Donizetti wrote more than 70 works over a 30-year career, eight of them in three year period, composed one of his finest in 11 days and a second in six weeks, covered the range from hilarious comedy to great historical tragedy. For audiences today, by far the best known is Lucia di Lammermoor, his 46th.
The libretto, by Salvadore Cammarano, is here in full.
What’s the plot?
Sir Walter Scott wrote ‘The Bride of Lammermoor', a gothic horror story apparently inspired by a real-life scandal. Lucy Ashton, forced into an arranged marriage, had stabbed her bridegroom on their wedding night. (Scott's novel has a more complicated and arguably better plot than the opera, but Donizetti left out Lucy’s scheming mother, making it more female-friendly!) The setting of the opera is unredeemedly dark patriarchy.
The plot? Here’s a very full on summary. Or more briskly you can view it in a few minutes here.
Playing it straight
Lucia is the “Everest” for bel canto sopranos. And the opera has launched many sopranos. Melba and Callas loved it, Joan Sutherland made it hers. We’ll watch parts of the famous performance by Joan Sutherland at the Met in 1982. (Interested in how a singer's portrayal changes? Here's her performance 10 years earlier.)
Following on, recently, are Natalie Desay and Diane Damrau. Currently, the leading production with traditional direction is from La Scala, with Lisette Oropesa in the title role, alongside Juan Diego Florez as Edgardo, “Maestro Riccardo Chailly approaching the masterpiece with reverence”: Review from Bachtrack here.
The powerless victim of patriarchy?
Recent productions have focused on the dark patriarchy as setting and the powerlessness of the young Lucia. And they have usually been approved by reviewers. Here’s a review of the ENO’s presentation in which Lucia is effectively a child victim of evil men. “Following the libretto though, Enrico has very little actual feelings for his sister and sees her merely as a tool, a means to secure a fortune through a prosperous marriage. God forbid, he would figure out how to make money himself when he has a woman at his disposal to sell.”
Could it – and should it - be produced differently? Sylvie Woods comments: “Alas, after two acts of our ill-fated protagonist being literally pushed over by her male relatives, to illustrate every depth of her humiliation, social exclusion, gaslighting, deception, intimidation and assault, I’m surer than ever that this narrative is lacking the lived experience of a female director.”
The most notorious recent production – with the most widely acknowledged current leading Lucia, did just that. ROH first played Katie Mitchell’s production in 2015, making Lucia mature and feisty, much more modern, rather than submissive, a “Lucia for our times”. Arts Desk Review comments “Damrau doesn’t do fragile.” Guardian review here.
You can watch a trailer here with Katie Michell and cast – and a longer, detailed exploration of the production here.
The production earned walkouts, protests and cancellations as well as mockery. But it returns in 2024 with Nadine Sierra in the title role.
The ROH didn't remain alone in the revisionist approach. Read here about the Hamburg production last year, in which the messages of feminism were loud. And the Met last year produced an updated Lucia, set in 21st century Rust Belt America, from Australian theatre and film director Simon Stone. No, it didn’t work well according to the reviews, but why it didn’t is an interesting issue. (You can see it when it comes to Australian screens later this year.)
There’s a careful consideration of issues of interpretation and the messages of the offer here – at the World Socialist Web Site! (First appearance on this blog for WSW!)
Recent feminist commentary about Lucia has moved to the music, and focussed on the “mad scene”, as an example of the character’s strength, resisting and defying the structure of the situation. It revisits each of the vocal and story highlights of the opera so far, and Lucia responds to each strongly. In this argument, the “Silencing of Lucia” in the plot can be seen as resisted in the mad scene, as she reenacts moments of power and love.
The Mad Scene
It’s the most famous of “mad scenes”, (alongside others by Donizetti) – and he knew from personal experience about the complexity of madness. “Because music penetrates deeper into the psyche than words alone, music melded to words in opera can convey a particularly powerful sense of mental derangement, with its minglings of pain and flights of fantasy, reality and delusions, horror and pathos.” (Another first for this blog – a reference from the NIH!) As the author argues, Lucia doesn’t ‘go mad’ in the final scene – the signs of delusion and hallucination are there from the first act.
Lucia’s ‘Mad Scene’ is the opera’s most famous moment, and directors’ biggest challenge. Listen to a few renditions.
Here's Sutherland in her Opera Australia 1986 performance (compare it with her swan song at the Met which we will watch.)And here's Natalie Dessay, in the Met, 2011.
And here's Lisette Oropresa in her much acclaimed La Scala performance this year. (The original score was used - no final cadenza duet with the flute!)
Most obviously, it’s not just one scene. Perhaps more than any bel canto work, it is a complex fabric of different themes and images – and very different vocal challenges in a massive marathon more than 20 mins long, as Lucia descends into madness.
Listen for recurrence of previous motifs - her Act I aria ‘Regnava nel silenzio’ and her duet with Edgardo ‘Verranno a te sull’aure’, that “poignantly make manifest her distracted mind.”
and about the final cadenza
The opera ends with a thrilling, chilling conversation of the soprano with the flute, for many the most brilliant moment. There’s a detailed piece on this cadenza here.
Lucia’s madness, this perfect madness, is the softest, the airiest of all breaths, yet also the iciest. A silvery flirtation between Lucia and a mysterious character only she can see, only she can hear. A white amusement in a white paradise. Lucia’s trills, her warbles and whistles emanate from her like a string of beads, exploding in the air like tiny flowers, followed by the plump, hollow notes of a solitary flute.
And here's a surprise - this triumphant moment in the opera wasn’t Donizetti’s! It was added later – after his death, probably 1889, for Nelly Melba's performances in Paris. It changed reception of the opera. “Once introduced, the cadenza with flute decisively altered the impact and reception of the mad scene. In the first two decades after the opera's 1835 première, the mad scene had not been particularly popular, perhaps because it contravened contemporary Italian taste for mad scenes featuring docile, virginal heroines. By the fin de siècle, however, the mad scene was regarded as the highlight of the opera, the excesses of the cadenza resonating with the new vogue for violent and hysterical heroines on the operatic stage.”
And it’s not just the flute. Listen to the sounds backing the mad scene and its changing moods. That chill, thrilling tiny sound of glass? The original scoring of this scene was for glass harmonica, but this is usually replaced by flutes. (Wondering about that glass harmonica? Here it is. More about it here.)
And it’s not just the mad scene of course.. this is an opera replete with the music that gave bel canto its name. Donizetti was a master at it - and it's not only for solos. Wait for the ultimate sextet - at the end of the first act. Described by one writer as “the greatest ensemble number in Italian opera”, the sextet that finishes the second act brings together the demands and the voices of the main players – in front of her brother and fated husband, Lucia signs the contracts of dower; “and at that moment, one of the most dramatic in opera, Edgar appears at the head of the broad flight of steps in the background, and slowly comes forward”. Edgardo: "Chi mi frena il tal momento? Chi troncò dell' ire il corso?" (What restrains me this moment? Why my sword do I not straightway draw?)"
This clip plays the sextet from the Bell Telephone Hour. As a commentator remarked, “Where else could you hear Tito Gobbi, Nicolai Gedda and Joan Sutherland singing together?”
Lucia di Lammermoor full opera?
You can watch the full opera on YouTube in SFOpera’s performance with Natalie Dessay:
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