Content area
Full text
In December 1839, invigorated by the simultaneous preparations for three of his works at the Académie Royale de Musique, the OpéraComique, and the Théátre de la Renaissance, Gaetano Donizetti wrote to his friend Tommaso Persico:1
I am in rehearsal at the Grand Opéra with Les martyrs, and at the Opéra-Comique with Maria [i.e., La fille du régiment]: the latter will be the first to reach the stage, followed by the other one in mid-February. Then, the other one, which has rather old music in it, at the Renaissance.
The unnamed work for the Renaissance was Vange de Nisida, a new opera in French to a libretto by Alphonse Royer and Gustave Vaēz. The director of the newborn Théátre de la Renaissance, Anténor Joly, had commissioned it in the wake of the triumphal production of Lucie de Lammermoor (the French adaptation of Lucia di Lammermoor) in the same theatre in August 1839. The ensuing contract - signed by Joly, Donizetti and the opera's librettists - stated in no uncertain terms that the rehearsals for Lange de Nisida were to begin the following February, with a clear (albeit undeclared) intention of staging it immediately thereafter.2
The autograph score of Lange de Nisida was virtually complete by 27 December 1839. It was among the first concrete results of Donizetti's efforts to work in Paris at the end of the 1830s and to benefit from its relatively liberal theatrical and censorial system. As Donizetti himself confessed to Persico, Lange de Nisida incorporated some «rather old music» from Adelaide, an Italian opera he had drafted around 1834 - presumably for Naples - but left unfinished.3 William Ashbrook advanced the hypothesis that the composer may have brought the incomplete score of Adelaide with him to Paris with the intention of proposing it to the Theâtre-Italien, with whose director he was negotiating in 1839.4 When it became clear that the project would not materialize, Donizetti used a large part of Adelaide in the composition of Lange de Nisida.
Even though the deadlines set down in the contract were respected, and the production process had advanced to the point of starting work on its mise-en-scene, the date of the premiere was repeatedly postponed. In May 1840, the Théátre de la Renaissance closed down...