One of the most versatile and popular opera composers of all time, Gaetano Donizetti dominated his field for many years, but his success did not come easily. Born in 1797 into a desperately poor family in the northern Italian city of Bergamo, he was sent to charity schools, where he was quickly identified as promising music student. As a youth, however, he had to defy his parents, who did not want him in the theatre.

     Three student operas were written before he turned professional; and when he was twenty one, his first full-scale stage work was produced in Venice, launching a career that lasted nearly thirty years. Later commissions from impresarios and opera houses took him to Naples, Milan, Florence, Paris, and Vienna, among many other cities. In Vienna in 1843, he achieved the highest honor imaginable when the emperor named him the official Court Composer and Master of the Imperial Chapel, a post Mozart had once held. Over the course of his career, Donizetti wrote more than 75 operas and scores of other works: songs for the solo voice and difficult pieces for two or three voices or piano; chamber music, cantatas, hymns, and religious and orchestral works. Donizetti died in 1848.

The Background of Lucia di Lammermoor 
  
     The most popular of all Donizetti’s operas has always been Lucia di Lammermoor, which he wrote under a commission from a major theatre, the San Carlo Opera in Naples. This opera is based on The Bride of Lammermoor, Sir Walter Scott’s great Romantic novel, the plot of which Scott may have taken from an actual murder case when a bride killed her groom on their wedding night. 

     The librettist of Lucia was Salvatore Cammarano, a polished Neapolitan poet and playwright who wrote several librettos for Donizetti. Coming from a large clan of theatrical professionals: actors, comedians, writers, and stage managers, Cammarano also wrote texts for Giuseppe Verdi and other composers.

The Opera’s World Premiere and Subsequent Popularity
  
     After the premiere of Lucia in 1835, the opera became so wildly successful that the world’s “celebrity” singers wanted to appear in it, and it almost immediately became a showpiece for coloratura sopranos. The busiest theatres scheduled performances of it by the hundreds, and soon Lucia was being produced all over Europe and even in South America and the Caribbean. Having reached London in 1838 and the United States in 1841, it has remained in the world’s repertory for more than 170 years. Its success is certainly owed to Donizetti’s genius at bringing characters to vivid life while achieving a perfect balance between voices and orchestra. In a word, Lucia is a seamless, poetic, heartrending Romantic work.

The Hapless Bride and Her Fate
  
     When Donizetti was looking for a source to use for his new opera, he said he wanted to write about “love, violent love, without which operas are cold.” That is what he did in Lucia, which is set in the Lammermoor Hills of Scotland. The action takes place in the turbulent 1680s and 1690s, when several European countries were at war and many Scottish families were torn apart by clan wars. The hero and heroine of the opera are Edgardo of Ravenswood and Lucia Ashton, whose families are mortal enemies. Because Lucia and Edgardo have secretly exchanged rings with each other and taken private vows, they consider themselves husband and wife. Their happiness, however, is destroyed when Lucia’s villainous brother, Enrico Ashton, forces her into an arranged marriage to save their family’s fortunes.
  
     The opera conveys a weighty moral message by showing how brutally Lucia is treated by her brother. At the same time it lays bare the wretched status of women, whose oppression was then fully sanctioned by law. To protect her virginity, a girl or woman could be locked up at home for years, a prisoner of her family’s need to make a “respectable” marriage for her. The moment she married, her condition worsened, for her all her money, her property, and even her children became her husband’s under law, and he could beat her or rape her at will. Divorce was almost impossible, and if she left her husband, she was forced to leave her children with him. It is certainly no exaggeration to say that women and children were no more than mere property for men to dispose of however they wished. In practice, this meant that from childhood on, millions of girls were forced to show respect and abject humility to all adults, speak with low voices, and be “as meek as lambs.” From birth to death, they lived without ever taking a single breath of freedom.
  
     Quite naturally, this repression of every emotion, every hope, and every desire was required for women to live “normally.” Lucia is the absolute personification of the horrors such total repression would cause. Enrico, Lucia’s brother, is desperate to see her married to Lord Bucklaw, and when she resists, he lies to her and shows her forged letters proving that Edgardo is in love with someone else. Close to a total breakdown, she feels chills and fever and is close to fainting, but she bows to Enrico’s relentless pressure and signs the marriage contract with Lord Bucklaw. At that moment, in one of opera’s most electrifying scenes, Edgardo bursts in upon the celebration and curses Lucia for betraying their love. After he is driven out, the formal rites go forward, and Lucia is led to her marriage bed. There, driven to madness, she kills her groom and emerges from the bridal chamber drenched in blood. Edgardo takes refuge in the cemetery where his ancestors lie, but people from Ashton’s castle tell him she is dying. Hearing the tolling of the bell for the dead, Edgardo kills himself.
  
     It is surely no accident that Lucia di Lammermoor remains Donizetti’s most popular opera, for it so much more than a Romantic tale with a touch of Gothic horror. Instead it is an intimate portrait of a woman driven mad by the repression of her very self.