The Living Air

Gaetano Donizetti’s bel canto masterpiece, Lucia di Lammermoor

By Patrick Summers, Houston Grand Opera Music Director

“Those who sing well pray twice”
—Traditionally attributed to Saint Augustine (354-430)

What could the 175-year-old Italian opera Lucia di Lammermoor possibly have to say to contemporary Texas in 2011? Its surface appears about as creaky as a stage work could be:  cold castles, ghosts in fountains, family strife, madness, undesired marriage contracts, and ancestors’ tombs. But a deeper look at its early Romantic-era composer, the Italian master Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848), uncovers revelations that can sing to us if we listen.

The bel canto era of opera, roughly 1810–50, had a vociferous audience that clamored for new works and for inventive ways of taking them by surprise. The operas of that era had structural regularities: an overture or prelude, an opening chorus, often with only male voices, an entrance aria for the title character in the second scene, duets, trios, often larger ensembles, building in energy and size to a finale only after a pause for slow introspection. For social reasons the works were often front-loaded: first acts were the longest; final acts the most brief. The three-act structure was common for Italian operas, four or five acts in France, with a requisite ballet almost always added for French audiences, something seen even as late as the Verdi Otello, into which a ballet was inserted for its Paris premiere in the late 1880s.

That ubiquitous term, bel canto, generally refers to the works of Italian opera composers Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and early Verdi, though there were others of importance, like Cherubini, Meyerbeer, and the composer who had as much influence on Verdi as Donizetti, the now nearly invisible Saverio Mercadante. Bel canto, which literally means “beautiful singing”, is now broadly evoked to justify all manner of ludicrous musical stylings: anytime a singer wants an unwritten fermata, or wants to rewrite whole passages to show off rather than to stylishly ornament with dramatic truth, the term bel canto suddenly appears.

For particularly nostalgic opera fans (recording buffs, mostly), bel canto is sometimes the most efficient way to live in a golden age past, when all opera was better, when naturally, some was and some wasn’t. One still hears broad generalizations bandied about in closed musical circles, always in reference to bel canto, that no singers today can trill (the ability to sing two closely-spaced notes in rapid succession), when many singers today can execute a trill with the dexterity of a fine violinist. Some orchestras have tended to look smugly down upon the bel canto composers, thinking them too harmonically simplistic and easy to play, beneath them. No one would say that they are as challenging to play as Strauss, Wagner, or Mahler, but it must be said that great orchestras are capable of seeing the merits of these enigmatic and deceptively simple works. When Donizetti and Bellini are accused of “simplistic” harmonies or orchestrations, I inevitably think of Ernest Hemingway’s slam-dunk retort to William Faulkner’s accusations that Hemingway had “never used a word where a reader might check his usage by a dictionary.” Hemingway’s response could be a response to those who misunderstand and harshly judge the delicate orchestral textures of bel canto opera, “Poor Faulkner, Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”

And how does a company set about producing such an era-specific work so that it is meaningful to a modern audience while also being true to its legacy? A conductor, director, and designer must look first to the essence of the plot: young Lucia is bound in a marriage contract with a man she does not love. She is an economic pawn in a male-dominated world, imprisoned into a life that drives her mad. This is not a ‘realistic’ world, but it is one of tender melancholy, a cold world of constantly closing doors and threatening walls. Scotland was a craggy and unknown place to most of early 19th century Europe, its complex history has always given rise to wild mythic associations.

Nearly everyone, even now, has a mental picture of Scotland and Scots: tartans, fog, bagpipes, hunting dogs, and whisky, even if none of these correspond very accurately to reality, with the obvious exception of the whisky. Sir Walter Scott, whose 1819 novel, The Bride of Lammermoor, is the source of Donizetti’s opera, invokes a richly-textured mythical Scotland, and continental Europeans were enchanted by its exoticism, fellow Britons and Americans, somewhat less so. There were at least half a dozen “Lammermoor” operas scattered through the 1820s, some even scored with bagpipes and reels, none of which appear in Donizetti’s version. Salvatore Cammarano’s excellent libretto gave Donizetti the emotional raw material he needed, but there is not a single measure of music in this opera that could be considered remotely Scottish, for Lucia is a thoroughly Italian opera and a paragon of its Romantic Era, in that it strives only for the truth of its many emotions: melancholy, rage, hurt, madness, and a firm belief that the two doomed lovers will meet in a better “next” world.

Further, the orchestral tint of Lucia is highly evocative to the visual imagination. Stage scenic design in the early nineteenth century was rudimentary: painted drops and static pre-electric light, so imaginations were highly called upon in theaters of the day. One was always aware, no matter how beautiful the qualities of scenery, that it was scenery, that it was false. Out of necessity, music created more scenic mood than any actual scenery. With the scenery providing not a literal re-creation, but a suggestion, audiences of the bel canto era could hear night time, hear storms, and hear cold castles and windy crags. Music is an abstract and metaphorical world, and if one believes in music as a story telling device, which is the very definition of opera, a relentlessly literal scenic obsession is wildly at odds with that belief, not to mention against the tide of theatrical history. Whether the scenery is literal or abstract, good operatic scenery, like good acting or singing, should evoke more than it illustrates. This is not to say the scenery and costumes should not be beautiful, but it should be emotionally true first, as in, true to the score, and beautiful after that.

For the novels, plays and operas of the Romantic era, verisimilitude was not the goal; if plots were implausible, it was no matter. Rather, the aim was a protracted emotional truth, heightened public portrayals of emotional longings we all feel in far more personal surroundings. Always bring your imagination with you to the opera; you’ll have a much more enriching time. “Reality” has such a curious reputation in the opera house; do not obsess about the plot of an opera, as in, “could this happen to me?” That’s reality show stuff. Of course it couldn’t happen to you; you are highly unlikely to find yourself locked away in Scottish castle, driven to murder a man you’ve been forced to marry to save your family’s honor. The entire purpose of Romantic-era art, including Donizetti’s operas, was to connect with what you feel, not merely with what you know. In each of our own lives, even in this modern era, even in a land far removed from the origins of this opera, the feelings it evokes are relevant and utterly plausible, even if its plot is not. In absorbing the score of Lucia di Lammermoor in live performance, take just one important step: simply accept the plot as absolutely true as it is happening before your eyes. Having accepted that, turn your attention to the emotions of each character, and simply listen. Just, listen. That’s all you need. It is only underneath the level of the “plot”, allowing your imagination to escape reality, not seek it, that Lucia can speak to you, and what treasures there are in Donizetti’s imagination.

Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma represent the pinnacle of the bel canto era in terms of vocal expressiveness, their combinations of orchestral nuance and vibrant energy, and their evocative and clear libretti. Both operas make extraordinary demands on the musicians who perform them. As a student at Indiana University, I recall running into one of the school’s main conductors in a grocery store. I happened to have two scores with me, sitting in my shopping basket, Norma, and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. He pointed to Tristan and said, “the greatest opera ever written”; he pointed to Norma and said, with a hint of warning, “just as great, but it’s the hardest thing you’ll ever conduct, much harder than Wagner.”

Gaetano Donizetti’s score of Lucia di Lammermoor is among the noblest, the apogee of a particular style of arched and soaring vocal writing. Donizetti’s operas were direct descendants of the formal symmetries of the classical period, particularly the operas of Mozart and Rossini and the “sturm und drang” symphonies of Haydn. Indeed, play only the bass line of any of Haydn’s 100-plus symphonies and you hear pure Donizetti. The great “Romantic” movement, which essentially spanned the nineteenth century, having begun as a reaction against the rationalist reasoning of the Enlightment, those ideas that were embedded in the founding of the United States, was an embrace of powerful and extreme emotions. It had nothing to do with modern notions of “romance,” rather the movement was an attempt to release the imagination, not through reality, but through the portrayal of deep melancholy and heightened emotions bordering on violence.

Mother Nature and human nature were linked, violent storms mirrored stormy hearts, craggy coastlines depicted similarly jagged relationships; tombs of ancestors became houses of confession and profound regret. Ancient natural beauty only threw into relief the pain of living and the brevity of love. Of the famous five stages of grief, “anger” and “bargaining” are the most present in Romanticism works. God is sought by characters in great duress. One of Lucia’s most touching lines is also one of the most “Romantic” in character: forced to sign a contract of marriage to Arturo, she sings, unaccompanied by the orchestra, incredulous to her fate, “la mia condanna ho scritta!”, “I have signed my own condemnation”, a death warrant. In his poem, “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey”, from 1798, William Wordsworth summoned the feeling of the epoch with perfection, and with indispensable words for understanding Lucia di Lammermoor:  “….I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man, a motion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things.”

To think on Donizetti is to muse on the concept of education itself, and how it has so utterly changed. He came from an intellectual world that has all but vanished, educated as he was by the highly influential Bavarian composer Simone Mayr, who immigrated to Italy to teach in Donizetti’s native Bergamo. Mayr was an Illuminatus, but forget the images of Dan Brown’s fictionalized Illuminati in his recent book and film Angels and Demons. The Bavarian Illuminati from whom Mayr emerged were a group of gentle geniuses, wellsprings of the Enlightenment, and they were founded just 6 weeks before the formation of the United States, in May of 1776. They were, like intellectuals throughout history, suspected of all sorts of insubordinate crimes and elitism, some even blamed them for the French Revolution, but their short history was devoted to the acquisition of knowledge and to an integrated universal view of the world, uniting nature with the intellect.Donizetti’s education at the hands of Mayr encompassed not only music, but a panoply of disciplines that Mayr managed to connect to music, the mysticism of the heavens, or what was then known of the heavens, and an in-depth knowledge of the sciences.

Donizetti had a thorough schooling in what would now be broadly called “the humanities”, yet no humanities department of the last 100 years would have matched Mayr’s broad approach. Donizetti was an exemplary student. He was an intellectual polymath, reveling in a huge array of subjects from the ancient to the modern. He treasured a rare 1497 Landino edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy given to him by one of his students, Adelson Piacezzi, which was among his effects upon his premature death from cerebrospinal meningovascular syphilis, an all too common malady of his era, probably inherited; it is not fatal in 2011.

Mayr was a visionary and generous teacher. For his pupils, the surface of any subject was merely a covering to be removed to explore what was beneath; every subject had layer upon layer of meaning, far from today’s ‘bottom line’ educational mentality. Musical science was linked, by Mayr, to the science of the spheres, the circle of fifths each connected to some celestial body, planets or comets. Music was, to Mayr and his pupils, a language subject to and representative of the very stuff of the universe. The rudiments of music, the harmonies and colors of the orchestra, were connected to a host of subsidiary disciplines and meanings, humanist and complex; symbology was a large part of Donizetti’s education and the key relationships of his operas all have symbolic meaning, though that becomes particularly complicated when applied to Lucia di Lammermoor, because so many of the keys changed during the initial rehearsal process and shortly after the premiere, for various practical reasons (and a couple of singer demands).  Listen to Donizetti’s oeuvre through a prism like Mayr’s tutelage, rather than simply reacting to its toe-tapping melodiousness, and a true musical dramatist emerges. Donizetti constantly experimented with orchestral seating in an opera house, as the conductor-less practices of the eighteenth century did not work for larger orchestras, and many orchestras, including Houston Grand Opera’s, sit in the basic formation he pioneered. 

The piano was the instrument of the early nineteenth century—numbers upon numbers of amateur pianists practiced away—to walk through a Viennese morning in 1820, for example, was to hear the simultaneous tinkling away of dozens of distant keyboards. If much of Donizetti’s music sounds like orchestrated piano music, this is no criticism, for his music shares many of the limpid and elegiac qualities of two later piano masters, both of whom revered the music of the bel canto, Frederic Chopin and Franz Liszt. Even Richard Wagner, who was never very kind to many of his fellow composers, had respect for the great melodists, particularly Bellini, whose Norma Wagner was fond of conducting. Wagner held only Beethoven in greater esteem. Beethoven transcended the Romantic-era with an extraordinary vision of what mankind could be; he belongs to every age, the ultimate Romantic, a title he must share with the prolific Franz Schubert, possessed of an extraordinary ability to write music that seemed to have a surface simplicity, but that illumined the inner pain of loss. Schubert’s music influenced every 19th Century opera that followed him. Schubert’s whopping “Wanderer” fantasy for piano is essentially a wordless three-act opera. The simplicity and anguish of a Schubert song piano accompaniment can be felt in many of Donizetti’s arias (listen, for instance to the chorus, “O qual funesto,” which is pure Schubert!). Donizetti and Schubert share of type of rhythmic drive vs. rhythmic pliancy, music powered by text, and simple warmth.

One of the significant challenges of conducting operas of the early nineteenth century is that orchestras today, while not generally smaller in number than Donizetti might have heard, are most definitely louder. An orchestral player in 2011 looking at Donizetti’s dynamics, a fortissimo marking, for example, which means, “very loud”, and is a clear instruction to be louder than simply “forte” (loud), will execute a far larger sound than a player looking at the same marking in 1835. But simply marking everything down to quieter dynamics can make for incredibly anemic attacks that are at odds with the declamatory Italian text which the orchestra must imitate. There are solutions, and they are fascinating to discover and enact; largely they involve getting the orchestra to inflect, much as an actor does in speaking text. In operas of this era, text is music and music is text. Modern musicians are generally taught to play long smooth lines, with little inflection of strong and weak accents. Once an orchestra makes music a colorfully inflected language, instead of a monochrome smoothness, the orchestral texture of a bel canto opera can suddenly be seen through, and a fine singer can easily rise over it. No opera though, particularly of this era, will ever have the same balance that you have at home on your CD; that simply isn’t possible or even desirous in natural sound. Composers like Donizetti and Verdi never intended for their orchestral writing to be ‘in the background’, the way so many modern recordings are engineered, which has immeasurably altered the expectations of live sound today. A conductor can and should spend hours of rehearsal time getting the balance right between pit and stage, but the balance of live sound is utterly different than that for a recording. Another significant challenge is to convince singers to sing the unwritten higher notes in recitative passages in Donizetti’s operas, the appoggiature. Singers of Donizetti’s time would have sung these higher notes, which follow exactly the contour of the Italian language, without being asked. Composers like Donizetti, by tradition, often wrote two identical pitches at the ends of Italian sentences, with the expectation that a singer would sing the penultimate note at least a tone higher, sometimes even an octave higher, depending on the harmonic structure. This was simply the practice, a holdover from the days of a keyboard-accompanied recitative, and we know absolutely that it survived well into Verdi’s career, for Verdi specifically instructs baritones singing the title role of his 1850 Rigoletto, prior to the final scene, “this scene should be sung without the usual appoggiature”.

Though it is complicated to explain, to conduct Donizetti feels different “in the arm” from any other composer. A conductor’s gesture is largely cerebral, an outward manifestation of an inner impulse. Music is both a science and an art, and thus so is conducting, for in music, unless the science is in place there is no art. An arm gesture represents sound but doesn’t illustrate or mimic it. Conductors are not dancers, or they shouldn’t be. A conductor enables sound but doesn’t make it; the conductor is the single silent participant of a musical performance.

Donizetti’s music, on first glance, would appear to command a thought/gesture similar to early Verdi, or at least similar to his direct contemporary Vincenzo Bellini, but neither is the case. Donizetti sits directly between the enlightenment classicism of his training and the elastic rhythmic impulses of the later Romantic era composers; a conductor must be technically capable of both, of reacting to the various demands of what looks, on the page, to be simplistic, skeletal, and repetitive. His bass line structure, the rock on which the foundation of his music is built, is unlike any other composer, and the bass line is essentially all a conductor conducts in a Donizetti opera, which has always particularly fascinated me. If Donizetti did not have the anarchic effect of Wagner, he most certainly did pave the way for opera to become an expressively intellectual art. He was the protector of a long tradition, and even a cursory glance through his sources and subjects illustrates an impressively fecund mind, operas on Peter the Great, on Don Quixote, on Noah and the Ark, literary sources as disparate as Corneille, Scott, Byron, Gibbons, Goethe, Hugo, Schiller, and Dumas. The British monarchy, then as now, was a subject of fascination, Donizetti’s famous “Tudor Trilogy” is actually a quartet of operas centered on Elizabethan politics: Il Castello di Kenilworth (1829) a now almost entirely forgotten opera about Elizabeth I, the first opera to have an extended scene accompanied by the glass harmonica, the first operatic appearance of the instrument which would play such a large role in the history of Lucia di Lammermoor. Maria Stuarda, Roberto Devereaux, and Anna Bolena complete the series. Donizetti wrote 68-75 operas, it’s difficult to accurately count them as more than a dozen are lost and several were revisions of existing works. Donizetti’s output of music was enormous even if one excludes his operas: he wrote a vast amount of church music, including dozens of complete masses, hundreds of songs, and 35 cantatas, many of which are miniature operas in themselves. He wrote quickly but fastidiously by the standards of the time, sometimes producing up to four operas in a year. How times change: in 2011, a prolific opera composer would take several years to produce a work, so great is the risk now and so rare is the phenomenon.

As with many of Donizetti’s operas, the orchestral effects are simple but innovative. The compact prelude of the opera foreshadows the sepulchral opening of Rigoletto. The long harp cadenza of Lucia’s opening scene, often anachronistically romanticized by virtuoso harpists, is one of the great introductions to any operatic character, and would have been a delightful surprise to an 1835 audience. The famous sextet is recognizable even to those who know nothing of opera, and it is as brilliant an example as any of the type of non-realistic ‘frozen moment’ so typical of the era. The French horn writing in the final tomb scene is the finest of the period, a scene which also includes a beautiful cello solo, assuming a line from an Edgardo too distraught to continue, a musical device which would have made attentive listeners gasp.

One of the score’s real glories is the “oh, qual funesto”, the great chorus of sadness prior to the mad scene, with a soulful solo trumpet in unison with the chorus. But the great musical moment out of many in Lucia is the flute and soprano writing of the mad scene. Its evolution is slightly obscure but interesting: Donizetti initially scored Lucia’s mad scene to feature a solo glass harmonica, an instrument that had been invented by Benjamin Franklin, or rather, re-invented, as instruments made of glass played with wet fingers had existed before, but Franklin’s version of the armonica, as he called it, was indeed a new instrument, a treadle-like affair, and allowed for multiple pitches to be played, though it worked better for slower tempos as faster passagework tended to sound muddled and indistinct. It was thought in the nineteenth century that the instrument not only depicted madness but caused it in those who played it, which is one of the proposed reasons Donizetti’s marked out the glass harmonica part and replaced it with flute prior to the work’s premiere. There are many other more rational explanations, the simplest being that the player just couldn’t play it, or that Donizetti needed faster notes than the instrument can provide. The long flute and voice cadenza which ends the slow section of the mad scene is not of the period, but was an invention of soprano Adelina Patti at least fifty years following Donizetti’s death. It has become, though, so much a part of the lore of the work that to leave it out would be a loss for opera fans and it can have enormous dramatic effect, a feeling of musical and dramatic improvisation, a sound that Lucia alone hears. 

Lucia di Lammermoor is the quintessence of its era. Flaubert, Zola, and Tolstoy all incorporated performances of Donizetti’s opera into their novels. Perhaps the most bizarrely delightful depiction of Lucia can be found in the 1997 film, The Fifth Element, starring Bruce Willis and Gary Oldman. Set 250 years in the future, opera has survived the centuries, and the Lucia mad scene is sung by a blue multi-tentacled androgynously evolved creature with a lovely soprano voice. Lucia di Lammermoor evokes a world of celebrated divas and divos possessed of a rare ability to spin silent air into beautiful living sound. The recent death of one of the great singers in history, Dame Joan Sutherland, brings to mind the wide variety of sopranos who have had success as Donizetti’s heroine. Maria Callas is often credited with the modern bel canto revival, and that is justified, except that the silver-voiced Lily Pons, Callas’ artistic polar-opposite, was singing most of the bel canto operas the world over, particularly her own famous Lucia, a generation before. (Ms. Pons was also fond of inserting the entire Lucia “Mad Scene” into the second act music lesson of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville!). But if Pons and a few others were admired and loved in the bel canto operas, it was a mentor of both Callas and Sutherland, conductor Tullio Serafin, who made the twentieth century world hear these operas as profound musical drama, not simply as thrones upon which divas occasionally sat. Serafin was a vocal coach as well as a conductor, and he uniquely understood the expressive qualities of the human voice and the demands composers Donizetti placed upon it.

Serafin had rare insight of both instrumental and vocal timbres, and the singular combination of rhythmic fluidity and propulsion, he understood and believed in the delicate and distinct musical architecture of these operas, that music is the drama and the drama is musical. These are the oft-forgotten qualities that exemplify the essence of the mysterious bel canto art. Critics are forever declaring someone the “new Sutherland” or pointing out the “Callas-like” qualities of a new soprano. This is just lazy fluff, not to be taken seriously, except that it is enormously unfair to young sopranos making their own way in their art, and Joan herself often railed against it. I can never forget the moment I first heard the voice of our current Lucia di Lammermoor, Albina Shagimuratova; I thought I had indeed stepped back into a golden age, for rarely had I experienced such tonal radiance coupled with a timbre that sounded like no one else I’d ever heard. But she is not a new Callas or Sills; she is unique in her gifted self with her own emerging qualities. Talented singers pay homage to a glorious past, yes, but not by copying it or trying to recreate it. They transcend it. Lucia is just such an opera, the type from which stars are made. Far beyond its Scottish setting, its interesting history, and its performing challenges, there lies within it that great spirit of the Romantic age exemplified in the expressive power of that most mysterious of all musical instruments, the human voice, and Lucia di Lammermoor is, more than anything, a celebration of that.

Patrick Summers
Vienna, Austria
November 18, 2010