Roberto Devereux

The opera has a male title role, but the real main character is Elisabetta. It is 1837, at the Real Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, and Gaetano Donizetti gives an exceptional part to one of his best-loved and most brilliant performers, the soprano Giuseppina Ronzi de Begnis, his “dark muse”, a specialist in tormented, violent, delirious female characters. Two years after Lucia di Lammermoor, Salvadore Cammarano stirred once again Donizetti’s genius with a concise, compact and highly effective libretto, in line with what the composer proclaimed in a famous letter: «Voglio amore, che senza questo i soggetti sono freddi, e amor violento» («I want love, for subjects are cold without it, and violent love»). The opera ends with a shocking scene of hallucinatory delirium that gives new dramatic meaning to the primadonna’s customary final rondo. In addition, Donizetti’s outstanding talent is also helped by the British setting, among those Tudors who had already inspired him in three previous operas, Elisabetta al castello di Kenilworth, Anna Bolena and Maria Stuarda, and which is also reiterated in the brilliant symphony explicitly quoting the English national anthem God Save the King.

Roberto Devereux is among the most significant titles in the mature production of Donizetti and one of the most successful rediscoveries of twentieth-century Donizetti-Renaissance. At the Festival, it is entrusted to the musical director of the Donizetti Opera, Riccardo Frizza, and staged by a great Shakespearean director (the “real” Shakespeare was involved in the conspiracy of the Earl of Essex), Stephen Langridge, artistic director of the Glyndebourne Festival. On stage, four international opera stars such as John Osborn, Raffaella Lupinacci, Simone Piazzola and, in the fiery role of Elisabetta, the Italian-Australian soprano Jessica Pratt.