When Donizetti began his career in 1818, Italian opera was wholly dominated  by Rossini, whose formal florid style all composers were bound to imitate.  This course will show how Donizetti, under the pervasive influence of his beloved teacher Simon Mayr, found his distinctive, mature voice.   More craftsman than innovator, Donizetti grew slowly but surely to become himself the dominant operatic force of his generation. Indeed by 1835, fifteen of his operas had been mounted at Italy's foremost opera house, La Scala of Milan.

This chronological study begins with representative examples from his first 30 or so works, both serious and comic, produced in the first 10 years of his career between 1818 and 1828, mainly for Naples and other cities in the south.  While the early serious works show little trace of individuality, such early comic works as L'ajo nell'imbarazzo (1824) and Alina (1828) reveal the true Donizetti. Indeed in the field of comic opera, he wrote from the start with ebullience, freshness, and tongue-in-cheek sentimentality, qualities epitomized eventually in L'elisir d'amore (1832), the perfection of sentimental comedy in a pastoral setting.

The course will then show how after 1828 Donizetti's mature style began to take shape in works like L'esule di Roma (1828) and Elisabetta al castello di Kenilworth (1829) under the influence partly of Bellini's Il pirata (1827) and partly of Rossini's monumental French operas. Finally Donizetti came into his own as a composer of tragedies, as the course will illustrate with the great works which cap this formative period: Anna Bolena (1830), Donizetti's first major success, using for the first time traditional conventions in service of a powerful, swift drama;  Lucrezia Borgia (1833), a further modification of convention to explore the vein of sensational melodrama;  Marino Faliero (1835), a striking anticipation of Verdi, produced in Paris in direct competition with Bellini's I Puritani ; and Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), generally considered the archetype of Italian Romantic opera.

A chronological, in-depth examination of the great twenty or so works following Lucia di Lammermore in which Donizetti's style was further enriched as a result of his commissions for Paris and Vienna and the need to cater to audiences more sophisticated than those of Naples or Milan.  In Europe, this musical era became "The Age of Donizetti."

Join Opera con Brio for this year-long, in-depth study of the life and works of this quintessentially romantic composer.