Zoraida di Granata

The opera chosen for the #donizetti200 project – thanks to which every edition of the festival includes a work written by Donizetti exactly two centuries earlier – is Zoraida di Granata in the second version, that of 1824. This opera had premiered two years earlier, on 28 January 1822, at the Teatro Argentina in Rome, and was the first great success of Donizetti’s career, even though at the very last moment Gaetano had had to rewrite for a mezzo-soprano en travesti the part of the male protagonist, Abenamet, which had initially been composed for a tenor, killed by an aneurysm on stage a few days earlier while singing an opera by Pacini. Two years later, impresario Paterni asked Donizetti to revise the score, expanding the part of Abenamet for the great contralto Rosmunda Pisaroni. In this new version, the opera was presented, again at the Teatro Argentina, on 7 January 1824. It was not such a success as two years earlier, probably more due to the inexhaustible thirst for novelty of the public of the time than to any real fault of the opera, one of the most interesting of Donizetti’s first creative season.

At the Donizetti Opera, Zoraida di Granata is presented in a new staging directed by Bruno Ravella, in a co-production with the prestigious Irish festival of Wexford, where, however, it was performed in the 1822 version. On the podium is Alberto Zanardi, a young conductor who has been engaged for years “behind the scenes” at the festival. In the roles of the two lovers, two singers who are steadily growing in success and fame, soprano Zuzana Marková (Zoraida) and mezzo-soprano Cecilia Molinari (Abenamet), while tenor Konu Kim (already in L’ange de Nisida) will be the perfidious Almuzir. Next to them, in the supporting roles, the young talents of Bottega Donizetti.