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Roberto Devereux (1837)
Elisabetta: Edita Gruberova
Sara: Delores Ziegler
Roberto Devereux: Don Bernardini
Nottingham: Ettore Kim
Lord Cecil: Benoit Boutet
Sir Walter Raleigh: Merih Kazbek
Page/Domestic: Francois Richert
Philharmonic Orchestra of Strasbourg
Chorus of the Opera du Rhin
Friedrich Haider conductor
Recorded March 1994
Nightingale Classics (distributed by Koch International) Nc o7os63-2 (2 CDs)
This review originally appeared in The Opera Quaterly, vol. 12, no.2 (winter 1995-1996), pp. 140-42.
Roberto Devereux is a tragic work. At its conclusion, the title character is executed (offstage), and Queen Elizabeth I, raddled with guilt, quite unhistorically announces her abdication. This powerful opera, which had its premiere at the San Carlo in I837, was composed in the darkest period of Donizetti's none-toohappy life-his young wife had died not long after delivering a stillborn child, and a cholera epidemic was raging in Naples.
The queen's role was designed for Giuseppina Ronzi-De Begnis (1800-1853), to whose considerable measure the composer had tailored Fausta, Sancia, Maria Stuarda,1 and Gemma di Vergy. The Elisabetta of this score towers above Donizetti's earlier representations of that Tudor monarch in II castello di Kenilworth and Maria Stuarda. The wide-ranging, intense emotions of his third portrait of Elisabetta are vividly mirrored in Donizetti's music.
This role designed for Ronzi, a soprano drammatico d'agiliti, requires a sizable voice equally expressive in all registers. The famous examples of this vocal type in the early nineteenth century-Colbran, Ungher, Pasta, and Ronzi - appear to have been basically what today we would call dramatic mezzo-sopranos with powerful high tones; a more recent example of this vocal type would be Ponselle. Their effective two-octave range went from B-flat below the staff to high B-flat, with high C most often encountered only in figurations. They did not go in for sopracuti (that fashion seems...