Gaetano Donizetti

Gaetano Donizetti drew inspiration from the Tudor queens and their sad fates to compose three operas that are considered some of the best works of bel canto: Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda and Roberto Devereux. It is a great opportunity for a singer of Diana Damrau’s calibre who, like her colleague Beverly Sills has done in the past, uses the Italian composer’s sumptuous melodies to express the femininity and determination of these heroines who fell victim to either machismo or raison d'état.The final scenes presented in this album detail terrible demises, even though Donizetti and his librettists don’t strictly stick to historical truth. Poor Mary Stuart is beheaded by her cousin while Queen Elizabeth I and Anne Boleyn’s heads are chopped off by Henry VIII. Elizabeth is plunged into despair after the love of her life, Roberto, the Earl of Essex, is executed. Stricken with grief, she starts hallucinating and sees the crown of England bathed in blood and a man running around the palace wearing her own head. One hundred years after Donizetti, cinema has been able to explore these macabre situations even more vividly.Diana Damrau is particularly fond of Donizetti's characterisation of the three women. He gives them, she says, “the capacity to love, an enormous tenderness, an insatiable desire, vulnerability, a grandiose appearance, strength, conviction, vanity, pride, greed, ruthlessness, determination and harshness, a sense of responsibility and power, anger, rage, despair, helplessness, distress, sadness... and an underlying anxiety of death”. At the lectern we find Maestro Antonio Pappano, heading the Choir, Orchestra of the National Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome and six vocal soloists. He has chiselled away at the accompaniments, elevating the tragedy of these three heart-breaking fates. © François Hudry/Qobuz

Overwhelmed by commissions, Donizetti used his opera L'Ange de Nisida - which was abandoned after the Théâtre de la Renaissance in Paris went bankrupt in 1840 - as a source of inspiration. He drew large excerpts from it for his opera La Favorite. All that remained of the original work were scattered manuscripts that the musicologist Candida Mantica took eight years to piece together like a puzzle. The compositions were dispersed around several European libraries, especially in Paris, the United States and were again used in later works.The world premiere of this re-enactment took place in London on 18th July 2018 in a concert version intended to be published by Opera Rara (the main sponsor) conducted by Mark Elder (available on Qobuz).The work was still waiting for its stage premiere. This took place the following year at the Donizetti Festival in Bergamo, the composer’s birthplace, and was conducted by Francesco Micheli. We find the echoes of these performances under the skilled command of Jean-Luc Tingaud, with a non-French-speaking cast that has clearly been well-trained. Now it just needs to be brought to a stage in Paris where it’s been eagerly awaited since 1840... © François Hudry/Qobuz