Lyric Opera 2023-2024 Issue 3 - Daughter of the Regiment

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 24 cultivated audience for opera, and a music press that offered dozens of informed reviews of new work. If composers or performers could make it there, it was generally held, they could make it anywhere. Donizetti had been angling for a Parisian commission from the mid 1830s. Though he remained a restless composer who, in the words of an admirer, “writes like a steam-engine and lives half his life in a coach,” the city remained his main operating base until his death in 1848. Donizetti’s careerist calculation came off. His 1840 apotheosis elevated him to the status of Parisian celebrity; he was recognized in the street and received endless invitations from fashionable society. Among other successes, Lucrezia Borgia and his nal triumph, Don Pasquale , followed. In time, he came to tire of “the courtesies, the dinners, the portraits, the plaster busts” of polite society, but the world he inhabited was altogether more salubrious than the drafty garrets of Puccini’s La Bohème . Moreover, after the peevish censorship that his work had incurred in conservative Naples, he also found the air of intellectual freedom for which Paris was famed refreshing and invigorating. Donizetti soon recovered from any hurt he felt from the initial criticisms of The Daughter of the Regiment . He took heart from the fact that virtually all his reviewers, critical or otherwise, acknowledged that the opera lay outside the Italian protocols that had dominated Donizetti’s music thus far and was clearly recognizable as a genuine comic opera in the French style. That had been his aim—to make of the work, as one of his kinder reviewers noted, a successful application for French naturalization. Donizetti chose as principals two young French singers at early stages in what would prove illustrious careers. Juliette Bourgeois (who had changed her name to Borghese while touring in Italy) played Marie, while the tenor Marié played Tonio, her Italian suitor. The choice proved only half-successful. Reviews were loud in praise of Borghese’s looks, voice, and acting, but united in panning Marié, who was said to have sung off- key all night. (It is interesting, if excruciating, to imagine quite how he mangled the eight high Cs in the “Ah! mes amis, quel jour de fête” aria for which the part has become famous.) Donizetti’s strategizing over other aspects of the production was more effective. He employed two very experienced and highly rated librettists based in Paris, with an ear for changing public moods. They delivered him a risk-averse piece: a classic Romantic love affair, complete with Italianate color and the mandatory happy ending. Admittedly, The Daughter of the Regiment ’s plot was lightweight and predictable. At the rst night, the coup de théâtre by which Marie was revealed to be the daughter of the aristocratic villain of the piece was greeted by a heckler proclaiming,”That was obvious!” But as Donizetti’s librettists knew, comic opera never lets predictability get in the way. Donizetti also played to his audience’s prejudices by orienting the opera’s plot around past French military glories associated with the expansion of France in northern Italy under Napoleon’s First Empire (1804–15). This was all the more pertinent in that patriotism was very much in the air at that moment. An international crisis over Egypt in 1839-40 triggered a war scare that led the government to call up troops and fortify defenses around Paris. The Orleanist king Louis Philippe, set on the throne by the 1830 Revolution after the overthrow of the reactionary Bourbon dynasty, positioned himself as a liberal patriot, resisting conservative forces at home and abroad. The year 1840 also witnessed a aring up of pro-Napoleonic sentiment. Louis Philippe regarded Napoleon not as the creator of a rival dynasty but rather as a great French patriot and conqueror. The king sought to capitalize on the Napoleonic Legend that had grown up around the ex-Emperor since 1815 Lily Pons triumphed as Marie in the Met’s 1940/41 Season. Met Archives / Met Opera