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«I want love, but violent love!» PDF Print E-mail
May 1835. Donizetti’s creative vein was pressing him so hard that when finally the Naples Theater Society – at the composer’s insistence – authorized Salvatore Cammarano to write the libretto for Lucia di Lammermoor (Lucy of Lammermoor) the score was completed in less than a month. The last sheet is in fact dated “1835, July 6”. Walter Scott’s poem The Bride of Lammermoor, with its intense drama and passion, was the ideal inspiration for the composer, who had always dreamed of a personage like this! Scott’s style, which lends itself easily to translation, helped the taste for the romantic catch on widely in that period.
Cammarano elegantly simplified the plot – reducing the Ashton family and skipping the complicated political-religious background. This left the action to the fore – and Donizetti liked it swift – but kept the main details so the story is easy to follow and the conflicts are straightforward. The composer’s involvement in the impetus and excitement of the events and feelings is clear from the syncopation, silences, and dialogues – as much as from his own hurried, nervy hand-writing!
The result is one of the highest expressions of Italian romantic melodrama, a balanced encounter between the text and the music, especially in the purity of the vocal parts – the librettist hardly needs anything more. Scott’s climate is already romantic, against the backdrop of a gloomy, sinister Scottish landscape with its Gothic atmosphere, revisited through the eyes of Ossian and Hoffmann, where nature is no longer just a pretty picture to be admired, but becomes a scenario fuelled by human affects and action.
Donizetti dives straight into the action, with no lengthy symphonic preludes. Mystery and tragedy already hover in the doom-laden tones of the percussion in the funereal key of A flat major. The effect is confirmed by a moment of quiet anguish before launching the great sextet «Chi mi frena in tal momento» (What restrains me at this moment?). The composer converts the pity Lucia’s every gesture inspires into creative energy. She is the source of the life and action of all the others, though Edgar and Henry have very much their own personalities – especially Edgar, whose strong tenor part embodies the personality of a romantic hero. His importance is highlighted in the finale, where his suicide becomes a supreme gift of himself, rather than just fruit of a rash impulse.
But Lucia’s presence is constantly felt even when she’s not on stage. As events evolve the timbres of her accompaniment change – first all a harp, then an oboe, cellos and finally the flute, fixedly evoking madness. This is not an excuse for a virtuoso performance: even when she sings in unison with the flute she is not imitating it – the flute mimics her voice, so the soprano’s vocal fluency is no longer a sublimation of sentiment but becomes its intense, pathetic expression. Unheeding of the tragic developments, the music is celestial, elegiac, painful and bewildered. Donizetti’s pietas lightens the weight of guilt on the murderer, the music remaining pure and innocent.
The opera inexorably proceeds towards madness, like evil slowly growing, and the foreboding is sometimes there in the music, though at others it is more like memory; at the peak of her madness the unhappy Lucia recalls her first meeting with Edgar, the scene at the fountain, the marriage contracts and ceremony, and the farewell song.

 

Monica Rosolen