Donizetti's first ‘affare di Parigi’: an unknown rondò-finale for Gianni da Calais

Abstract

Donizetti's involvement with Paris has been understood to date from February 1834, when Rossini, acting as the Théâtre Italien's music director, commissioned Marino Faliero for performance the following winter. Though written in Italy, the work was substantially revised in Paris during the two months Donizetti spent there before the première on 12 March 1835, hence William Ashbrook's assertion that Donizetti ‘wrote for the first time for Paris, absorbing the musical tastes of that city, when he presented Marino Faliero at the Théâtre Italien’. While this opera unquestionably remains the one that officially launched the composer's Parisian career, new manuscript and printed musical sources reveal that Donizetti's ties to the city actually date back to 1833, when plans were laid for productions of two of his earlier operas: Gianni di Parigi (1831) and Gianni da Calais (1828). Like Marino Faliero, the first of these works was composed in Italy with a Paris (or a London) première in mind, Donizetti having hoped diat Giovanni Battista Rubini would introduce it at one of his benefit performances soon after rejoining the Italiens (part of the troupe spent spring and summer seasons at the King's Theatre). A close study of the work might shed light on the composer's understanding (or ignorance) of operatic practice in the city at this point in his career; indeed, it was precisely because Gianni di Parigi was so French at least in terms of its libretto (Felice Romani's adaptation of Claude Godard d'Aucour de Saint-Just's libretto for Boieldieu's classic and closely protected Jean de Paris, in the repertory of the Opéra-Comique since 1812) that the comic melodramma was never mounted in Paris. But it was the second work, composed for the Teatro del Fondo in Naples (where it was premièred on 2 August 1828), and performed at the Théâtre Italien twice, on 17 December 1833 and 4 January 1834, that Donizetti actually helped adapt to Parisian taste.

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