Edited by Eleonora Di Cintio (2025)
One volume: full score + critical commentary
NR 142837
In his 1882 book In chiave di baritono – a sort of memoir studded with operatic anecdotes – Italian journalist, author and poet Antonio Ghislanzoni describes the musical extravaganzas at La Scala forty years earlier, recalling Gaetano Donizetti’s Il furioso all’isola di San Domingo as one of the most successful operas of its time. Not long after its premiere at the Teatro Valle in Rome on January 2, 1833, Il furioso would become one of Donizetti’s most popular melodramas. It played steadily to packed houses – from major venues to the smallest theaters – across Europe and overseas until the mid-nineteenth century.
To honor the contract he had signed with impresario Giovanni Paterni, Donizetti teamed up with his friend Jacopo Ferretti, a much sought-after librettist in early nineteenth-century Rome, to create an opera based on the story of lovesick Cardenio, a character from Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. At the time, that subject had been used in spoken dramas, in various forms, which were performed throughout central and southern Italy. In the hands of Ferretti and Donizetti, Il furioso became a melodramma semiserio – which is to say, a semi-serious opera – combining a tragic element embodied by the protagonist Cardenio, with a comic or even grotesque element, as represented by the slave Kaidamà, and the “half-strong and half-delicate” (in Donizetti’s words) Eleonora, along with, and to varying degrees, the rest of the cast.
Rome’s Teatro Valle was a modest theater. It certainly was not the city’s largest concert venue, nor the one with the best orchestra or the most elite company of singers. Still, with the means available, Ferretti and Donizetti managed to pull off an extraordinarily well-balanced performance, rife with an unstoppable inner energy and centered around music that displays remarkable ease in its shifts from lively tones to melancholy fractures, through a series of formal solutions that are at least in part irregular, shaped by the unpredictable conduct of Cardenio and of all those who, in a certain sense, descend with him into sheer madness.
Based on Donizetti’s autograph score, the critical edition of Il furioso all’isola di San Domingo presents the opera in a form that most closely mirrors the one seen by audiences at its first run in Rome. The main text of the critical edition also includes a series of vocal variants as transmitted through the vocal score with piano reduction, which was published by Ricordi in 1833. Donizetti himself took an active part in the score’s preparation.
Appendices in the first group include several modifications related to the initial run of Il furioso. There is the two-movement instrumental piece – which the sources refer to as the Sinfonia. Donizetti had already prepared it for the premiere, but was forced to cut it out shortly before the performance for practical reasons. The recitativo semplice featuring Bartolomeo and Kaidamà, which follows Eleonora and Cardenio’s duet in Act II, is significantly longer than the version preserved in the autograph score, which the composer must have reworked during the first run of performances.
In the wake of its premiere run, Il furioso attracted the attention of several Milanese publishers. They launched a fierce commercial battle to secure the rights to Donizetti’s score. The no-holds-barred struggle even involved a few copyists specialized in bootleg versions. One of the latter appears to have produced an unauthorized and likely incomplete copy of Il furioso, which made its way to the stage of Teatro Carignano in Torino in late summer 1833. The text for the Torino performances was reworked and used for a production that caused a stir of enthusiasm. A few months later, a copy derived from the Torino version found its way to Milano, just as Donizetti happened to be passing through. There, he was “snared” (as Donizetti himself put it) by Teodoro Gottardi, the then impresario in charge of operations at La Scala, who convinced him to supervise the staging of Il furioso planned for the fall season.
Milano was a focal point of the European operatic landscape of the early 1830s. Success at La Scala would pave the way for Il furioso and its composer throughout the continent. So, despite the fact that the score he was presented with in Milano was to no small extent a forgery, Donizetti plowed ahead and “patched things together” (again, his own words). He made a few necessary adjustments, tolerated the presence of music that was not his own, and accepted various proposals for arias from the singers that had been hired for the La Scala run.
The second group of the critical edition’s appendices spotlights the modifications of Il furioso all’isola di San Domingo made for the La Scala production overseen by Donizetti. They have been reconstructed based on the surviving sources and include a short instrumental passage added before Fernando’s aria in Act I; the wholly revised section that follows the duet featuring Eleonora and Cardenio in Act II; and the only replacement aria of which a record survives – “Nel piacer di questo dì,” sung by the soprano Eugenia Tadolini (Eleonora), which substituted the final rondo “Se pietoso d’un oblio.” Even before it became incorporated into Il furioso, the piece – written by Donizetti in the late 1820s in circumstances which we know little or nothing of – was one of the morceaux favoris of several singers active at that time in Italy. One of them, Caroline Ungher, included it in an 1831 Rome production of I pazzi per Progetto, which she took part in. A local publisher, Litografia delle Belle Arti, later issued a vocal score of the aria with piano reduction, accompanied by Ungher’s own variations. They too have been recovered and are included in the critical edition’s appendix. Indeed, they constitute an authoritative example of the vocal practice of the period – one which surely appertains to the history and provenance of Gaetano Donizetti’s Il furioso all’isola di San Domingo.