Baltimore Opera Company

Study Guide

Maria Stuarda

Italian Operas with English Themes

The rise in literacy in the late eighteenth century had what may now seem an unexpected consequence. Literary genres such as the novel (the French roman that lent its name to the nineteenth century—the Romantic age), short story, poem, and play broadened the scope of subjects from which librettists could choose. Hence, audiences composed of avid readers eagerly purchased tickets to see their favorite literary works adapted for the operatic stage. Italian audiences were no exception, so librettists who furnished texts for Gioachino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, Giuseppe Verdi and their contemporaries dutifully obliged. One of the countries whose literature was routinely plumbed was England, its dark brooding castles (along with those of neighboring Scotland) and tragic monarchs entertaining Italian audiences for more than half a century.

By the 1800s, Shakespeare was being published in Italy. Few could read the plays accurately in the original, so most Italians learned the Bard’s works through translations. Perhaps the most famous operas based on Shakespeare came from Verdi’s pen. His settings of Macbeth, Otello, and Falstaff (the libretto a compilation of references from The Merry Wives of Windsor and the Henry plays) are still considered worthy musical replicas. On the other hand, Rossini’s Otello had been traditionally lambasted because it veered so radically from the original; indeed, Byron himself commented that “They have been crucifying Othello” when he wrote of Rossini’s work. Scholars in the 1980s were able to absolve Rossini, however, when they discovered that his libretto was absolutely faithful to a French theatrical adaptation of Othello only peripherally referring to Shakespeare’s tragedy.

Giovanni Pacini, a composer once more popular than Bellini and Donizetti, wrote an opera partially based on Henry V entitled La Gioventù di Enrico V; some years later, Saverio Mercadante set a different libretto with the same title to create yet another handling of that subject. For his part, Bellini musically told a version of Romeo and Juliet in I Capuleti e I Montecchi. Mercadante also tackled Hamlet (Amleto); later in the century, Arrigo Boito, Verdi’s librettist for Otello and Falstaff, crafted another Amleto which composer Franco Faccio set to music. Verdi might have contributed a fourth Shakespearean opera had he followed through on his desire to work on King Lear (Re Lear), but he often confessed that he abandoned the project because he found the main character too terrifying.

Many operas celebrated Britain’s most dramatic monarchs and their courtiers. Donizetti stretched as far back as ninth-century Britain in Alfredo il Grande, an opera about the first great Saxon king, Alfred the Great. He later set Elizabeth I in no less than three works: Il Castello di Kenilworth, Maria Stuarda (also featuring Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots), and Roberto Devereux. The same composer characterized Henry II (Enrico II), Eleanor of Aquitaine (Leonora), and Henry’s mistress Rosamond Clifford in Rosmonda d’Inghilterra, and Edward III and Queen Isabella in lesser roles in L’Assedio di Calais. Rossini depicted Elizabeth I in Elisabetta, Regina d’Inghilterra, its libretto coming from the novel The Recess, or A Tale of Other Times by Sophia Lee; his La Donna del Lago features Giacomo (James V of Scotland). Arturo, the hero of Bellini’s I Puritani (based on the conflict between England’s Roundheads and Royalists), drives his beloved mad when he runs away to save Charles I’s widow, Queen Henrietta (Enrichetta). Indeed, England’s queens seem to have created great operatic subjects. Mercadante romanticized Mary Stuart in Maria Stuarda, Regina d’Inghilterra, while Pacini characterized “Bloody” Mary Tudor in Maria, Regina d’Inghilterra. Henry VI’s Queen Consort, Margaret of Anjou, was the subject of Pacini’s Margherita, Regina d’Inghilterra.

Brooding Romantic works inspired other great Italian operas. The dark play Bertram became the model for Bellini’s first professional success, Il Pirata. Walter Scott’s writing also was popular on Italy’s operatic stages. Rossini rendered into recitative and aria the tale told in a section of the narrative poem “The Lady of the Lake” in La Donna del Lago, and Pacini gave musical life to Scott’s knight in Ivanhoe. Perhaps the most famous Scott adaptation of all is Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, based on the novel The Bride of Lammermoor.

Other nineteenth-century Italian operas merely had English settings, such as Rossini’s La Cambiale di Matrimonio, which tales place in a village with inhabitants called Fanny, Toby, and a Canadian named Slook. Donizetti chose Liverpool as the setting for the semi-seria work Emilia di Liverpool. Whether Italian audiences knew England well or not at all, and whether they read these works in the original or in translation, they clearly were intrigued by the “English” plots and the characters that routinely trod the boards of their musical stages.

Denise Gallo

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