In the opening half of the nineteenth century, Gaetano Donizetti ranked among the principal architects of bel canto opera, writing both in Italian and in French. More than sixty operas issued from his hand, many of which remain embedded in the active repertory and still test singers through their rigorous musical and technical requirements. Stylistically situated between Rossini and Verdi, Donizetti routinely extended his scenes beyond the proportions favored by Rossini, yet he stopped short of dissolving the boundary between closed numbers and recitative, the step Verdi would later take in his middle and final works. Although critics often set him beside his contemporary Bellini, Donizetti cultivated a wider spectrum of operatic types and displayed greater adaptability of manner, even while falling short of the unalloyed melodic radiance that marks Bellini’s finest scores.
Born in Bergamo, Italy, Donizetti pursued his studies in that city with the opera composer Simon Mayr between 1806 and 1814. Among his early efforts are chamber operas, sacred compositions, and assorted chamber music. The first work to attract attention was La Zingara, staged in Naples in 1822. Through the remainder of the 1820s and into the 1830s he stayed active in Naples, functioning simultaneously as conductor and composer. International renown arrived in 1830 with Anna Bolena, whose expressive score and broadened scenes secured his place among the leading opera composers of the day. The comic L’elisir d’amore followed in 1832 and the tragic Lucrezia Borgia in 1833. Maria Stuarda came next, succeeded the same year by Lucia di Lammermoor, which quickly attained the status of an internationally celebrated masterpiece. Roberto Devereux, an Elizabethan tragedy of 1837, completed the trilogy tracing the English court from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I.
Operas written in the late 1830s did not equal the success of Lucia, and repeated clashes with royal censors added to his difficulties. After being overlooked for the directorship of the Naples Conservatory in 1840, he settled in Paris. There he produced the opéra comique La fille du Régiment, immediately admired for its charm and brilliance, and later the same year completed La favorite, another substantial addition to the French repertory. In 1842 he received the post of kapellmeister at the Austrian court in Vienna, yet he preserved his Parisian connections, moving repeatedly among the two capitals and Italy.
Among his final operas stand Maria di Rohan, an important historic opera, and the French tragedy Dom Sébastian, both dating from 1843. Caterina Cornaro, also from 1843, likewise counts among his strongest achievements on account of its intense dramatic force. Although seldom revived, these late works are serious creations that established benchmarks for Verdi. At the same period the consequences of the syphilis Donizetti had contracted in the late 1820s began to undermine his health in earnest. Early in 1846 he was placed in an institution outside Paris, only to be released to friends who brought him back to Bergamo in the autumn of 1847. He died in April 1848; although first interred in the Bergamo cemetery, his remains were later transferred, together with those of his teacher Mayr, to the Santa Maria Maggiore Cathedral.
