A common narrative about Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848) casts his serious operas of the 1820s, mostly written for the theatres of Naples, as – to be brief – the work of a journeyman, by necessity a follower of Rossini. The breakthrough is then said to come with Anna Bolena, written in 1830 for Milan and from there spreading throughout the Italian peninsula and to the major European capitals, thus paving the way for the great successes of the next ten years, including Lucrezia Borgia and Lucia di Lammermoor. Such a story, surely not by coincidence, chimes neatly with our present-day Donizetti repertoire, in which the first serious opera to receive regular revivals is indeed Anna Bolena. In other words, it congratulates contemporary operatic habits. However, a closer look at (and a closer listen to) some of those serious operas from the ‘forgotten’ Neapolitan 1820s tells a different tale, one in which L’esule di Roma is, as it happens, a prime exhibit.

As usual at this period, we know little about the opera’s genesis. The librettist was Domenico Gilardoni, Donizetti’s chief collaborator during this period. The subject they chose was based on Luigi Marchionni’s play Il proscritto romano (Venice, 1820), which in turn derived from an earlier French play about Androcles and the lion (a tale already well known in Italy in many formats). Renamed L’esule di Roma (an alternative word for ‘exile’, as proscritto had acquired uncomfortable political implications in 1820s Naples), the opera was premiered at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples on New Year’s Day 1828. It was immediately proclaimed a public success, and this in spiteof the fact that the first performance was attended by a large contingent of the Neapolitan court: royal personages whose presence often tended to subdue the reactions of their loyal subjects. During the ensuing season, it was staged a further 20 or so times and then remained in the Neapolitan repertory into the 1840s – a singular achievement in those swiftly changing operatic times.

Part of this initial success must, of course, have been due to the principal singers, all of them much praised: tenor Berardo Winter as Settimio, the exile of the title; soprano Adelaide Tosi as his beloved Argelia; and, considered best of all, bass-baritone Luigi Lablache as Argelia’s father Murena, tortured by the fact that his machinations were responsible for Settimio’s banishment. However, the most extraordinary feature of the reception is that – although the opera was played before an audience generally thought of as conservative and tradition-worshipping, forever thinking back fondly to the times when the ‘Neapolitan school’ was unequivocally at the forefront of Italian music – it was precisely the most innovative, daring aspects of Donizetti’s new opera that caught the public’s and the critics’ imaginations. Central to this innovation is the character of Murena. Unlike the usual, unbending patriarch of stock melodrama, Murena, as depicted in Gilardoni’s libretto, is from the start a wavering, unstable figure, full of regrets and
anxiety about his past iniquity. Taking his cue from this novel aspect of the libretto, Donizetti enthusiastically embraced Murena’s instability in his music for the character. Even in Murena’s most conventional moments, such as his two-movement aria embedded in the opening Introduzione, he is forever prone to unpredictable outbursts and unusual vocal effects. Both the slow movement and the cabaletta of this opening aria (‘Per lui… nel mentre’ and ‘M’appare mai sempre’) have virtually no trace of continuous lyrical line, the opening statements in both cases being little more than an accumulation of declamatory proclamations, with agitated orchestration only emphasising the sense of unease. Murena’s aria in the second act (‘Entra nel Circo… Ahi misero’) takes this unconventional style to even greater extremes: the accumulation of guilt has by this stage in the drama cast Murena into madness: in a remarkable anticipation of Donizetti’s famous mad-scenes of the 1830s, the character’s vocal discourse is built from disjointed fragments of recollection and horrified anticipations of the future his wickedness has set in motion.

In comparison with Murena, the two young lovers are more conventional characters. Argelia is most obviously Rossinian in vocal style, particularly in the opera’s finale, in which the plot’s rather precipitate happy ending is celebrated by a so-called Rondò finale (‘Ogni tormento, qual nebbia al vento’), with streams of soprano coloratura celebrating the restoration of order to a dangerously unstable state. (One imagines that the King of Naples, ruling over the revolution-prone ‘Kingdom of the Two Sicilies’, might well have sighed contentedly at this denouement.) Perhaps not surprisingly, Argelia is at her most affecting in her second-act duet with her father, in which her gentle melodic idiom proves to have an eminently dramatic function in calming her troubled parent. Her exiled lover Settimio is a more complex case. His aria and duet with Argelia in the first act also present a character reminiscent of Rossinian vocal ways, although with far less ornamental exuberance. But, at least in the shape in which the opera was first performed, he virtually disappears from the action in the second half, only returning at the very end to narrate his unlikely, lion-assisted escape from the Roman Colosseum. Small surprise, then, that in the opera’s very first revival, at La Scala, Milan, in July 1828, Donizetti balanced the character, indeed enriched it considerably, by providing Settimio (again sung by Winter) with a ‘prison scene’, a number that we include in this recording. A complex orchestral picture of the ‘oscuro sotterraneo’ in which Settimio awaits his sentence precedes a further two-movement aria in which he reiterates his love for Argelia and, at the last, defies fate in the face of death.

However, in spite of all these compelling arias and duets, there was one further number, in many ways the opera’s most daring, that especially caught the public imagination. As several reviewers pointed out, at the midpoint of the opera, at the end of Act 1, where convention would have demanded a so-called concertato finale, with chorus, soloists and orchestra all coming together for a grandiose close, Donizetti broke with tradition and closed the act with a long Terzetto for the three principals (‘Ei stesso… La mia vittima’), one in which – again – Murena’s instability dominates the vocal gestures to a remarkable degree. During this period in Italy, composers often defied audience expectations at their peril, but the dramatic effect of the Terzetto was unprecedented. Here is one review of the first run of performances, typical in the extravagance of its praise for the Terzetto:

Each of the three principals, with both the force of canto declamato and the energy of the action, moves us to tears in the final trio of the first act, which has justly been declared a Donizettian masterpiece. The Senator [Murena] confronts his victim; Settimio reproaches his persecutor; Argelia is divided between filial and romantic love. Every evening all the numbers in the opera were applauded; but at the end of the first act the public, in order to express its complete approval, called forth both the singers and the composer.

What becomes clear in this and subsequent reviews was that, as well as admiring the Terzetto’s unusual formal experiment (the abandonment of the concertato), critics and audiences were also amazed by the manner in which Donizetti managed to preserve the very different vocal characters of the three principals while still projecting the sense of bel canto melodic expansion that Italian opera was famous for. In a half-joking letter to his revered teacher Simone Mayr, Donizetti reported on the extraordinary reception of the piece, mentioning that its success was encouraging him further in experimentation, in evading what he called ‘the yoke of the finales’.

The continuation of that exploration would be a project for the future, in particular during the remarkable sequence of further experimental operas Donizetti wrote for Naples in the late 1820s, works such as Il Paria, Il diluvio universale and Imelda de’ Lambertazzi. But there is little doubt that L’esule di Roma pointed the way. What is more, it proved by far the most popular of the composer’s opera in the 1820s: within six years it had been seen in more than 30 Italian cities, with additional premieres in London, Vienna and Madrid. Tracing the reception of L’esule through published libretti and other material proves a fascinating enterprise. We have already seen that, in the summer of 1828, Donizetti supplied a new tenor aria for Settimio in Act 2. When the opera was brought back to Naples at the end of that year, with the great tenor Giovanni Battista Rubini in the role, the composer obliged him with an alternative second-act aria, one more suited to his extraordinary skills. And then, for a revival of L’esule in 1840 in his home town of Bergamo, Donizetti supplied the Settimio of the day, Domenico Donzelli, with yet another version of the aria. (Regrettably, these two additional arias for Settimio have survived only in vocal score and thus cannot be included as appendices to our recording.) It is typical of the period that many other revivals took advantage of the opera’s relatively modest proportions to interpolate further favourite arias and duets, either from earlier Donizetti works or from those of other composers. By this means, performances of L’esule in the 1830s included music by Balducci, Bellini, Celli, Conti, Costa, Mercadante, Pacini, Rossini and doubtless numerous others: a glorious celebration of the fact that contemporary audiences in Italy and elsewhere valued ‘the event’ more than they did ‘the work’, and seldom allowed concern about the integrity of the latter to interrupt their operatic pleasure.

This steady stream of revivals came to an end in the early 1840s. New modes of operatic drama had gradually emerged, not least from Donizetti himself. By the time of its last performance in the 19th century, in Naples in 1869, L’esule di Roma was no more than an historical curiosity. But the passage of time since then, the additional perspective that we now have on Donizetti’s entire compositional arc, can make the opera newly relevant. When sympathetically presented, it emerges as nothing less than a key work in the composer’s development: an opera that won him new audiences, both within Italy and beyond; but one that also embraced new forms through which to channel vocal expressivity, stretching the limits of the genre and encouraging Donizetti in his never-ending journey of compositional renewal.

Although also present in the 18th century, ancient Rome established an important place in the operatic world following the self-coronation of Emperor Napoleon in 1804. With the aim of gaining symbolic legitimacy in the eyes of the kingdoms he had conquered and with whom he needed to re-establish diplomatic relations, Napoleon initiated a programme of construction: both of himself and of the empire he governed. Clearly aspiring to take his place in a line of ancient Caesars, he made potent use of the myth of Roman civilisation; in ways that today we would call ‘propagandistic’, he appropriated values such as courage, force, self-denial and loyalty to the state. The cult of Rome, above all of imperial Rome, thus became dominant in the first decades of the 19th century, affecting virtually all the arts – theatre, architecture, fine art – and even influencing the smallest aspects of everyday life such as male and female fashions and accessories. The Napoleonic cultural project was so pervasive that it ‘contaminated’ even those states that between 1804 and 1814 succeeded in escaping the expansion of the French empire. It should thus come as no surprise that, in the wake of that empire’s collapse in 1814–15, the restored monarchs strove to take possession of the forms of representation that had belonged to the Napoleonic system, using that appropriation as a way of obscuring its memory.

This process of reclamation took place almost throughout Europe, but Naples, the capital of the so-called Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, was without doubt one of the sites where it was at its most intense. From 1808 to 1815, Naples was run by Napoleon’s deputy Joachim Murat. In his years of sovereignty in Naples, Murat encouraged a series of public works, among which were new architectural excavations of nearby Herculaneum. After Murat’s defeat and death in 1815, the task of disinterring the city and surroundings of Pompei was given further funding (and appropriately publicised) by the restored government, now under the rule of Ferdinando I: a few months before Ferdinando died in 1825, leaving the Kingdom to his son Francesco, the noted French art historian François Mazois consigned to the printer the first two volumes of his Les Ruines de Pompei, dedicating them to the then princess Maria Isabella, Francesco’s consort. After 1825, various official Italian newspapers – Il giornale del Regno delle due Sicilie and La gazzetta di Milano among them – informed their readers of the frequent inspections carried out by the new royalty of archaeological sites, thus helping to distance the Murat era from the general process of rediscovery of ancient Rome. However, one of the most effective means through which the emergence of Herculaneum and Pompei impressed itself as cultural work associated with the old (and now new) Bourbon rulers took place in the theatre. On 19 November 1825, the name day of Maria Isabella (now Queen), the Teatro San Carlo in Naples staged Giovanni Pacini’s L’ultimo giorno di Pompei, an opera written to a libretto by Andrea Leone Tottola and set, as the title reveals, in a place not 20 miles from the city, and within whose ruins selected visitors could now roam. What is more, L’ultimo giorno di Pompei had as protagonist one of the most well-known historians of ancient Rome, Sallustio, and at its finale restaged the volcanic eruption that caused his death and that of his wife (Ottavia in the opera).

In several ways, not least in its volcanic finale, L’ultimo giorno di Pompei reveals a kinship to another opera set in ancient Rome: La vestale, by Gaspare Spontini to a libretto by Étienne de Jouy. Staged for the first time at the Paris Opéra in 1807, this opera represents a further example of how that sense of ancient Rome celebrated by the French in the early years of the century was then taken over by the restored regimes after 1815, and by the Bourbons in particular. Naples became, in its turn, fascinated by the Vestale story. Vestal virgin Julia is loved by the Roman general Licinius. At night he sneaks into the temple where Julia is guarding the sacred flame of Vesta, distracts her and indirectly causes the flame to be extinguished. Discovered by others, Julia is condemned to death by the priests, but thanks to the intercession of Vesta – who manifests herself via an earthquake and volcanic eruption – the sentence is revoked, allowing Julia to unite with Licinius. Judged from its first appearance as an emblem of the Napoleonic empire, La vestale saw its first performance in Naples during Murat’s reign, in 1811, at the San Carlo in a translation by Giovanni Schmidt. Its success was such that it was revived two years later and then again in 1814 and 1815.

In this last revival La vestale was seen by, and evidently made a great impression on, the choreographer Salvatore Viganò, then living in Naples. In the long history of the opera’s Italian reception, Viganò represents one of the most important moments: he realised an extremely personal version of De Jouy and Spontini’s opera, in the form of a so-called ballo pantomimico first performed in Milan in 1818. Just as in the opera, the priestess of Vesta, now called Emilia, is in love with and loved by Decio (originally Licinius), proud son of the consul Murena. Once again, the vestal virgin allows the sacred flame to be extinguished; but, in a departure from the opera, she is not saved by the goddess but is condemned to be buried alive while Decio, who attempts to save her, is fatally stabbed by soldiers guarding her tomb. Viganò’s La vestale did not reach Naples before the 1830s, but the Bourbon capital did have access to an extremely faithful transcription of it: as a spoken drama, realised by Luigi Marchionni and published in Naples in 1825, shortly after the umpteenth revival at the San Carlo of La vestale.

Given the extraordinary popularity of La vestale, it comes as no surprise that, at least until the end of the 1830s, the opera influenced many Neapolitan librettists and composers. This included not only Pacini and Tottola with their L’ultimo giorno di Pompei, but also Marchionni, who in 1825, the very year his Vestale was published in Naples, also published another tragedy, Il proscritto romano, which became the source Domenico Gilardoni used to create the libretto for L’esule di Roma. Although L’esule was based on a French melodrama, Androclès, ou le lion reconnaissant, written during the French consulate by Louis-Charles Caignez (it was first performed at Paris’s Théâtre de la Gaîté in 1804), Il proscritto romano and, with it, Gilardoni’s libretto, reveal in mutated form the profile of La vestale, which in its various forms had so enthused and continued to enthuse the Neapolitan public. Not incidentally, Gaetano Donizetti, who arrived in Naples in 1822, may well have attended several performances of Spontini’s opera, and he personally supervised performances at the Teatro Carolino in Palermo in the Carnival season of 1825.

The kinship between La vestale and L’esule di Roma can be seen as early as the first scene: one of the main characters – Murena in the case of Marchionni/Gilardoni/Donizetti; Lincius in the case of De Jouy/Spontini – finds himself contemplating Roman celebrations which he cannot enjoy as he is torn by internal conflicts. More important still is the overall backdrop: the sheer monumentality of Rome – the grandiosity of the buildings, the vastness of the spaces, the numerous participants attending public ceremonies – serves to emphasise and render that much more desperate the drama of single characters. Indeed, they are often motivated by a sense of guilt at having betrayed the state that is being celebrated, to have, as it were, shown cracks in the monumental background against which the plot takes place: Licinio/Decio for being in love with a woman dedicated to a goddess; Julia/Emilia for having allowed the sacred flame to be extinguished; the senator Murena for having condemned to exile for political reasons the young Settimio. As in La vestale, what emerges in L’esule is an unresolvable opposition – at least until the precipitate happy ending – between a world that seems granite-like in its longevity and individuals who live within it, and are sometimes crushed by its weight. Of course, we can see changes to the pattern over time: little by little, in the unravelling of these dramas by Marchionni, Tottola and Gilardoni, the human passions on stage acquire an increased focus and attention, not to mention an increased intensity. But it was precisely through such changes, inflected by the new canons of Romanticism, that ancient Rome managed to remain on the lyric stages of Naples in the first part of the 19th century, progressively obscuring in the transition from one regime to another the memory of the man who had first elected it as a model of his own politics.