Donizetti's Enduring Importance Lucrezia Borgia, Rigoletto and Tosca Read more at Suite101: Donizetti's Enduring Importance: Lucrezia Borgia, Rigol

The composer Gaetano Donizetti, far from being a hack composer of little importance, is a fundamental figure in the development of opera during the nineteenth century.

It's no secret that Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), in his development from nationalistic Italian opera composer known for his choruses (Il papa del coro) to serious composer on the European stage, studied Donizetti's Lucrezia assiduously, carrying the score around with him and studying presumably among other things the use of a male chorus composed of individuals and the relationship between the three protagonists, both elements from Lucrezia that he carried into his own Rigoletto.

Verdi, during his long creative life, had as one of his primary goals, never completely accomplished, to write a French style music drama. This wasn't just because of the piles of money ammassed by Spontini, Rossini, Halevy, Auber and most of all Meyerbeer, but also for artistic reasons, because the Paris stage put on operatic dramas of a theatricality unknown in Italy. He saw in Donizetti a composer who, more than Rossini, managed to incorporate the Italian musical idioms with French style dramatic cogency and theatricality.

Rigoletto, like Lucrezia, is based on a Victor Hugo play (Le Roi s'amuse) and shares with Lucrezia the atmosphere of a corrupt court and the devotion of a parent to his or her child: in Rigoletto, it's Rigoletto's obsessive protectiveness of Gilda, in Lucrezia it's Lucrezia's hidden maternal love for Gennaro. The treatment of the chorus in Rigoletto, a male chorus of individual cortiers, is strikingly similar to the chorus in Lucrezia Borgia.

The structure of Rigoletto, however, is not as clearly that of a trio as in Lucrezia Borgia. The most prominent structural element in Rigoletto is the three duets between Rigoletto and Gilda, and the Duke remains somewhat extraneous to the real interaction between father and daughter, almost as does Orsini, Gennaro's friend, sung by a mezzo soprano. Lucrezia is an absolute trio, with three dramatic divisions (prologue and two acts) and central to the first act, thus central to the opera, a trio between Gennaro, Lucrezia and Duke Alfonso, where Gennaro is poisoned after being tortured off stage.

Donizetti and Puccini

The influence of Lucrezia Borgia is not only felt in Verdi but also in Puccini (1858-1924), who was influenced by the character of Duke Alfonso, Lucrezia's villainous husband, when he conceived the Baron Scarpia in Tosca. Not only is the off-stage torture of Gennaro reminiscent of the torture of Cavaradossi, but Scarpia's relationship with Tosca, based on manipulation and bullying, clearly owes a dept to that of Alfonso and Lucrezia.Maybe even more than Verdi, Puccini looked to France for inspiration, especially to Meyerbeer and Massenet, and for him as for Verdi, Donizetti was an example of the Italian in Paris, who perhaps more brilliantly than any member of the italian school, and also more fluently, was able to use French dramatic techniques to succeed on the Italian stage.

Donizetti's Enduring Importance

Thus it is clear that Donizetti, rather than being, as Robert Schumann would have it, a composer of "music for a puppet theater" had a profound influence on the future of Italian opera in the nineteenth century.