Edited by Roger Parker and Ian Schofield (2026)
NR 142544
L’esule di Roma, first performed at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples in 1828, was the first Donizetti opera to enjoy a broad national and then international dissemination. It is thus a key element in understanding how his reputation took hold in the following years. However, the state of the surviving sources, in particular those that reveal the various shapes the opera took in subsequent revivals, is confusing, and showing every evidence that Donizetti (as usual) was undecided about the final shape of his score, preferring to reconfigure that shape to suit whatever local conditions were in place. In particular we can be sure that his autograph score offers us merely a first stage in the opera’s compositional history, and that there are several other versions that have an equal claim to authenticity.
On the most basic level, the present critical edition offers an entirely new reading of that first version of the opera. As well as correcting and refining innumerable small details of phrasing and articulation (in which decisions need to be made in virtually every single measure of the work), the present edition follows the criteria of the Donizetti critical edition in establishing and making clear – and performable – the usual plethora of conundrums that were left in a Donizetti score (which was, of course, a working document, never fashioned as a fassung letzter Hand of the opera). Crucial to the criteria of the edition are that the reasons for such decisions are exhaustively noted and discussed in a Critical Commentary, and given further context in a lengthy Historical Introduction and Source Descriptions.
But there are also larger issues at stake in what is offered here. Two obvious cases are outlined below.
The first is that, probably because of a cast change, the part of Publio changes voice type during the course of the opera. In the first number, he is a tenor; but then in the later stages of the autograph he becomes a baritone. Donizetti then sketched in an alternative baritone part for the first number. Our edition supplies both voices, thus allowing performers to decide for themselves which vocal configuration of this important figure they choose to employ.
The second case, much more serious still, is that, in this first version of his score – the one reported in his autograph – Donizetti left the principal tenor, Settimio, with almost nothing to do in the second half of the opera. This circumstance was clearly brought about by dissatisfaction with the tenor who first created the role, and was a defect that, in several subsequent revivals, Donizetti attempted to remedy by supplying at least three (perhaps four) second-act substitute arias for Settimio. In the present edition, we take the view that the absence of this aria was forced on the composer by external circumstances, and so we include as part of the main edition the first substitute aria he wrote for the character, written for La Scala some months later. What is more, as part of the edition, we have sought out the other arias he wrote (all of them completely unknown for nearly 200 years), and will publish them as Appendixes to the edition. The La Scala additional aria has already been performed in the Opera Rara recording made of a preliminary version of this edition (2024). When the edition is performed in Bergamo this November (2026), a further additional aria (one written for a revival in 1840 in Bergamo) will be used. In the latter case, the editors needed to orchestrate the piece, as it has survived only in vocal score.
Such tracing of the extensive reception of L’esule through published libretti and other material has been a necessary part of making the edition of L’esule di Roma, above all demonstrating the protean nature of the operatic object during this period. As we have seen, the opera may indeed have been celebrated for its unusual dramatic and musical solutions; but it also became famous for its seemingly endless ability to absorb alternative shapes; shapes that we have managed to restore in this edition.
In addition to making available a considerable body of music newly available to performers (all the replacement arias), there are also good arguments for periodically returning to the known traces the composer left of his opera – in this case overwhelmingly his hand-written score – and trying to configure them anew. Donizetti’s autograph score was written for performers who were completely immersed in a contemporary tradition and who thus had no need of the kind of notational accuracy and consistency modern performers need. In preparing such notation for modern performance, editorial decisions need, as mentioned, to be made on every page, indeed in virtually every bar of every instrumental part.
WP of the critical edition: 13.11.2026, Bergamo, Teatro Donizetti.