Edited by Eleonora Di Cintio (2024)
One volume: full score + critical commentary
NR 142137
Caterina Cornaro was the last of Donizetti’s revised melodramas to debut during composer’s lifetime. From what we’ve been able to reconstruct, a host of anomalies regarding the work’s ontogeny come to light, including a sudden interruption in Donizetti’s work on the opera, which led to what would be, for the composer, an unusually drawn-out undertaking; a change in venues – from Vienna to Naples, over the course of six months; censorial interference that effectively sabotaged the production; and the fact that Donizetti himself did not preside over rehearsals for the only two performances of the opera during the 19th century.
Given the opera’s beleaguered history, we opted to base the critical edition of Caterina Cornaro on Donizetti’s original score, which is to say, the composition that the author sent to production before any third parties meddled with it. Based mainly on the manuscript of the score, the critical edition restores everything that was cut or changed for Caterina Cornaro’s premiere in Naples. This includes Donizetti’s handwritten lyrics, most of which were scrapped and replaced by lyrics introduced by the censor, as well as whole swaths of music that were eliminated, unbeknownst to Donizetti. We also consulted several other recently discovered manuscript sources, which allowed us to fashion an appendix detailing all known changes that Donizetti made to the score after January 1844. In particular, there is a new version of the grand finale, featuring two opening sections in the form of accompanied recitatives, the first of which is brought to light for the first time. Lastly, thanks to preparatory material for Caterina Cornaro housed in the San Pietro a Majella Conservatory Library in Naples and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris (sketches, notes, fragments of the score), the critical edition provides, in the comment section, a reconstruction of the various phases involved in the process of composing Caterina Cornaro.
Thus, the newly restored version of Gaetano Donizetti’s Caterina Cornaro is at long last available to performers and academics. It is surely one of the composer’s boldest works from his intense period of experimentation with the melodrama genre, which Donizetti further explored during the final phase of his career. From another perspective, the presence of political content in the opera, which only now may be fully grasped, means that Caterina Cornaro may take its rightful place as a major work of Italian melodrama, whose heyday lasted throughout the 1840s, spurred on by the yearning for self-determination spreading across much of Europe at that time.
The full score will be available for sale by April 2025.