Anne Boleyn, Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth I. These and several other figures from the fabled British past were seized on by Italian opera composers of the 1830s, with Donizetti making something of a specialty of such figures, often allowing them to dominate the plot with their tangled personal histories, and dominate the musical argument with their vocal extravagances. What can such operas mean to us today? For some they might merely be further examples of the dramatic illogicality of bel canto opera, of a kind of theatre in which soprano roulades mean so much more than dramatic situations. The frequent license that Italian librettists (following their French and German dramatic models) took with English history might seem to confirm such ideas. But it is well to be aware that, for nineteenth-century Italians, Tudor England had little of that nostalgic glow in which we often see it these days. We seem endlessly to take pleasure in the generous costumes and atmospheric lighting, not to mention the spectacle of Britain unequivocally ruling the waves. But in Italy in the revolutionary 1830s, with political arguments about the best forms of government continually in the air, the dominant image of the Tudors was of a harsh, absolutist form of government: an ambience illustrating the fact that power could and did corrupt those who wielded it, causing them to destroy even those they held dear. This was one reason why Donizetti, consolidating his international career, chose such subjects to set to music. Far from indulging in an escape from contemporary concerns, the Tudor ambience was a chance to confront difficult questions about society, questions pressing ever more insistently on Italian opera-goers.

But there is also another, more intimately musical story to Donizetti’s run of ‘Tudor’ operas. The progress from Anna Bolena (1830) to Maria Stuarda (1835) to Roberto Devereux (1837) allowed Donizetti in each case to put centre stage a powerful but flawed female character, in the process exploring a new kind of vocal expression, one that gradually became emancipated from the Rossinian traditions in which the composer had grown up.

Anna Bolena is a canny mixture of the old and the new. In comparison with some of the more violent, experimental works of Donizetti’s Neapolitan years (in particular now-forgotten operas like Il Paria and Imelda de’ Lambertazzi), it may seem somewhat contained and Rossinian, with numbers like Anna’s cantabile in the final scene, ‘Al dolce guidami’, sounding positively backward-looking in its indulgence of vocal ornamentation. However, this scene is, as in the other two operas, preceded by a lengthy, ‘scene-setting’ orchestral introduction, one in which the woodwind play a prominent role, and in which moments of harmonic surprise constantly emerge. Lastly comes Anna’s final cabaletta, ‘Coppia iniqua’, which displays a taste for more forceful vocal utterance;  but here the ornamentation is strictly controlled and in this sense likely to remind us of the young Verdi, who learned so much from Donizetti’s example.

Maria Stuarda was originally written for Naples but then fell victim to censorship and was given its premiere at Milan’s La Scala. The soprano’s final scene bears obvious structural similarities to that in Anna Bolena: both are formed around a two-movement aria, albeit with substantial introductions and dramatic inserts; but in Maria Stuarda everything is on an altogether grander scale. There are again anticipations of Verdi, particularly in the “Preghiera” (Prayer), which develops into a great choral hymn (Verdi was a young student in Milan, regularly attending La Scala, when the Stuarda premiere occurred; one feels he must have been listening with peculiar attention to this Preghiera). The slow movement of Maria’s aria, ‘Di un cor che muore’, unlike its counterpart in Anna Bolena, is almost entirely shorn of ornament until the very final stages, with the urgency of Maria’s passion showing itself in a series of short, declamatory statements. The closing cabaletta, ‘Ah se un giorno’, is a remarkably expansive experiment, making much of contrast between major and minor modes and again hardly giving way to vocal ornament until the final moments.

Roberto Devereux, first performed at Naples’s San Carlo theatre, is one of the last operas Donizetti wrote before deserting Italy and devoting his final years to writing operas for Paris and Vienna. Although its final scene is again formed around a two-movement aria for the soprano, one can immediately see yet another change in style. From the earliest moments of the introduction the music is more harmonically complex and orchestrally varied, and this atmosphere continues into the soprano’s slow movement, the positively Chopinesque cantabile ‘Vivi, ingrato’, with its constantly surprising harmonic inflections. The closing cabaletta, ‘Quel sangue versato’, is equally restless: a passionate series of interjections, with a notably angular vocal line, showing the distance Donizetti had travelled in the years since Anna Bolena.

In all these operas Donizetti as usual carefully ‘tailored’ the leading roles to his leading sopranos. If anyone doubts the pre-eminence of such performers in the operatic economy, just follow the money: Donizetti’s fee for composing Anna Bolena was 4000 Austrian Lire; but his lead soprano Giuditta Pasta got more than ten times that for singing it. Pasta’s famed versatility – her strength both as a purveyor of rapid ornamental writing and in simpler, more emotionally direct writing – is everywhere to be seen in the opera she ‘created’, perhaps particularly in the great final scene, where Anna inexorably draws all the audience’s sympathy towards her. The same chemistry between composer and performer occurred in Maria Stuarda and Roberto Devereux. In both the lead soprano role was written for the formidable Giuseppina Ronzi De Begnis (also, as it happens, a noted Anna Bolena). We can hear her voice, her flexibility, her command of agility and her communicative powers, in almost every bar of the music Donizetti wrote for her: a great tribute to the power of the human voice to inspire composers on new expressive paths.