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Donizetti’s charming comedy is a celebration of innocence, so what setting could be better than a small Italian-American community in the Napa Valley, circa 1915? In this ingenious update, the naïve Nemorino believes that a love potion will win him Adina’s heart. Blossoming from a shy Italian immigrant to a plucky entrepreneur, he captures both his sweetheart and the American dream over the course of this delightful opera buffa. Tenor Ramón Vargas superbly embodies the role of the lovesick Nemorino, “which he sang with ardent lyricism and affecting poignancy” at the Met, according to The New York Times. The beautiful Adina is sung by the stunning Inva Mula, whose “agile voice” The New York Times praised for its “lovely timbre and a natural fluidity.”

Donizetti’s charming comedy is a celebration of innocence, so what setting could be better than a small Italian-American community in the Napa Valley, circa 1915? In this ingenious update, the naïve Nemorino believes that a love potion will win him Adina’s heart. Blossoming from a shy Italian immigrant to a plucky entrepreneur, he captures both his sweetheart and the American dream over the course of this delightful opera buffa. Tenor Ramón Vargas superbly embodies the role of the lovesick Nemorino, “which he sang with ardent lyricism and affecting poignancy” at the Met, according to The New York Times. The beautiful Adina is sung by the stunning Inva Mula, whose “agile voice” The New York Times praised for its “lovely timbre and a natural fluidity.”

ACT I

Giannetta and a group of peasants are finishing their morning harvesting before resting for lunch under the shade of a group of trees. Nemorino watches Adina timidly from a distance, sad about being too poor to offer her anything but his love and thus too shy to approach her. Adina reads the story of Tristan and Isolde and how Tristan won Isolde's affection with a love potion. The swaggering Sergeant Belcore arrives with a regiment of soldiers. He flirts with the girls and then declares his passion for Adina, asking her to marry him. She is flattered by his handsome bearing and the declaration of his love, but refuses the offer. The peasants return to work, and Nemorino finds the courage to declare his love for Adina. She laughs at him, telling him she is too capricious to settle down. The scene shifts to the square of the neighboring village. Dr. Dulcamara arrives with a supply of patent medicine for sale. Nemorino asks him if he knows of the magic elixir of love with which Tristan won Isolde. Dulcamara replies that it was he who created it. The quack sells his elixir, which is actually a bottle of Bordeaux wine, to Nemorino as a love potion. The effect of the alcohol is immediate. Certain that he will win Adina's love, Nemorino begins to treat her indifferently. To get even, Adina begins to flirt with Belcore and finally agrees to marry him. When orders arrive calling for Belcore to report to duty at once, it is decided that he will wed Adina that very evening.

ACT II

Distracted that Nemorino has not attended the party preceding her marriage, Adina puts off signing the marriage contract. All depart leaving Dulcamara alone. Soon, Nemorino enters and asks the doctor's help. He says Nemorino must double the amount of potion and gives him another bottle of wine. In order to gain the money to pay for the elixir, Nemorino joins Belcore's regiment and receives an enlistment bonus. The scene shifts back to the village square. Nemorino reels in, tipsy from the new bottle of wine. The village girls, having just learned that a rich uncle of Nemorino's has died and made him wealthy, crowd around him. Unaware of his new wealth, Nemorino thinks that at last Dulcamara's potion is working. Adina sees Nemorino with the girls and becomes jealous. She is now determined to win him for herself. Nemorino returns, sad at the thought of leaving his village and Adina for the army. Adina joins him and tells him that she has bought back his enlistment papers so that they can be married. All join in praising Dulcamara and his magic elixir.

The operatic world into which Gaetano Donizetti was born six years after the death of Mozart was a very different sphere from the one we know today. It was not just a question of no television, no radio, or CDs. The major difference was one of attitude. The passion then was for new music, and opera houses and composers were kept busy trying to fulfill the demand. Yet, the most powerful figures were not the composers or even the singers, but the impresarios.
      As Herbert Weinstock, one of Donizetti’s biographers, has written “They controlled the opera house…They chose librettos, selected composers to set them and hired companies of singers for composers to write for. The driven, hard-worked composers were expected to create to order in a rush, music grateful of exceedingly agile and intensely trained singers—the sort of music that was already delighting audiences.”
     It was, in short, an operatic factory; in the case of Donizetti, it might well be described as a sweatshop. His colleague-in-arms, Vincenzo Bellini, was among the first to rebel against being treated like a workhorse. He saw himself more in the mode of a sensitive Romantic hero, a stance that would be honed to perfection by Franz Liszt. In contrast to Rossini and Donizetti, who accepted their secondary status with only minor protests, Bellini thought of each of his operas as a unique creation.
      Unlike Rossini, and Donizetti to a much lesser extent, Bellini did not recycle good music from a hastily written work that had failed. Donizetti, on the other hand, being a less glamorous and fashionable figure than the aesthete Bellini, and always in dire need of money, did little to buck the system. Like Rossini, he was largely content to think of himself as an artisan rather than an artist.
 Donizetti produced 70 works—both comic and tragic—for the stage in fifty-one years (an average of three a year beginning at the age of twenty) and died on the edge of madness. Rossini, who was only five years older, had become a renowned figure throughout Europe by the time he was twenty-one. It took thirty operas and a decade longer for Donizetti to command a similar position in the theatrical life of his day.
 His fame peaked in 1835 with the writing of his most acclaimed opera, Lucia di Lammermoor. With the death of Bellini the year before and Rossini’s abandoning of the operatic stage, Donizetti at last gained the pre-eminent place in the world of nineteenth century Italian opera. But he would be king of the mountain for a comparatively short time. On the horizon was the young Verdi, as well as a series of pending personal disasters.
      Donizetti had long been stalked by tragedy. His two children died young, and two years after the premiere of Lucia his wife died of cholera. Then, following a triumphant visit to Vienna in 1842, his own health began to give way. In January of 1846, he had to be committed to an asylum near Paris as a result of supposedly advanced syphilis and was kept secluded there for eighteen months.
 When he was finally released, he set out for his native city of Bergamo in northern Italy, but was stricken with paralysis en route. He lived only a few months after reaching Bergamo and died there, burnt out and hallucinatory, at the age of fifty-one. He was buried at the city’s majestic cathedral, not far from the tomb of his teacher Simone Mayr.
      An unbelievable life, certainly, but one whose pain and struggle yielded at least a half-dozen works that through the years have steadfastly held the stage and that still move and delight us today. Yet, as admired as are the dark scores such as Lucia, Anna Bolena, and Maria Stuarda, it may be that Donizetti’s greatest achievements were in the realm of comedy, a field in which he is challenged only by Rossini.
     But for all the wonders of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, L’ Italiana in Algeri, and La Cenerentola, there are many more of us who are more than willing to give Donizetti the comedic place of honor because of the delicious nuances of scores such as Don Pasquale and that evergreen miracle, L’Elisir d’Amore. It is not only an elixir of love, but one of extraordinary musical potency, and, like Donizetti’s finest comedies, it has an enviable crystalline sparkle, spontaneity, and less of a sense of formulaic and stock answers to persistent dramatic questions than was typical of its time.
      What must it have been like to hear L’Elisir when its composer was still alive? Hector Berlioz has supplied the answer in a volume of memoirs. He was in Milan in 1832, when the ink of the pages of L’Elisir had barely dried. He tells us that “On arriving in Milan, out of a sense of duty, I made myself go to hear the latest opera. Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore was being given at the Canobbiana.
 “I found the theater full of people talking in normal voices, with their backs to the stage. The singers, undeterred, gesticulated and yelled their lungs out in the strictest spirit of rivalry. At least, I presumed they did, from their wide-open mouths; but the noise of the audience was such that no sound penetrated except the bass drum. People were gambling, eating supper in their boxes, etcetera. Consequently, perceiving it was useless to expect to hear anything of the score, which was then new to me, I left.
      “It appears that the Italians do sometimes listen. I have been assured by several people that it is so… [Still] music for the Italians is a sensual pleasure and nothing more. For this noble expression of the mind they have hardly more respect than for the art of cooking. They want a score that, like a plate of macaroni, can be assimilated immediately without their having to think about it or even pay attention to it.”
 While there is no doubt that the operatic manners of Donizetti’s day were appalling, it is also true that on that evening in Milan Berlioz was not in the most receptive of moods. He was no friend of Italian opera (and would later mount a major attack against Donizetti at the time of the Paris premiere of La Fille du Régiment). But, as critic William Weaver has written, Berlioz was right about one thing—“the parallel between opera and pasta. Neither is any good when cold.”
      The Italians have a saying for something that is done in a hurry—it is “cooked, served and eaten.” While L’Elisir was undeniably a delicious dish, it was one that had been quickly put together and served and eaten while piping hot. Still, it is no less tasty for having been turned out with rapidity. But then, Donizetti was an old hand at fast food. There was more than just a little of McDonizetti about him.
      It was precisely his ability to whip up a dish on the spot that had brought L’Elisir into being. When another composer had defaulted on his commission for the Teatro alla Canobbiana, its impresario (undisturbed by the failure of Donizetti’s most recent opera—Ugo, Conte di Parigi—at Milan’s principle theater, La Scala) asked the composer for a new comedy. Donizetti was all too happy to accept the Canobbiana commission. He was also indignant when the impresario suggested he simply redo one of his old scores.
     “Who is trying to make fun of me?” Donizetti replied. “I’m not accustomed to patching up my own works, nor anybody else’s either. You’ll soon see that I am quite energetic enough to make you a brand-new opera in fourteen days. I give you my word. Now, you give me Felice Romani.”
      Romani was the man who had provided the text for Donizetti’s Anna Bolena and all of Bellini’s librettos from Il Pirata to Beatrice di Tenda. In enlisting Romani for L’Elisir, Donizetti wrote the poet “I am obliged to set a poem to music in fourteen days. I give you one week to prepare it for me. We’ll see which one of us has the more guts.”
      At this time, Donizetti was thirty-four, with forty operas behind him. To him is credited this famous comment, on being told Rossini had turned out an opera in eleven days, “Ah, yes, but then Rossini always was lazy.” The short time he had to produce L’Elisir did not bother Donizetti nearly so much as the singers he had been assigned. He described them to his librettist like this: “We have a German prima donna, a tenor who stammers, a buffo with a voice of a goat and a French basso who isn’t worth much. Dear Romani, courage and go ahead.”
 Ironically, the Frenchman (a baritone, not a bass as Donizetti described him), Henri-Bernard Dabadie, had performed a year earlier in an opera by Daniel-Fancois-Esprit Auber entitled Le Philtre to a text by Eugène Scribe. It was this very libretto that Romani would “borrow” (a commonplace occurrence in nineteenth-century opera) to fashion his text for L’Elisir.
      Romani knew a good thing when he read it. Evidently Le Philtre had become a smash hit in the Paris of 1831 and would receive almost 250 performances during the next thirty years. Romani kept the plot line intact—a village boy is duped by a quack into buying a love philter that is supposed to make him irresistible to the most beautiful girl in town—but he renamed the characters. Térézine became Adina, Guillaume became Nemorino, le docteur Fontanarose became Dr. Dulcamara, and Joli-coeur and Jeannette became their Italian equivalents—Giannetta and Belcore.
      The amazing thing is that not only did Donizetti meet his deadline, but in the process, presented the operatic world with one of its supreme delights. Some idea of how L’Elisir came into being has been left us by a young friend of the composer’s, Emilia Branca, who was later to marry Romani. She has recounted that during the period of composing L’Elisir, Donizetti arrived at her family’s home one evening, very late for dinner.
      “Forgive me, forgive me, all my dear friends,” he said breathlessly on entering. “I was on my way here half an hour ago, but when I passed Romani’s house, I stopped in to see if he could give me something [some words to be set]. In fact, my good friend handed me an entire duet. While I was reading the verses—beautiful, as only he could write them—I felt so inspired that, without realizing it I began to read them [as if] already set to music…I wanted to jot down the sketch at once…Tonight before I go to bed, I’ll orchestrate it, tomorrow I’ll give it to the copyist who will copy out the parts and give them to the singers.”
      These indeed beautiful verses were for “Chiedi all’aura lusinghiera,” the first-act duet for Adina and Nemorino. Then, after dinner, Donizetti sang excerpts from his opera-in-progress for his friends. “Without possessing a beautiful bass voice,” Emilia writes, “Donizetti sang very pleasantly: buffo parts in a comic and exhilarating fashion, especially little songs and Neapolitan arietta, folk songs and some composed by himself…as he accompanied himself brilliantly at the piano.”
      Emilia has also provided us with a telling portrait of Donizetti the man: “He was handsome…tall, slender, his broad forehead crowned with black curls, his features regular. He was graceful rather than elegant; his aspect was good-natured, a frank and open manner…which was very likable. He was simpatico beyond words, and the fair sex was devoted to him.”
     Despite Donizetti’s admiration for Romani, their collaboration was not always easy, smooth one. Almost ten years older than Donizetti, Romani had an explosive disposition and did not take suggestions from composers gracefully. For example, when Donizetti asked for an aria for the tenor in the second act of L’Elisir, Romani bristled. “What’s the point of that rustic bumpkin coming in and whining pathetically, when everything must be festive and gay?” The composer’s persistence won out, and thank heavens it did. What would L’Elisir, or, for that matter, Italian opera be without “Una furtiva lagrima?”
      The Canobbiana’s new season opened on April 23, 1832, with an opera by Luigi Ricci—L’Orfanella di Ginevra—and Donizetti attended the first night to take a closer measure of the singers who would also be taking part in L’Elisir’s premiere. He somewhat revamped his initial feelings about his cast-to-be, and the next day wrote to his father, “Last night was the opening, and the tenor is fair, the prima donna has a beautiful voice but only she knows what she is saying. The buffo is a dog…Next week, I begin rehearsals, although I haven’t finished; little is lacking, however. Romani was obliged to finish in a hurry and is now revising certain details of the staging.”
     L’Elisir opened on May 12, 1832. Evidently, despite Donizetti’s—and Berlioz’s—misgivings about his cast, it acquitted itself well. The German who created Adina was Clara Sabina Heinefetter, one of six sisters, singers all; the tenor was Giambattista Genero; Dabadie, who had earlier created Rossini’s William Tell, was Belcore; and the “dog” buffo was Giuseppe Frezzolini, whose daughter was to become an acclaimed singer and later create Verdi’s Joan of Arc.
      A leading Milanese newspaper was full of praise for the singers and the new opera: “Arias, duets, trios, ensemble pieces…Everything is beautiful, very beautiful, and was well applauded. To say which number is better than another is not an easy task…The composer was applauded for every number, and when the curtain fell at the end of the acts, he was acclaimed more and more often on the stage with the singers, collecting his honorable and merited reward…”
      I have always had a soft spot for Nemorino and never believed that he was merely the village idiot. Indeed, Donizetti’s music seems to tell us the opposite. Like Nemorino, it is sweet, guileless and, in the case of “Una furtive lagrima,” infinitely touching. Nemorino is simply an uncomplicated, naïve lad who is hopelessly in love.
      I am much less in sympathy with the spoiled, petulant Adina. She is the worldly one, isolated by her money, beauty, and ego. It is only when other girls in the town become interested in Nemorino that she realizes his true, loving character for the first time. We in the audience have known from the first appearance of the strutting, arrogant Sgt. Belcore who the real person of quality is. It is precisely this knowledge, our empathy with Nemorino (not to mention the magic of Donizetti’s music), that holds us rapt throughout a performance of L’Elisir. We spend the evening waiting for the same light to dawn on Adina.
      There were thirty-three performances of L’Elisir that first season (including the one heard by Berlioz). Soon all of Europe was drunk with this intoxicating elixir, and in 1839 L’Elisir reached Paris, where it was staged at the Théâre des Italiens while Auber’s Le Philtre continued to play at the Opéra. No one in the capital, it seems, felt obliged to choose between the two. The same audiences flocked to both. In fact, someone suggested to Auber that the two operas be given as a double bill. “That’s an idea,” Auber responded, “though I think it might suit Donizetti better than me.”
      Later, the summer after the world premiere, when the score was being readied for publication by the house of Ricordi, Donizetti was asked to whom he wished to dedicate the opera. His answer was “Let it be ‘To the Fair Sex of Milan.’ Who knows better how to distill this elixir? Who knows better how to bestow it?”

This article was published by San Francisco Opera in 1992.

• Wed Oct 29 2008   7:30 pm
• Sat Nov 1 2008   8 pm High-definition video projection screens will be featured on the balcony level for this performance.

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• Wed Nov 5 2008   7:30 pm High-definition video projection screens will be featured on the balcony level for this performance.

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• Sun Nov 9 2008   2 pm High-definition video projection screens will be featured on the balcony level for this performance.

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