Lyric Opera 2019-2020 Issue 6 The Three Queens

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 29 Anna Bolena wasn’t the first success of Donizetti’s career, but it made his name throughout Europe as no other work had done prior to the premiere at Milan’s Teatro Carcano in 1830. Donizetti wasn’t always fortunate in his librettists, but he certainly was in this case with the vastly experienced, enormously respected Felice Romani. Nine years older than his composer colleague, Romani shaped any text with exquisite simplicity. In Anna Bolena he had a great tragic actress in Giuditta Pasta, who’d go on to create Norma for Vincenzo Bellini. This work uses all the conventional elements of bel canto opera – the cavatina (a slow, reflective aria) and the cabaletta (a livelier, showier aria immediately following the cavatina) – as well as large-scale duets, trios, and huge ensemble finales. At the same time, and especially in the superb final scene, Donizetti takes some very bold steps that help to make Anna Bolena , for its time, something of a musical trailblazer. The scene begins, predictably enough, with a quiet, legato chorus sung by Anne’s devoted ladies. What follows, however, is a huge surprise: an almost-mad scene in which the condemned Anne, awaiting execution, relives her wedding to Henry, but then imagines herself being forgiven by her first love, Richard Percy. Anne’s music here, much of it a cappella , wonderfully reveals her wandering thoughts and painful vulnerability. The emotions are extreme, with the soprano needing to respond line by line as would any great stage actress. Following this extended recitative is the loveliest, most touching moment of the entire opera: Anne’s cavatina beginning “Al dolce guidami al castel natio” (“Take me back to the pleasant Three extraordinary divas: (far left) Giuditta Pasta, pictured as Anne Boleyn, a role she created; (middle) Maria Malibran, who created the title role of Maria Stuarda ; (left) Giuseppina Ronzi di Begnis, the first Elizabeth I in Roberto Devereux . Gaetano Donizetti at the height of his career, painted by Giuseppe Rillosi. castle where I was born”), in which she’s overcome by nostalgia for her youth and her first days of love. Donizetti’s spellbinding legato communicates truly luminous sweetness, with the soprano tracing the lines as if sculpting the most delicate figurine. One of Donizetti’s supreme tests for the singer comes close to the end, when Donizetti asks her to ascend softly on a coruscatingly decorated phrase all the up to a floated high A. But there are more challenges for Anne ahead. First, when the men who love her appear – Percy, the court singer Smeton, and Anne’s brother Lord Rochford – she’s able to join her voice with theirs in a prayer for an end to her suffering. To insert a simple, heartfelt quartet at this point in the drama was a brilliant stroke by Donizetti, since it offers a welcome breather after such emotional stress and a calm before the final vocal fireworks. And when those fireworks come, it’s a real barrage, in the form of Anne’s mighty cabaletta, “Coppia iniqua” (“Wicked pair”). Here she proclaims that, rather than call down vengeance on Henry and his new bride, she’ll go to her grave ”with pardon on my lips.” Donizetti’s music asks his heroine to slash through sequences of electrifying trills and wild bursts of coloratura, while digging deeply and vehemently into the text. Even more than Anna Bolena , many liberties with history are taken in Maria Stuarda . For example, there was no romance between Mary and the Earl of Leicester at all, whereas this is an essential element of the opera. And Lord Cecil certainly wasn’t viciously intent on seeing Mary executed. The opera’s turning point is the in-person confrontation between Mary and Elizabeth (also a vital part of the Schiller play on which Maria Stuarda was based), but, in fact, it never took place, since the two never met! That confrontation is the source of the most famous anecdote associated with this opera. The story goes that, in a rehearsal for the Naples premiere, sopranos Giuseppina Ronzi di Begnis (Mary) and Anna Del Serre (Elizabeth) got into a knock-down, drag-out fight onstage, right after Mary vilified Elizabeth as a “vil bastarda” (“vile bastard”). Apparently the fracas started with Del Serre smacking Ronzi di Begnis in the face and the situation then worsened, with each lady