Donizetti, Gaetano

(1797–1848)

   An astonishingly prolific 19th-century composer, Gaetano Donizetti was born to a poor family in Bergamo in November 1797. With the help of a talented music teacher, Simone Mayr, Donizetti began to study music. In 1815, he went, at Mayr’s expense, to study in Bologna; on his return in 1817, he was contracted to write operas for the stage (opera was then a popular art form). His first efforts, especially Il falegname di Livonia (The Carpenter of Livonia) were popular successes. Chiara e Serafina, his 1822 debut in Milan, was a flop, however. The resilient Donizetti nevertheless bounced back with a string of successful commercial operas performed between 1822 and 1830 in Naples, Palermo, Rome, and Genoa.

   Donizetti moved into a different artistic and commercial league in 1830 when his Ann Boleyn was produced at the Carcano theater in Milan and subsequently in Paris and London. The opera established his European reputation, which was confirmed in 1834 (after a string of lesser works) by his Lucrezia Borgia, which premiered in Milan to public acclaim and subsequently was staged in Paris. In 1835, he collaborated with the librettist Salvatore Cammarano to write Lucia di Lammermoor, the work for which he is today most remembered and which he wrote in a mere 36 days. He was by now one of the most famous composers in Europe, as well-regarded in Naples, Paris, and Vienna as in Milan or Venice. Donizetti’s beloved wife died in 1837. He subsequently contracted syphilis, and this brought on increasing mental instability and eventually a stroke that left the composer paralyzed for the last two years of his life. Donizetti died in Bergamo in April 1848.