Donizetti and His Operas

Lucia di Lammermoor. Of all of Donizetti's operas, none has more resolutely resisted changes of operatic fashion than this seria in three acts, first given at the San Carlo on 26 September 1835, six and a half months after the prima of Faliero at Paris. It used to be a cliché of criticism to claim that Lucia was a direct result of Donizetti's exposure to I puritani at the Théâtre-Italien, as though otherwise he would have been incapable of composing it; some of the more extreme belliniani even went so far as to swear that Lucia was written in homage to Bellini's memory, when in fact Bellini died just three days before the delayed prima of Donizetti's opera. The advantage of taking a closer look at all Donizetti's operatic scores in turn is that it affords the opportunity to determine how directly Lucia stems from his preceding work and how it extends tendencies already observable there. No man who worked as consistently as he did inside a number of theaters could be impervious to what his contemporaries were about, yet by 1835 his manner was so thoroughly formed, if not at its fullest development, that he absorbed outside influences into his own practise, which was, quite simply, the most wide-ranging and solid of any Italian operatic composer of his generation.

The resemblances between Lucia and I puritani, other than those unavoidably resulting from the conventions of the period, are superficial ones.