Professor of Music Emeritus at King’s College London Roger Parker explores how L’elisir d’amore challenges old stereotypes, and the keys to its lasting success.
Donizetti's L’elisir d’amore (The Elixir of Love) is part of our 2023 festival (performances 20 June - 1 July). Find out more and book online >
For the greater part of its history, serious Italian opera, opera seria, had been partnered by, and often lampooned by, its comic twin, opera buffa. Composers tended to write in both genres, although the former had the greater prestige, blessed with gala nights and glittering castrati (the castrated star singers of the opera world) to match the noble plights of its classical and mythological heroes. Meanwhile, however, the latter, with its seemingly ordinary protagonists, was just around the corner, making sure that the entire façade was not taken too seriously. It may well have been a sign of the Napoleonic and Restoration periods, ones of great political confusion in Italy, in which ‘regime changes’ occurred with alarming rapidity, that some new pendulum swings between the two seemed to take place.
An 18th-century example of commedia dell’arte
In the immediate aftermath of Napoleon, with Rossini in his heyday, comic opera came into a decisive ascendant. By 1824, Stendhal, Rossini’s great enthusiast, could write that, ‘Everyone in Italy agrees that serious opera is dull, and, what’s more, is a species of composition that requires the utmost perfection in performance. One serious opera in the year, at La Scala or the San Carlo, is found to be sufficient’. This was an exaggeration, but never before had the wild antics and violent reversals of comedy seemed so fitting to contemporary audiences, and so dominant in even the greatest theatres.
In the 1830s, however, with a new seriousness on the streets and with revolution once more in the news, this dominance rapidly disappeared. Composers began to specialise in one or the other genre (both Bellini and Verdi kept by and large to serious works), and although opere buffe continued to be composed, after 1840 they rarely had the cachet of opera seria. The repertoire at La Scala, Milan’s (and, by extension, modern Italy’s) greatest theatre bears this out. Until around 1830, comic operas hugely outnumbered serious ones: even though an opera seria always inaugurated the new carnival season (the most prestigious event of the year), elsewhere they were few and far between. But from then into the 1840s and beyond, the number of comic works drastically declined: in 1842 only two opere buffe were staged at La Scala in the entire year, and both were elderly classics – Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia (1816) and Donizetti’s Le convenienze ed inconvenienze teatrali (1827). Partly as a result of this fall in esteem, comic opera became, in some hands, stylistically stagnant – as late as the 1850s, new works in the genre might still repeat the old Rossinian clichés, crescendos and all.
Gaetano Donizetti
Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848) was the last major Italian composer to ignore this trend. He continued throughout his career to write comic operas as readily as serious ones, and excelled in both genres even at the end of his career, when such versatility went against prevailing fashion. Part of the reason he did so was because, in his hands, comic opera mutated, becoming more consistently coloured by a more sincere, sentimental vein – a tone that had emerged in previous comic opera only occasionally. This new atmosphere is present in some of his comedies from the 1820s, even though these works inevitably owe a large debt to the Rossinian style, but it decisively emerges in L’elisir d’amore. The opera was written for Milan’s second theatre, the Teatro alla Canobbiana, in 1832, but from these relatively humble beginnings was immediately recognized as an exciting new kind of comedy, worthy to stand alongside Rossini’s great works.
It is from the opening scenes evident that, even at the libretto level, this is an opera that will challenge old stereotypes. We might well, at first sight, see the roster of characters as having origins in the old commedia dell’arte traditions: the central love interests are Nemorino (Harlequin) and Adina (Colombina), their love assisted/obstructed by stock types such as the swaggering Belcore (the Capitano) and the chattering Dulcamara (the Dottore). But embedded within this is a crucial gender reversal: Nemorino is described in the libretto as a ‘coltivatore, giovane semplice, innamorato d’Adina’ (farmer, a simple young man, in love with Adina); not of the highest station, then, and defined by his simplicity and his governing emotion. Adina, on the other hand, is a ‘ricca e capricciosa fittajuola’ (a rich and capricious tenantfarmer), certainly further up the social and financial scale, with intellectual habits to match and – in the term of a later generation – ‘flighty’. The crux of the plot says it all: in the opening scene Adina reads (avidly, dreamily) distant romances about Tristan and Isolde’s love potion; and then, a little later, Nemorino is credulous enough to be duped into spending serious money on a love potion that he believes is ‘the real thing’.
Title page of the libretto published by Ricordi
In this context, with old certainties suddenly called into doubt, it is surely no accident that one of the numbers Donizetti added to the old French libretto on which L’elisir is based was a heartfelt ‘romance’ for Nemorino, and that this number became the most famous in the entire opera. Nemorino’s ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ seems to encapsulate the new kind of sentimental force, a force that the composer knew was the key to opera buffa’s survival in a more serious, actionladen world. It also cannily exploits a new kind of male voice then emerging: that of the romantic tenor. Nemorino was created by a young singer called Giambattista Genero, about whom little is known, but it’s clear that his famous aria is suited to the more robust, ‘manly’ tenors then emerging. Superseding the castrato, this new, virile breed of romantic hero pushed the natural voice further up the scale (without the use of falsetto) and became the darling of the new, ‘revolutionary’ opera that was taking hold.
Placed at the height of the action, a still point of calm in this hectic opera, ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ holds within it the key to L’elisir d’amore’s lasting success: while Adina’s idea of romance is fanciful, gleaned from a book, Nemorino’s is real, passionate, and immediately communicative. By the end of the opera, with Adina’s beautiful final aria, ‘Prendi, per me sei libero’ (‘Take it, for I have set you free’ in Amanda Holden’s translation), echoing the heartfelt emotion of ‘Una furtiva lagrima’, we know that sincerity has won the day; and that, in the process, a new kind of opera buffa has been born.
Roger Parker is Professor of Music Emeritus at King’s College London, having previously taught at Cornell, Oxford and Cambridge. He is General Editor (with Gabriele Dotto) of the Donizetti critical edition, published by Ricordi. His most recent book is A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years (Penguin, revised ed. 2015), written jointly with Carolyn Abbate.
