Volume 54, Number 18 · November 22, 2007
Looking for 'Lucia'
By Daniel Mendelsohn
Lucia di Lammermoor
an opera by Gaetano Donizetti, libretto by Salvatore Cammarano, directed by Mary Zimmerman
at the Metropolitan Opera, New York
In February 1834, Gaetano Donizetti, whom the premiere of his Anna Bolena four years earlier had made a star of the Italian opera world, accepted with joy an invitation by Rossini to compose an opera for the Théâtre-Italien in Paris. As the vehicle for his entrée into the Parisian music world, the composer cannily chose an adaptation of a popular French play about a murdered Venetian doge; and yet the run of Marin Faliero, as the new opera was called, was both unspectacular and short, closing after five performances. Partly this had to do with the fact that the opera premiered late in the season, a serious disadvantage particularly since it had been preceded by Bellini's hit I Puritani; partly it was because of practical aggravations of the kind amusingly familiar from the performance histories of early-nineteenth-century opera. (The Parisian fire marshals had insisted on testing their new safety system the day after the prima, a routine that involved, among other things, flooding the theater.)
Review, 5011 words
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