Baltimore Opera Company

Study Guide

Maria Stuarda

The Regal Triptych – The Three Queens

In 2000, opera lovers were delighted by a boxed set of CDs featuring Beverly Sills’ interpretations of Gaetano Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda, and Elisabetta (in Roberto Devereux). Equally sought-after seven years later, these remastered recordings, reissued by Deutsche Grammophon under the title Donizetti: The Three Queens, document significant highlights from the career of one of America’s most important sopranos. In addition, they serve to demonstrate the dramatic talents of one of nineteenth-century Italy’s greatest composers, in particular, his ability to depict character through music.

Premiered in Milan on 26 December 1830, Anna Bolena was the opera that brought Donizetti international fame. Indeed, this score would later be extolled by the great Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini as an exemplar of national genius, a work “approaching epic poetry in music.” Anna, a role premiered by Giuditta Pasta, the dramatic soprano who one year later to the day would sing the first performance of Bellini’s Norma, is one of the primo Ottocento stage’s finest tragic heroines. Donizetti’s score carefully depicts her mounting dismay as her husband Enrico (Henry VIII) grows colder and her eventual mental instability as she falls prey to the political and romantic machinations at court.

The next queen in Sills’ repertory is Mary Stuart, history’s Mary Queen of Scots (not “Bloody” Mary Tudor, her cousin). Censorship woes prevented the premiere of Maria Stuarda in Naples and went on to cast a shadow over its opening in Milan in 1835. The resulting “sanitized” version may have been more politically palatable, but it was exceedingly less interesting. Once the original score was restored in the late twentieth century, sopranos were once again provided with the opportunity to interpret a woman who becomes a “victim-heroine,” as William Ashbrook has noted. Maria’s so-called “Execution Aria,” “Di un cor che more,” is surpassed in dignity and nobility only by her final cabaletta “Ah! Se un giorno da queste ritorte” in which she accepts death with pride rather than hatred for those who brought about her ruin.

Even though Roberto Devereux bears the name of Elizabeth’s courtier, the score is really a vehicle for the character of Sills’ third queen, Elizabeth I. In fact, its source, François Ancelot’s tragedy Élisabeth d’Angleterre (Elizabeth of England), demonstrates that the original focus was actually the female lead. This role’s best interpretation requires a soprano who can ably navigate Elizabeth from uncertainty to fury as she is tormented by thoughts of emotional and political betrayal. In the end, she is wracked by remorse and revenge. Premiered at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples during the autumn opera season of 1837, Roberto Devereux featured some of the finest singers of the day, including one of Donizetti’s favorite singers, Giuseppina Ronzi de Begnis, for whom the role of Elizabeth was fashioned. She, like Sills, interpreted all three of these powerful queens during her stage career.

When considering Donizetti’s queens, though, one cannot overlook two other characterizations of Elizabeth I. Just one year before Anna Bolena, Donizetti created a musical interpretation of the Virgin Queen in the opera seria Elisabetta al castello di Kenilworth. Because this work was performed in celebration of the birthday of Maria Isabella, Queen Consort of King Francesco I of Naples, it needed a happy ending that would underscore all of the idealized virtues of the nobility. Hence, even though the opera is interesting musically, this Elizabeth, delineated as a wise and generous ruler, is far less complex than those to follow. The second “Elizabeth,” of course, is Maria Stuarda’s rival for the throne and for the love of Leicester. Here is a more potent queen, but not yet the powerful force audiences would meet five years later in Roberto Devereux.

Because each Elizabeth faces a rival, Donizetti was able to capitalize on pairing female voices in relationships that enrich each score. Encounters between the two soprano roles of Elizabeth and Amelia broaden the dramatic palette in Elisabetta al castello di Kenilworth; similarly, the soprano lines of Maria Stuarda and Elisabetta musically underscore the conflict in the second work. It is in the Elizabeth of Roberto Devereux, however, that the composer created her most memorable incarnation, pitting her against her mezzo-soprano lady-in-waiting, Sara. One must not think that these portrayals are in any way Donizetti’s notion of the real development of the historical Elizabeth as a monarch; rather each role presents a unique character within the dramatic text of its libretto.

Any of these parts are choice repertory for today’s sopranos. No matter which role they are engaged to sing, though, they are required to bring to the stage both acting and vocal skills that are truly fit for a queen.

Denise Gallo


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