Gaetano
Donizetti
Born: 29th November 1797 - Died. 8th April 1848
Gaetano Donizetti was a composer from Bergamo, Lombardy.
Born in 1797, he was one of the foremost composers of
Bel canto operatic repertoire during the first half of the 19th
Century.
Though Donizetti was not from a musical background, he was awarded a full
scholarship to a school founded by German composer Simon Mayr. Following this, Mayr
was instrumental in Donizetti’s enrolment at the Bologna Academy, where the nineteen
year old wrote his first opera, Il Pigmalione.
At the age of 25, Donizetti was offered a contract to write for the Teatro San Carlo in
Napoli that prompted his move to the city for 22 years. Donizetti wrote over 60 operas
during his career and of these, 51 were premiered in the city. Initially, his comic operas
were the most popular, but his first great success was the opera seria, Zoraida di
Granata, which premiered in Rome in 1822. This shift was furthered with the premiere
of Anna Bolena in 1830 that was particularly popular in Italy.
Success in a variety of genres followed, including comic operas L’elisir d’amore (1832)
and Don Pasquale (1843) and historical dramas Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) and
Roberto Deveroux (1837), all of which were set to Italian libretti. Donizetti had,
however, started to become irate with the censorial limitations in Italy. He felt that, with
an offer from the Paris Opéra in 1838, he would have more freedom to choose his
subject matter and would make more money from working in France. Over the next
ten years working in Paris, he wrote new operas with French libretti, including the tragic
Les martyrs, a French version of his previous Poliuto. More operas were premiered in
the 1840s until Donizetti fell ill with syphilis in 1843 and his output diminished. After a
few institutionalised years, Donizetti died in his hometown of Bergamo in April 1848.