Gaetano Donizetti

Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti (29 November 1797 – 8 April 1848) was an Italian composer, best known for his almost 70 operas.

Along with Gioachino Rossini and Vincenzo Bellini, he was a leading composer of the bel canto opera style during the first half of the nineteenth century and a probable influence on other composers such as Giuseppe Verdi.

Donizetti was born in Bergamo in Lombardy.

At an early age he was taken up by Simon Mayr who enrolled him with a full scholarship in a school which he had set up.

There he received detailed musical training.

Mayr was instrumental in obtaining a place for Donizetti at the Bologna Academy, where, at the age of 19, he wrote his first one-act opera, the comedy Il Pigmalione, which may never have been performed during his lifetime.

The youngest of three sons, Donizetti was born in 1797 in Bergamo's Borgo Canale quarter, located just outside the city walls.

His family was very poor and had no tradition of music, his father Andrea being the caretaker of the town pawnshop.

Simone Mayr, a German composer of internationally successful operas, had become maestro di cappella at Bergamo's principal church in 1802.

He founded the Lezioni Caritatevoli school in Bergamo (now the Conservatorio Gaetano Donizetti) in 1805 for the purpose of providing musical training, including classes in literature, beyond what choirboys ordinarily received up until the time that their voices broke.

In 1807, Andrea Donizetti attempted to enroll both his sons, but the elder, Giuseppe (then 18), was considered too old.

Gaetano (then 9) was accepted.

While not especially successful as a choirboy during the first three trial months of 1807 (there being some concern about a difetto di gola, a throat defect), Mayr was soon reporting that Gaetano "surpasses all the others in musical progress" and he was able to persuade the authorities that the young boy's talents were worthy of keeping him in the school.

However, as Donizetti scholar William Ashbrook notes, in 1809 he was threatened with having to leave because his voice was changing.

In 1810 he applied for and was accepted by the local art school, the Academia Carrara, but it is not known whether he attended classes.

Then, in 1811, Mayr once again intervened.

Having written both libretto and music for a "pasticcio-farsa", Il piccolo compositore di musica, as the final concert of the academic year, Mayr cast five young students, among them his young pupil Donizetti as "the little composer".

As Ashbrook states, this "was nothing less than Mayr's argument that Donizetti be allowed to continue his musical studies".

The piece was performed on 13 September 1811 and included the composer character stating the following:

"Ah, by Bacchus, with this aria / I'll have universal applause. / They'll say to me, "Bravo, Maestro!

/ I, with a sufficiently modest air, / Will go around with my head bent... / I'll have eulogies in the newspaper / I know how to make myself immortal."

In reply to the chiding which comes from the other four characters in the piece after the "little composer" 's boasts, in the drama the "composer" responds with:

"I have a vast mind, swift talent, ready fantasy—and I'm a thunderbolt at composing."

The performance also included a waltz which Donizetti played and for which he received credit in the libretto.

He remained there for nine years, until 1815.

An offer in 1822 from Domenico Barbaja, the impresario of the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, which followed the composer's ninth opera, led to his move to Naples and his residency there until production of Caterina Cornaro in January 1844.

In all, 51 of Donizetti's operas were presented in Naples.

His first notable success came with an opera seria, Zoraida di Granata, which was presented in 1822 in Rome.

Before 1830, success came primarily with his comic operas, the serious ones failing to attract significant audiences.

In 1830, when Anna Bolena was first performed, Donizetti made a major impact on the Italian and international opera scene shifting the balance of success away from primarily comedic operas, although even after that date, his best-known works included comedies such as L'elisir d'amore (1832) and Don Pasquale (1843).

Significant historical dramas did succeed; they included Lucia di Lammermoor (the first to have a libretto written by Salvadore Cammarano) given in Naples in 1835, and one of the most successful Neapolitan operas, Roberto Devereux in 1837.

Up to that point, all of his operas had been set to Italian libretti.

Donizetti found himself increasingly chafing against the censorship limitations in Italy (and especially in Naples).

From about 1836, he became interested in working in Paris, where he saw greater freedom to choose subject matter, in addition to receiving larger fees and greater prestige.

From 1838, beginning with an offer from the Paris Opéra for two new works, he spent much of the following 10 years in that city, and set several operas to French texts as well as overseeing staging of his Italian works.

The first opera was a French version of the then-unperformed Poliuto which, in April 1840, was revised to become Les martyrs.

Two new operas were also given in Paris at that time.

Throughout the 1840s Donizetti moved between Naples, Rome, Paris, and Vienna, continuing to compose and stage his own operas as well as those of other composers.

From around 1843, severe illness began to limit his activities.

By early 1846 he was obliged to be confined to an institution for the mentally ill and, by late 1847, friends had him moved back to Bergamo, where he died in April 1848 in a state of mental derangement due to neurosyphilis.