Donizetti Don Pasquale

soliści

BAC 033

Triumphant swan song of opera buffa • Gaetano Donizetti was a prolific opera composer, well versed in all styles of his genre. But there was one thing fortunately still missing: success in Paris, the opera metropolis of the era. At the end of the 1830s his dream finally came true. The French version of his Lucia di Lammermoor and premieres of La Fille du régiment, La Favorite and Les Martyrs brought him a series of successes. On 3 January 1843, Don Pasquale, his second comic opera, was first staged at the Théâtre des Italiens in Paris. The conditions were favourable, as the cast was the same as that which had made Bellini's I Puritani a brilliant triumph eight years earlier; indeed, Donizetti's Don Pasquale, one of the last operas of the Italian buffa genre so successful in the 18th century, was also a resounding success, and this was the reason for the opera's continuing popularity to this day • For his opera Donizetti had a libretto at his disposal that was completely committed to the traditions of opera buffa and its roots in the Venetian Comedia dell'arte. In countless operas and comedies, this stereotypical story had long since been told; Donizetti, however, transported the material that had already made generations laugh into his present: as an accomplished opera composer of his era, he broke down the character stereotypes and musically transformed the acting archetypes of the libretto into individual characters who, in their own way, experienced a story as it could happen to anyone else. This is how his audience - and still wants to experience theatre!

DVD

15.04.2008

3760115300330