Maria Stuarda
Maria Stuarda is a tragic opera, in two acts, by Gaetano Donizetti, to a libretto by Giuseppe Bardari, based on Andrea Maffei's translation of Friedrich Schiller's 1800 play Maria Stuart.
The opera is one of a number of operas by Donizetti which deal with the Tudor period in English history, including Anna Bolena, Roberto Devereux and Il castello di Kenilworth. The lead female characters of the operas Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda, and Roberto Devereux are often referred to as the "Three Donizetti Queens". The story is loosely based on the lives of Mary, Queen of Scots and her cousin Queen Elizabeth I. Schiller had invented the confrontation of the two Queens, who in fact never met.
After a series of problems surrounding its presentation in Naples after the final dress rehearsal – including having to be re-written for a totally different location, a different time period, and with Buondelmonte as its new title – Maria Stuarda as we know it today premiered on 30 December 1835 at La Scala in Milan.
Composition history
The appeal of Mary Stuart and Scottish history in 19th-century Italy
In a variety of areas – drama, literature – England in the Tudor era exerted a fascination upon continental Europeans in an extraordinary way. In literature, it has been noted that more than 20,000 books have appeared about Mary's life and that, within two years of her death, stage plays also began to appear. In addition to Schiller's Maria Stuart, there had been another influential play, Count Vittorio Alfieri's Maria Stuarda written in 1778 in which "that unfortunate queen is represented unsuspicious, impatient of contradiction and violent in her attachments."When it came to what had been handed down about Elizabeth I to Donizetti and other Italian composers, opera stage director Stephen Lawless notes that the continental view would have been very different from the Anglo-centric one of Elizabeth as Good Queen Bess, as Gloriana, and as the one who routed Catholicism from England's shores. But from an Italian perspective, Elizabeth was a heretic and, indeed, a bastard since "her father Henry VIII had never obtained an annulment from the Pope to end his marriage to Catherine of Aragon in order to marry his second wife Anne Boleyn" Therefore, to European Catholics, Mary was a martyr and the legitimate ruler of England, a sympathetic character contrasted with Elizabeth, who was traditionally cast in a darker role, often "as unrestrainedly jealous, willful, and easily over-wrought. This is the portrait of Elizabeth found, not too unexpectedly, in Bardari's libretto".
As far as Italian opera of the primo ottocento is concerned, these attitudes found their way into the works which poured forth: they covered a large portion of the Tudor era, including works about Henry VIII's first daughter, Mary, who became Mary I of England, known as "Bloody Mary" for enforcing the country's strict return to Catholicism. The appeal of these operas has been expressed by Professor Alexander Weatherson in the 2009 Donizetti Society Newsletter as follows :
But Weatherson concludes:
The libretto for ''Maria Stuarda''
Having seen Schiller's play in Milan in an Italian translation, Donizetti approached the famed librettist Felice Romani, who had written a successful libretto in 1830 for Anna Bolena, the opera which secured the composer's place as one of the leaders of his day. Wanting a strong and powerful subject for his new work, the composer's idea was to have Romani prepare a libretto about Mary Stuart, but the librettist appears to have ignored him, perhaps because of his desire to get away from writing for the theatre, which he increasingly found to be distasteful.Therefore, the composer sought the services of Giuseppe Bardari, a seventeen-year-old law student with no experience, who became the librettist, thus giving Donizetti the opportunity to work closely with him, or to even write entire scenes himself and to greatly influence the structure of the work. Schiller's play had been translated into Italian by Andrea Maffei and it was this translation upon which Bardari relied. Although he was forced to eliminate "almost all of the play's political and religious references and the number of characters from 21 to six, the libretto does adds the love story of Mary Stuart and Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, which had no basis in fact, albeit that Leicester had been considered by Elizabeth to be a possible husband for Mary. At the time of the events portrayed, Dudley was actually 55, Elizabeth was 53 and Mary was 44.
However, the libretto does retain the fictional meeting between Mary and Elizabeth in a very dramatic confrontation. While its musical elements are noted below, "the confrontation....so essential to the dramatic structure of both play and opera, it is, surely, a translation into action of a clash which was implicit in history – of a clash which took place in the letters the queens exchanged".
''Maria Stuarda'' becomes ''Buondelmonte''
An incident occurred at a rehearsal of the opera which is recounted by Harold Rosenthal:The rehearsal continued, she sang, the matter went no further. After its successful dress rehearsal, the King of Naples suddenly banned performances of the opera "perhaps because his Queen, Maria Christina, was a direct descendant of Mary Stuart" or "the sight of one queen calling another 'vile bastard' on the stage of the Teatro San Carlo was too much for the Neapolitan sensibility". But it has also been simply noted by Professor Weatherson that "politics were the cause" in that reputed secret seditious behavior against Elizabeth I by Mary "made the decapitated monarch unpopular in Bourbon Naples".
Donizetti responded to the ban by suggesting another subject, that being Giovanna Gray, but after it was also rejected, he set about revising and removing large segments of the score and, by quickly employing Pietro Salatino as new librettist, created a different work. He named it Buondelmonte referring to a character who appears in Dante's Paradiso "who apparently caused a war between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines". But prior to its first performance, the composer expressed his concerns in a letter to librettist Jacopo Ferretti :
Inevitably perhaps, when Buondelmonte was first given on 18 October 1834 in Naples, it was not successful; it received only six performances and it was never performed again.
When forced to simplify part of the music for the original Elisabetta, Donizetti scribbled on the margin "But it's ugly!", and further on refused a change, writing "Do it, and may you live for a hundred years!"
Performance history
''Maria Stuarda'' appears in Italy: its 19th–century rise and fall
Although there was an attempt to mount Maria Stuarda at La Scala in late 1834, it came to nothing and, finally, the opera was planned to be given on 28 December 1835 at La Scala, Milan with the famous mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran in the title role. Donizetti "tailored that role" for her with "improved recitatives, and extended scenes". In addition, he created a new overture. The censor had approved the libretto, although Ashbrook speculates that some of the original wording had been changed to gain that approval.In the end, the opening night performance was postponed due to Malibran's indisposition, but when it did occur on 30 December, it was clear that both lead role singers were in poor voice. Donizetti described the evening as "painful, from start to finish". It was quickly clear that the audience disapproved, as did the authorities for different reasons because, instead of singing donna vile as the substitute language for vil bastarda, Malibran rejected the censor's revisions and sang the original words. Several better-performed presentations later, the Milan censors clamped down, imposed conditions which Malibran would not accept, and she withdrew. Realizing the difficulties of a run in Italy, a London première was planned, but Malibran's death at the age of 28 in 1836 cancelled the project.
Except for the several performances of the Buondelmonte version noted above, productions of Maria Stuarda were staged in Reggio Emilia and Modena, in Ferrara and Malta, in Florence, Ancona, Venice and Madrid, Bologna, Porto, Granada, Málaga, and Barcelona plus Venice and Padua, Lisbon, and finally Pesaro, all variously trimmed versions. Naples finally heard the opera in 1865, but the work was ignored for the next 130 years. It has been suggested that, with the exception of Venice and Naples, most of these locations "were of peripheral importance" and therefore the opera "never found its way to the stages of Vienna, Paris, or London", the Italian reception being a major requirement to launch an international success.
Revivals in the 20th century and beyond
Prior to the discovery of the original autograph in Sweden in the 1980s, the only performances which began the 20th century revival were those of what Ashbrook described as 19th Century "sanitized" versions. The first one of the century was that given in 1958 in Bergamo, with the US premiere, in concert form, following on 16 November 1964 in Carnegie Hall. The premiere in England took place on 1 March 1966 in London. There was also a Maggio Musicale Fiorentino production in 1967 which starred Leyla Gencer and Shirley Verrett.By the late 1980s, after a critical edition was prepared from the autograph, what was revealed at that point was that Donizetti had re-used a couple of numbers in La favorite, and that in post-Favorite performances, starting with one in Naples in 1865, they had been replaced by different numbers from his other lesser-known operas. The critical edition was first given in Bergamo in 1989 in a two-act version.
The first staged performance in the US took place at the San Francisco Opera on 12 November 1971 with Joan Sutherland in the title role, while the first staged performances of the "Three Queens" operas together in the US took place in 1972 at the New York City Opera, all three operas staged by Tito Capobianco. Presentations of the trio earned some degree of fame for American soprano Beverly Sills who took the starring role in each. Dame Janet Baker sang the title role in a production at English National Opera conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras beginning in 1973, which was recorded and filmed.
The opera has been given in a variety of European and North American locations in recent times, which begin to increasingly establish it as part of the standard repertoire. A production which was noted as "no longer a display piece for rival divas, nor does it maintain the simplistic view that the opera presents Mary as noble victim and Elizabeth as vengeful monster here, the rival queens are both profoundly tragic, complex figures", was given by English Touring Opera in 2005 and Maria Stuarda was presented at both the Teater Vanemuine in Estonia and Pacific Opera in Victoria, B.C. during the 2011/12 season. Between 1 January 2011 and 31 December 2013, the opera has seen 86 performances of 18 productions in 16 cities, according to Operabase.
Other US companies have presented some or all of the "Three Donizetti Queens" operas. Among them has been the Dallas Opera with both Anna Bolena and Maria Stuarda to date. The Minnesota Opera staged all three between 2009 and 2012. In April 2012, the Houston Grand Opera presented the Minnesota Opera's production of the work, but casting mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato in the title role. She had sung the role of Elisabetta in Geneva in 2005 and, when the Metropolitan Opera gave Maria Stuarda in January/February 2013, it also starred DiDonato as Maria. As with Anna Bolena, which preceded it in 2011, this was the company's first staging of the work.
Welsh National Opera presented all three of Donizetti's "Queens" operas throughout the UK from September to November 2013. This historic season was premiered in Cardiff then toured to venues in England and Wales in 2013.