Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Donizetti: L'Ange de Nisida

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Get ready for a truly ear-opening opera experience on radio! A lost opera by Gaetano Donizetti has received its world premiere recording through the agency of Opera Rara, the record company in the UK whose declared mission is "to rediscover, restore, record and perform the forgotten operatic heritage of the nineteenth century."

We think of Donizetti as a composer of Italian opera, but he also wrote operas in French language for production in Paris. L'Ange de Nisida was Donizetti's follow-up creation for the highly successful French Lucie de Lammermoor (1839) at the Theatre de a Renaissance. But the theater shortly went bankrupt and Donizetti's work was no longer needed. Opera composers have long been accustomed to recycling their own material. For L'Ange de Nisida, Donizetti borrowed a lot of material from his Adelaïde, and from L'Ange de Nisida he moved on to take pages from that music to apply to La Favorite and Don Pasquale. So there isn't a complete autograph score of L'Ange de Nisida. It had to be reconstructed like a jigsaw puzzle from pieced-together pages of music paper. But of the written-down music on paper about 97% has been recovered. The rest was orchestrated and partially composed by Mark Fitzpatrick. The Italian musicologist Candida Mantica has prepared the complete performing edition of L'Ange de Nisida.

Nisida is another one of those idyllic little islands off the coast of Naples, like Capri. The title of the opera could be loosely translated as "Falling in Love on the Isle of Nisida." The opera's story in part concerns the onetime king of Naples and his mistress. Despite the French language libretto, this opera falls like Adelaïde into the genre of Italian opera semiseria. It has its comic elements. Two acclaimed concert performances of L'Ange de Nisida were given at the Royal Opera House, London in 2018. Sir Mark Elder conducts the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House and the Royal Opera Chorus, with a five member singing cast. Opera Rara wasted no time in making the live-in-performance world premiere recording available to the public. The entire opera fits onto two generously timed compact discs, issued earlier this year.