Don Pasquale
About the Composer
Gaetano Donizetti was born in 1797 to a poor family in
Bergamo, in northern Italy near the Swiss Alps. Although no one in the family
had ever shown any musical aptitude, young Gaetano was to become one of Italy’s
most important composers—and his brother Giuseppe (who relocated to Istanbul)
became chief of music to the armies of the all-but-defunct Ottoman Empire.
When Donizetti displayed phenomenal keyboard skills at an
early age, a local composer took him on as a pupil. Oddly enough, the man who
would write some of the most lyrical, singable music in all opera was himself a
terrible singer. The boy’s mentor set him up with his first opera commission, a
comedy for an opera house in Venice. But just as his career in opera was
getting going, Donizetti came of age to be drafted into the Austrian army. (As
a native of northern Italy, he was a citizen of the Austrian Empire.) A wealthy
lady from Donizetti’s hometown came to the composer’s rescue and paid for him
not to have to enter the army.
For the next twenty years, Donizetti would scurry up and
down the Italian peninsula, writing a vast number of operas for all the
important theaters. He and another composer, Vincenzo Bellini, were rivals for
the crown of the last great opera composer, Gioachino Rossini, until Bellini
died young. Donizetti was a skilled craftsman and a hard-nosed, practical man
of the theater. Although he took a great deal of care to get his libretti
perfect, he was known to reuse music from his old operas when composing new
ones. He believed an opera was something that happened on a stage in front of
an audience, not something that existed on paper. As a result, he tended to
rewrite his operas extensively when he toured them to different cities,
tailoring his music to the abilities of the singers he was working with. Many
of Donizetti’s greatest successes came in Naples, where the opera industry had
been booming for hundreds of years. While producing an opera in Rome, Donizetti met
Virginia Vasselli, who later became his wife.
Donizetti wrote both comic and tragic operas, as was typical
in his day. Famed for infusing his comedies with a touch of pathos or momentary
seriousness, Donizetti wrote (among others) two comedies—The Elixir of Love and
Don Pasquale—which are still staples of the opera repertory. Many of his
serious operas, like the Tudor trilogy Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda, and Roberto
Devereux, draw their stories (loosely) from European history. His masterpiece
Lucia di Lammermoor rapidly became the most popular opera of its day.
After Bellini’s death, Donizetti was the undisputed king of
the Italian opera scene, and as such began venturing abroad to conquer foreign
opera houses. In Paris, he played his Italian operas at the Théâtre des
Italiens and wrote in French enormous grand operas for the Paris Opéra and
happy little comedies (such as The Daughter of the Regiment, another repertory
staple) for the Opéra-Comique. The understandably peeved French composer
Hector Berlioz—who was never too popular in France himself—summed up the
situation: "One can no longer speak of
the opera houses of Paris, only of the opera houses of M. Donizetti." A few
years later, Donizetti conquered the principal opera theater in Vienna. For a
short period in the early 1840s, he was the most important composer in Europe.
Donizetti was an agreeable, pleasant man who went through a
great deal of personal tragedy. His parents died within a
week of each other, and his wife died of cholera shortly thereafter. Donizetti
himself began losing his mind in 1845, and before long it became clear that he
had syphilis. His children had all died, so a nephew looked after him during
his few remaining years—a period in which he could barely carry on a
conversation, much less compose an opera. He died in his hometown of Bergamo in
1848.
The Comedy of Don Pasquale
Commedia dell’arte
The comic story of Don Pasquale comes out
of the centuries-old Italian form of improvised comedy known
as commedia dell’arte. Think of commedia as live Warner Brothers cartoons. You
know how all those cartoons have the same characters and the same basic gags,
even if the plots vary slightly from cartoon to cartoon? How the Road Runner is
always leading the coyote to fall off a cliff, and Bugs Bunny is forever
dressing up in drag and fooling Elmer Fudd? That’s how commedia dell’arte works
too. Famous commedia characters include Pantaloon, the stingy old man; his best
friend, the incompetent Doctor; a mooning pair of young lovers; and any number
of scheming servants. (The cast list of Don Pasquale reads like an outline for
a commedia farce.) Commedia plays were by and large improvised; the actors used
their stock jokes and bits of slapstick to flesh out a simple plot, usually
about young lovers outwitting their foolish parents. They then toured their
shows from town to town. The roots of commedia dell’arte reach back to the
comedy of ancient Rome, and the form itself reached its heyday during the
Italian Renaissance. It profoundly influenced not only comic opera but also the
plays of Shakespeare and Molière.
Opera Buffa
Comedy and opera were made for each other. In the early days of bel canto
opera, there were two kinds of opera: opera seria,
which featured noble, heroic characters, a happy ending, and
not a trace of humor; and opera buffa, which featured more
approachable characters, a happy ending, and lots of humor (unhappy endings
became standard much later). Both feature plenty of singing, but the role of
the music changes. In opera seria, the music helps us experience the passions
and dilemmas of the characters; in opera buffa, the music functions as a laugh
track. Great comic composers like Mozart, Rossini, and Donizetti knew how to
write music that makes it easy for an audience to laugh, music that is quick
and reassuring and often funny in and of itself.
A typical musical device you’ll hear in comic opera is
patter, where the words are sung at breakneck speed, like tongue-twisters,
usually to a very simple tune. Patter is most often sung by the
lower voices, and Don Pasquale features one of the great patter duets, in this
case between Don Pasquale and Dr. Malatesta, bass and baritone, who compete to
see who can sing faster. The other standard musical device to listen for in
comic opera is ensemble writing. In serious operas, ensembles are used
sparingly, because they tend to interrupt the forward thrust of the story. But
ensembles are the lifeblood of comic operas, because nothing expresses mounting
confusion, frenzy, and hilarious misunderstanding better than those moments
where all the characters are singing at once.
The Culture in the Comedy
Don Pasquale began as improvised comedy: the 1840s equivalent of Saturday Night Live.
It’s unlikely that large audiences will be enjoying today’s SNL sketches in 160 years,
because that kind of humor is specific and topical, not timeless.
The reason large audiences attend Don Pasquale today is
because of Donizetti’s great music, not because they’re expecting non-stop
laughs. In fact, the basic joke of Don Pasquale—the skirt-chasing old man who
is abused by his wife—is no longer particularly funny. That’s how much Western
culture has changed over those 160 years. Yet we can use this comedy as a lens
to learn about the culture that created it. All humor works by setting up an
expectation and then reversing it. Homer Simpson is funny because he’s so
extremely the opposite of a model American. We constantly parody those in
power—parents, bosses, or the President—because it’s fun to invert the power
structure, to make those we trust look untrustworthy. Thus, in comic opera,
when young love wins out over age and money, it’s because the culture in
general went in the other direction. In real life, age and money held the
reins, and young love really only had a chance in the topsy-turvy world of
comic opera. Don Pasquale sheds a particular light on Donizetti’s intensely
patriarchal society. To an Italian of Donizetti’s day, a story about a woman
who beats her husband and refuses to let him dominate her was just about the
funniest thing in the world, because in that culture, everyone would have
assumed the opposite was the natural order.
The Music of Don Pasquale
Don Pasquale is a masterpiece of bel canto opera. This term,
"bel canto," is Italian for "beautiful singing" and describes the style of
opera popular in Italy in the early nineteenth century. Three composers
excelled at creating bel canto opera: Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti.
But aren’t all operas supposed to feature beautiful singing?
Yes, but in some operas the drama or the orchestra or the sets can pull focus.
In bel canto, the singing—and the specific singer at your performance—is always
the center of attention. When you go to a bel canto opera, you can expect the
singers to make wonderful, crazy, serene, hilarious, and beautiful
sounds—sometimes clear and simple like a songbird, sometimes wild and furious
like a blizzard, but always fireworks for the voice. Donizetti tailored his
music to the talents of the singers at each particular performance, going so far
as to rewrite or even substitute entire arias based on the needs of a
particular singer.
You will hear three different types of singing in a bel
canto opera. Each one tells the story and moves the plot along in a slightly
different way:
Recitative.
Bel canto operas are much like musical comedies,
which feature talking and singing. But in bel canto, the talking is actually
sung—sung very quickly on just a few notes, accompanied only by intermittent
chords from the harpsichord, piano, or orchestra, not melodies. Recitative
moves the story of the opera along at a good clip. In recitative, the words are
more important than the music.
Aria.
An aria ia a solo song for an individual performer.
Time stops and one character expresses a personal feeling: love, joy, sadness, hope, despair, etc. Many
bel canto arias have a beautiful melody, and the singer takes the opportunity
to show off his or her lovely voice. Others are exciting or funny or tell
stories that are relevant to the plot. Don Pasquale opens with a lovely aria
for Dr. Malatesta. In the next scene, when we first meet the leading lady, or
prima donna, she sings an elaborate aria (as was the custom in
nineteenth-century Italian opera). The opera also features arias for the other
characters, including much heartfelt romantic music for Ernesto.
Ensemble.
When more than one character sings at the same time it is called an ensemble.
Comic operas always feature ensembles, because there is something intrinsically
funny about a great many people all talking at once. Memorable ensembles from Don
Pasquale include a gorgeous romantic duet for the lovebirds and two hilarious
“patter” duets. Most of the second act is a long ensemble at the wedding of Don
Pasquale and “Sofronia:” duet becomes trio, then quartet, then quintet, faster
and faster, until by the end everything is madness, confusion, and delightfully
hilarious music.
Recommended Recordings
Opera d'Oro / Conductor: Riccardo Muti
Norina: Graziella Sciutti
Ernesto: Pietro Bottazzo
Malatesta: Rolando Panerai
Don Pasquale: Fernando Corena
Erato / Conductor: Gabriele Ferro
Norina: Barbara Hendricks
Ernesto: Luca Canonici
Malatesta: Gino Quilico
Don Pasquale: Gabriel Bacquier