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Updated: June 1, 2025
'They are great artists, murmured Sidonia to himself, as he listened to their performance of one of Donizetti's finest compositions. The father stood in the centre of the great square, the other musicians formed a circle round him; they continued their performance for about ten minutes to a considerable audience, many of whom had followed them, while the rest had collected at their appearance.
Even the famous "Spirito Gentil" is merely a stream of the brackish water that flowed, day and night, from Donizetti's pen, only it happens to be a little clearer than usual.
The popular verdict has stamped "Lucia" as Donizetti's masterpiece, and if the consensus of musicians could be obtained, it would unquestionably confirm the verdict. It contains incomparably the grandest of his arias for tenor, the Tomb song in the last act, and one of the finest dramatic concerted numbers, the sextet in the second act, that can be found in any Italian opera.
Nevertheless, Beethoven refused to adapt his music to the style of the Italian singers fortunately; for, if he had, it would now be as obsolete as most of Rossini's and Donizetti's. When Berlioz made his famous tour in Germany, matters had somewhat improved, to judge from the following remarks in his "À Travers Chants:" "They say that the Germans sing badly; that may seem true in general.
Further help was to come to me subsequently, though at the cost of great sacrifices on my part, owing to the success of one of Donizetti's operas, La Favorita, a very poor work of the Italian maestro's, but welcomed with great enthusiasm by the Parisian public, already so much degenerated.
These tunes in regular four-bar lengths are melody of an amorphous sort; only when they were tightened up, made truer, more pregnant in a word, when they were so shaped as to stand really and truly for the thought and feeling in the composer did they become the beautiful things we find in Lohengrin, foretelling the sublime things we find in Tristan. Eric's tunes are as colourless as Donizetti's.
It is a significant fact that Donizetti's lighter works have stood the test of time more successfully than his more serious efforts.
She was to assume the rôle of Lucrezia Borgia, in Donizetti's brilliant opera of that name, a rôle in which the enterprising director of the Académie Royale assured the expectant public that she possessed no equal.
'What can you expect from a man who to- day is enthusiastic about Gluck's Iphigenia in Tauris, and to- morrow mad about Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia? he said. Tieck's conversation about these and similar topics was much too entertaining and charming for me to give any serious weight to the bitterness of his views.
Here she enjoyed the advantage of studying the great lyric tragedienne, with whom she occasionally performed: not a look, a tone, a gesture of her great model escaped her. She was given the part of Jane Seymour in Donizetti's "Anna Bolena," which she looked and acted to perfection, Pasta personating the unfortunate Queen.
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