare-bones opera idea.  Here it is: The boy does not know he is a banished prince, but eventually his big chance arises, and he gets the throne and the princess. Plus, you get a dark-stage assassin’s chorus to go with it.  Great!

The Donizetti Festival thought the music was good enough to stage Enrico in 2018, and I agree – totally enjoyable.  The big part is Enrico, written for a contralto (which I cannot distinguish from a mezzo-soprano, except in Wikipedia sound clips). Anna Bonitatibus lists herself as a mezzo, so she doesn’t care about the distinction either.  But she does very well as Enrico, and Donizetti wrote some good tunes for the boy prince – worth pulling up the recording just for that.

But the Festival did not think the notion of an opera eroica was quite appropriate for this simple story, so they played it for laughs, and these heroics are really quite funny to watch: broad over-acting, heavy makeup and wacked out hairdos. Gilberto the clown is like a cross between Dr. Dulcamara and a much funnier Tonio.  Geltrude the assistant has to turn sideways to get through the doorway; that’s a pretty wide ‘fro, Trudy. You know the thing is goofy when the lead soprano expresses her grief to a funny little stuffed animal.

In fact, this production steps away from what the composer probably took seriously, by doing a “play within a play”, so you can see everyone getting ready for their entrance, and the director running around giving orders, off on the sides.  In this absurd format, the play within a play is not annoying; it just tells you that nobody is going to die of consumption, and the dagger- and swordplay will not be fatal. Annoying, though, is the extraneous bear who sometimes runs through the set; not sure how that helps the humor, or anything else.

I thought the opera was easier to watch than Don Gregorio (too silly even for me), which came eight years later, and better written than Zoraida (inconcise), from the same librettist. It was more like Pia di’ Tolome – a small-time success that you don’t expect to get very far outside of Venice. (Sure, at 21, I would have settled for that.  Or even now.)

But the very rare opportunities to see this opera (CueTV) are worth taking, because this is completely enjoyable music. Donizetti’s off to a good start.

Zoraida di Granata - 1822

• The Young Gaetano

Zoraida di Granata was roughly the 7th opera from Donizetti, out in 1822, and the first one that the Italians liked.  Then it was another eight years until he wrote Anna Bolena, his first opera that is now regularly performed.

It’s not bad!  He’s got some extremely long arias going here, and some of them chain into another very long aria, etc.  Some huge lengthy laments by the tenor, but the heavy work is for the soprano; looks pretty exhausting. 

For me, this music is mostly not captivating.  I had just seen the wacky Daughter of the Regiment, and I’m remembering my beloved Elixir of Love and even Don Pasquale, so I was hopeful, but – starting with meandering overture -- no fireworks here.

The first act kind of drags with these extended songs, and you might be disappointed there’s no wild melody line to take home with you.  But it’s a nice piece of work anyway, with a gripping story to pull it along. 

The pieces you want to rewind and replay are the several quartets, mostly in the second act – good work!  (Is that a quintet right at the end of Act 1?  More than five?  Donizetti knows how to do this!) 

• Rethink This Ending, Here

Zoraida is in the category of operas where the story has a king or queen or another big wheel pulling rank on a person who is already in love with someone else.  You’ve got your Tosca, your Trovatore, your Semiramide, your Clemenza di Tito, and others.  (This is no standard categorization of operas, but just wait, and watch this space.)

Here, the king goes after Zoraida, but he can’t push too hard because her real love, Abenamet, is the trusted head of the king’s army.

Actually, Abenamet has the whole army on his side, and they are winning the battles against the Spanish, and armed to the teeth.  So it’s kind of surprising that Abe doesn’t just tell the army to off the king, because that would solve everyone’s problems.

Even Zoraida has a couple of clear shots at the king and she should take them, because this king is abusive, conniving, and alone.

Instead, Donizetti has everyone being polite to the king, even up to when Zoraida is about to be burned at the stake just for being in love with Abenamet.  Then Abe saves her, and, incredibly, they convince the king to be a good person from now on.

This is the sort of thing a young opera composer sets up and probably regrets for the rest of his life.  G.D. was 24 at the time, and he thought this ending was the way to go.  Possibly, you don’t get into writing tragedies until you are a little older.

But then, nobody staged his opera again for 200 years.  It really disappeared.  Half-baked ending?  Maybe.

• A Lesson for Giuseppe Verdi

Look here.  You can save the boyfriend by pretending you are giving in to the king, and letting him have his way with you in exchange for releasing the boyfriend.  It will work.  But you should not tell the boyfriend that is what’s happening until you get him out of town.

Il Trovatore.  Aida.  And more: Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride (two guys in this case), and Erkel’s Hunyadi László.  Think with me here – there must be many more.*

The lesson here is, make the deal with the king, and then inject some drugs or something so the guy does not know what deal you’ve agreed to, until he’s across the border.  Because love like this does not allow your guy to expect to live happily ever after, if you’ve made the big sacrifice for him. He will stay and die, rather than agree to that arrangement and actually be saved.

* These are in the sub-category of operas where the story has an enraged person in power, infatuated with one of their subjects, and eager to murder that person’s actual lover.   To save the lover, the first of the pair cuts a deal with the king or whoever, giving in and faking devotion.  It never works.

• The Irish Step In

This video was the extremely recent (late 2023) production at Wexford.  Of course it was, because Zoraida di Granata is so incredibly rare, I cannot find any indication that it has been performed anywhere since the 1800s.  Certainly not on video.  Nice job, Wexford Festival.  (They say they do a lot of rare Donizettis, so great!)

One thing I liked about this production is that they did ALL the scene changes without dropping the curtain.  Kudos, guys.  Lots of dark scenes here, so that made it easier to shove tables around on the stage, but even when you could see the whole operation, it was minimal and undistracting, and they kept on singing.

Wexford’s Zoraida is in a category of productions, not operas, where they do exquisite stage changes, and I am all for it.  Top of the heap: New York’s 2018 Samson et Dalila (with the devastating Elīna Garanča) where the scene change itself drew enthusiastic applause. 

[Wait for me, Elina; I’m still working on my Latvian.]

I go for the smooth changeovers, not the 60-second pauses in the dark with the curtain down and distant banging breaking the awkward silence.  Chicago’s Macbeth, for instance.  Fix it.

The mean king was a guy named Kona Kim, and he is totally in charge of his sound and his presentation.  Plus, Rachel Croash, who did the slave girl Ines, really knocked it out with her small part.

Let me tentatively venture something new here. Are the soprano and the lead tenor (Claudia Boyle and Matteo Mezarro) young and relatively inexperienced?  Not my bailiwick, but it kind of seemed like Zoraida didn’t know exactly what to do with her arms, hands, and face -- and Abenamet was way behind Speedo Green with the power and assertiveness in his voice.  I could be way off.

But you can’t criticize a soprano who can coloratura her way through that one, the opera three hours long with her singing dense notes all over the page for a good 60-70 percent of that. 

• It’s the “Donizetti Rebound”

You know how when a character resigns him/herself to an unfortunate fate or a sad course of action, and the music sort of winds down to a slow pace and low volume? 

Then, sometimes that character changes their mind, or sees an upside, or the army rides in for the rescue, and the music rolls up with speed and energy and optimism?  You lean forward then, in your seat, and you become hopeful, and so does the singer.  Moving ahead fast all of a sudden, back in the mainstream, new life.

Rossini does it, and some others I’m sure, but Donizetti has it in there a lot.  It is called the “Donizetti Rebound”.   You heard it here first.

Don Gregorio - 1826

Don’t get excited and go into Don Gregorio thinking you’re going to see another Don Pasquale; that came 17 years later, and Pasquale is entirely more fun to watch.

Jacopo Ferretti worked with Donizetti on some revisions for Zoraida in 1824, but then they tried for comedy with Gregorio, and a couple of others during the ‘20’s.  If this one is typical, then I’m not eager to check out Olivo e Pasquale, and especially will avoid the 1824 original version of Gregorio, called L'ajo nell'imbarazzo.  (They fixed it up and got Don Gregorio? Not enough fixing.)

I’ll give these guys credit for one thing: the fun, emblematic music that shows up in one form or another in all the Donizetti comedies. The overture is great, and there’s a baritone solo or two, a nice piece by the soprano, and a very strange and pleasant song by the poor son Enrico. (Strange and pleasant might be a rarely-offered specialty of Donizetti; listen to the innovative “Servant’s Chorus” in Pasquale for another example.)

What they appear to be working on here is setting up for a final scene where all six members of the cast put on opposite-gender clothing and sing a song. They do set it up! They do sing a song! They have the wrong clothes!  It’s not very funny!

And to get there, you’ll want, again, to focus on some of the really nice musical numbers, because that will help you wade through a whole lot of spoken narrative. (Modo parlato? No, let’s just say “they are talking” because this is such a low-brow opera.)

Also: here come more fancy, inexplicable costumes, extra-long songs with little impact, and even shouting at the orchestra’s conductor.  There’s plenty of time here to go get more popcorn while the video keeps running – you won’t miss much.

Ferretti has just one joke to tell, and it is that old Gregorio has had such a tough time with women that he thinks his sons should wait until they are about 40 before they start speaking with the ladies. This theme goes on for an hour, and then we see that one of the young rebels has secretly met and married his gal, and they have a baby. So everyone runs here and there, and hides behind this and that, and disguises themselves as a woman/man depending on what they are not.

Rossini had quit his long run of silly shows for Venice about 12 years earlier, and moved on to better ideas. But I guess the good people of Italy wanted more of this fluff (and so did the good people of Austria, Saxony, Spain, and Brazil, apparently), so let’s serve it up.

Tough call: is Gregorio worth watching so you can hear the melodies and feel the Donizetti energy? Maybe not! Go back and listen to Zoraida, or jump ahead to Faliero. They’re sad, but respectable.

Or just do what everyone else does and see Don Pasquale, if you want a comedy.  I’ll do the heavy lifting and try to watch Donizetti’s other 10 buffas from the 1820’s, and issue the warnings where needed.

Il Castello di Kenilworth - 1829

Oh boy, this is a disappointment. Was our man Donizetti under a very short deadline, or suddenly being paid per word, or per musical note?  This one is about as boring as they get, for 19th-century melodrama.

Disclosure here: I have only seen 60 minutes of Castello at this point, and I don’t know if I’ll ever cue up this 2019 Bergamo recording again. I’m not curious about the remaining 1 hour 15, beyond what I read already on Wikipedia. This thing is a dud.

I put most of the blame on a guy called Andrea Tottola, who set up the story for Castello, and five other operas for Donizetti.  I won’t list them here, because I’ll bet money that you have never heard of any of them, as I have not.

Surprise: Tottola scripted La Donna del Lago for Rossini, and I liked that; no big objections to his Ermione or Mosé in Egitto, either. This calls for a study of some sort about the librettists, apart from the composers. Watch this space.

Anyway, the first problem with Castello di Kenilworth, and probably the reason that Donizetti has only three “queens” in his famous English-oriented opus, is that this fourth one is just too simple a story. A quick plot description tells it all: Robert hides his wife Amelia, when Queen Elizabeth (the first) comes to visit, because the queen has the hots for young Robert, but then the queen finds out and forgives them all.

That’s it!  After one hour on stage, they’ve reached the point where the wife is about to escape from hiding, and long before this point, I believe, Tottola should have introduced at least one other plotline, to keep us awake.

We need Fanny (the servant) to be in trouble, maybe pursued by a prince, or secretly lusted after by the queen herself; or we need some bloody conflict with an enemy castle, or two. Maybe Amelia could do a crazy mad scene on the stairway, or old Lambourne (the other servant) could be revealed as a banished prince, worth millions. But she doesn’t, and he’s not. They just stand around, being servants.

This raises the question of what, exactly, is in Walter Scott’s novel Kenilworth, because that’s where Tottola got the idea. Right, Tottola just read the “Cliff Notes”; good theory.

In any case, one gets the impression of an extremely linear plotline, and almost no tension.

The second element that wrecks this 2019 presentation is the uninteresting staging at the Donizetti Festival. There’s no set! Everyone just walks around on the bare floor, because there’s been no effort to build a castle here.  (At a couple of points, they unroll a carpet; no points for that.)

They did build a jail, to hide Amelia.  Couple hours before the show, they cobbled together some metal rods, making a small cage, and called it a day. No, wait! They also put wheels on the bottom, so they could roll Amelia’s little jail around while she sings desperately. It looks ridiculous.

So, it doesn’t look like a castle, and that thing doesn’t look like a jail, and the entire cast doesn’t look as if they particularly care. They don’t move much; for many minutes they are merely waiting for the queen, or looking at Amelia as she rolls by in her cage. Plus, QE1 is supposed to be aiming for some alone time with Robert, the husband, but I didn’t see her trying for anything.

So, Donna del Lago. Good work with that, Andrea Tottola, but now please consider a career in software documentation, or legal proofreading.

I think they are singing well enough. Amelia appeared to be missing all the opportunities to articulate her complicated staccato runs, though she really has a sweet-sounding voice, so okay.

What about the music? This one starts right off with a lengthy tenor solo, and the chorus comes along with some hot “rebounds” already in Act 1. But I couldn’t compare this Donizetti with the others, maybe because I was so eager for something to happen to the story. A singing snake-oil salesman with Bitcoin, maybe, or an army regiment that has adopted a girl as their mutual wife.

It's possible that some evening when I’m eager for some inaction, I’ll pull Castello up again, and push through to the end. More likely, if I can find a different production, with an actual castello there at Kenilworth, I’ll see what happens there.  (Or I could watch Daniel Auber’s version, from six years earlier.) But Medici.tv is about to release Le Convenienze Teatrali, about which I know nothing, and that seems a better gamble. 

Rosmonda d’Inghilterra - 1834

Here it is! This is the one we’re looking for!

Rosmonda is an astonishing, high-tension opera, with heady, adrenaline-pumping music from start to finish.  Why isn’t this one up there with Otello and Norma and Lucia? I truly cannot tell why not. If they staged Rosmonda in New York or Chicago or San Fran, it would be a solid hit, no doubt.

Straight away under the rising curtain, we have the poor unknown woman set upon by the king, and held in the catacombs for their trysts.  The king’s top advisor says no, this is immoral, and whoever that girl is, she must suffer. Wait for it -- it’s his beloved daughter! The king is plundering her on the side, eager for Rose to be his new queen, but the current wife has a few things to say about that, not backing down.

Yes, this is hot stuff, and all of them – the king, the poor daughter Rosmonda, her flustered dad, the queen, and the queen’s pants role assistant Arturo – deliver Donizetti’s anguished solos and duets and more, to express their grief, or frustration, or determination, as they try to get themselves out of this messy hornet’s nest. Big music for Jessica Pratt (Rosmonda) and Raffaella Lupinacci (Arturo) here, and these singers are amazing to listen to.

There just aren’t any slow scenes here, because this one is moving fast from start to finish. It helps to know that this is largely a true story, and you can read about King Henry II, his lead knight Clifford, and the jilted but confident Queen Eleonora. (Clifford’s castle is still there, in ruins, 900 years later.) “The Fair Rosamund” and her unhappy fate is the topic of many books and stories, a few stage plays, a movie, and at least 4 other operas.

These stories probably don’t ALL suggest that Rosmonda, whose father works closely with the King of England, cannot recognize her popular king by the age of 20, or that the king has no idea who this young woman is. The Bergamo makeup people have absolutely everyone sporting very dark greasepaint across the brow/eye/cheekbone areas, but even so, Rosmonda and the king aren’t hiding their identities that way.  (The queen knows her so well that she has Arturo tracked for romance and marriage, so I suppose she can see through the makeup easily enough. Wait – the queen wants her pageboy Arturo to go marry a basement captive? Rather a lot of poetic license, I think.)

They could plausibly gloss over the notion that Rosmonda is not curious about why her new boyfriend keeps her hidden under the castle – something girls might think of reporting to their mom or dad – but who knows how social customs worked in the 12th century.

Still, this is a terrific story, with top-grade music from our guy Donizetti (more emotional and far less comical than most of his other work) and there’s no obvious explanation for why it isn’t performed more frequently. One possibility is that the score was lost for more than a century, and I would like to know more about how it was “discovered in a library by a musicologist”, because that is an extraordinary discovery. It’s only been available since the 1970’s, so maybe with time, this one will catch on, and I hope so.

My other theory about Rosamonda’s lack of popularity is the simple fact that Donizetti and his writer Romani seem to have goofed on the ending – it just drops off uncelebrated, leaving me needing a solid, final completion scene and resolving chorus. The Bergamo audience that I saw on video might also have been confused – the dagger plunges, the townspeople gasp, and the lights go black – and then there’s a few seconds of silent expectation before they decide that it’s done -- time to applaud the finish, we presume, and go straight to the curtain calls. I wanted more.

The engaging and hugely touching story, I would think, could carry this near-perfect opera on their own, to fame and fortune, but on the other hand, I suppose if the ending leaves you looking back over your shoulder as you head for the lobby, hoping for a genuine final scene, that alone could mute your desire to see Rosmonda again. Perfection, except for the last 5 seconds. (And fully puzzling, if you look at the list of extraordinarily popular operas Romani wrote (and finished) for Donizetti, Bellini -- most of his big successes -- and even Rossini.)

Maybe a small re-write, just the final scene, would bring Rosmonda to the big stages again; for me, it has everything else it needs.

Marino Faliero - 1835

So close! Marino Faliero was almost a timeless masterpiece, almost an Otello or a Nabucco. This one has nearly everything a tragic opera needs for enduring fame, but Faliero is gone and mostly forgotten. This time, we blame the librettist.

Faliero really was the Doge of Venice in the 1300’s, and the sad story was used by playwrights, novelists, and painters, along with Donizetti and Giovanni Bidera who came up with the opera. You’ve go the right elements, then: the doge and his special hat, the secret conspiracy against the ruling council, the duplicitous wife with her secret affair, the swordfights and the execution block. This story is ready and waiting for an opera.

Donizetti did his job – the music is fabulous and varied. In fact, it sounds a lot like Verdi to me.  (Verdi showed up with his first opera just a few years later, so the connection makes sense.) He’s got the baritones and the basses, solo and duet; the tenor and the soprano have their star moments too. Good so far.

The trouble is, the storytelling is really poor. Sure, the first scene starts hot, with an overbearing political honcho and grumbling in the ranks, and next we see the tenor sadly leaving his lover forever.

But why? One scene with the big guy yelling at the workers doesn’t justify a revolution, so it doesn’t make sense when the doge joins in to whip up a treasonous uprising, putting his life and his marriage on the line. And I never found out why Fernando the tenor was going to leave Elena, even though there’s a major breakup scene here.

Then Faliero the Doge has some real problems with Irene, but then it turns out, Irene is not his wife; Elena is. So I guess Fernando really should leave Elena, but the details are a mystery.

Remember those clever productions where they use the overture to show you some background information – the leadup, the backstory, the history? This opera needs something like that, because you cannot tell from this libretto why everyone is doing what they are doing.

Act 2 has the revolt very much afoot, and it is time for the doge to take action, to draw swords against the despicable Steno, and the tension builds.  But they just stand and sing about it, even after Steno walks in, threateningly. Then everyone goes home.

But not before Fernando also walks in and challenges Steno to a personal duel.  Is that going to resolve the people’s revolution? I don’t think so, but this is a story where everyone puts off the important political revolt for a few hours so these two can duke it out in the churchyard.

This is really frustrating, because you need a different source to learn what’s going on with all these angry people, all these sad lovers. Or, you could skip the story and the acting altogether, and watch the sunset while you listen to Donizetti’s lively score.

The ending is classic tragedy. Someone has tipped off the king, so the revolution fails, and heads will roll. But who blew their cover?  Oh, no! It was bad wife Elena and her side-squeeze Fernando. Tragedy, remorse, forgiveness, and death, and this is so good that we wish the composer had teamed up with somebody else, some writer better equipped to tell us the story. This thing needs a re-write.

So a few stagings in the 1800’s, and then Faliero is history, and little else. Always committed to the legacy, the Donizetti Festival put it on in ’08, so we have that recording (CueTV.online). And that’s unfortunate, too, because here, the staging isn’t much good, my opinion. After Scene 1, wonderfully showing the details of the in the shipyard, they keep setting up nearly empty rooms where two or three people stand and sing.  On and on, again and again.

The excellent music and the emotion of tragedy are not quite enough for a lengthy scene in opera. The characters have to be moving, or the background work has to clarify the context. If you have them standing motionless and singing for long enough, it kills the action of the story. At Bergamo, it happens again and again. It’s 2024, so time to try again? Put someone else in the director’s chair, maybe. And figure out a way to tell us all, in advance, why everyone is so upset.

A different cast, too, if I get my way. Oh, boy, this Fernando looks pretty dashing, nice hair and all, but there’s a nasal sound, like a dishwasher or a dumptruck at work, that makes it hard to listen to him for very long. There he is in Scene 2, and you hope he goes away pretty soon, but the problem is, Elena walks on, and she sounds even worse. Low notes, okay; stick with the mezzo work. The high register: please stop with the screeching, the “bird of prey making the kill” soundtrack.

Let’s go check and see what has become of these two singers’ careers, after 16 years. Portrait models, maybe.

Hang in there, Gaetano. You picked the wrong librettist. (Bidera also wrote Gema di Vergy for Donizetti, and that one did only a little better than Faliero: two different productions during the 20th century, hooray!) But I like Marino the rebel doge of Venice and his sad story. Maybe I’ll give it a shot.

Pia de’ Tolomei - 1837

The question is going to be, how can Donizetti offer us these two confusing operas (Marino Faliero and Pia) just a few years apart, with the completely transparent Lucia di Lammermoor right in between?

After Faliero, the composer gave Bidera the boot, and teamed up with Salvadore Cammarano, which worked so well with Lucia that they stuck together for ten years, and six more operas. (It worked: Cammarano wrote Roberto Devereux, Poliuto, and L'assedio di Calais, among others. These two were obviously having great fun with human tragedy.)

Of course it could be a physical problem with my addled brain, but once again, I sat through the first few scenes wishing I had read a lot more about this story before diving into the opera. I’m here busily taking notes:

• Why is Ubaldo giving this letter to Ghino, and insisting that he not show it to Pia, to whom the letter is addressed? 

• Why do they sing about “the messenger” with the letter, since he never appears, and if that’s not actually Ubaldo, then who is the messenger? 

• How did Pia get her hands on the forbidden letter so quickly after that?

• Pia’s brother is out in the forest (why?) and Nello wants to kill him (so, do it!).

• Who exactly is there in the dungeon? Why is he or she in jail?

On it goes, but with some research, you can make sense out of this. For the Venice opening, they should have printed a long background statement in the program, because this Pia was never a very popular opera. (Then again, they had a lot of other problems back then, what with delays due to cholera, and the second burning of the main theater in Venice.)

Pia de' Tolomei might have been a real woman in Siena in the 1200’s, but there is more information in the legend than in documented history. The key characteristic of this person was that she was murdered by her husband, and that sad tale is now the subject of novels, poems, paintings, traditional operas, modern movies, and a rock opera, according to the Wikipedia list, which I have not verified.

In Donizetti’s (and Cammarano’s) hands, Pia’s husband and brother are on opposite sides of a war (it’s the Guelphs and the Ghibellines again), but, as always, there’s no explanation of how she married an enemy.

(Norma, William Tell, Lucia, all the Romeo & Juliet stories, I Puritani, Il Pirata, Aida. Meeting, befriending, and falling in love with someone in the opposing camp, a camp that all your friends are trying to obliterate.  Special challenges to the dating scene, but okay; I guess that could happen.)

Anyway, the brother sends Pia a letter suggesting a meeting, but the letter is intercepted and misinterpreted, so now everyone is in trouble. That’s the story, in a nutshell. Pia doesn’t make it, but she promises her brutish nemesis that “my ghost will haunt you!”, so he has to live with that tiny vengeance.

And finally, more words of wisdom: “It is far better to die than to endure a life of misery,” and I suppose we can debate that, as we have been debating it since I posted in 1976 the cryptic “A short sad life is better than a long sad life.” Or maybe since 1775 when Patrick Henry gave New Hampshire its depressing motto.

Coherence or mishmash, you still get a great series of songs, duets, and even two “soldier’s choruses”, which always pull an opera across the line for me.

The stars are the soprano, Pia, and the contralto who wears the pants for her brother Rodrigo. It’s one more Donizetti from CueTV.online, and this one (Venice, 2005) gives you Patrizia Ciofi and Laura Polverelli handling the main roles with precision. Some of these solos and duets sound more challenging than anything in Faliero or even Lucia, and they are great fun to hear, from these two women.

So with Pia de’ Tolomei, it’s not so obvious why this opera dropped off the stage for 100 years, because that’s a solid piece of history (or mythology) for you, and the music does the job for sure. The fact that I cannot easily trace the storyline does not make it unique in the least, and certainly does not preclude fame and popularity for an opera. I plan to hear more of what Donezetti did in the 1830’s, and see if I can put it all together.