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 In his lifetime (November 29, 1797 - April 8, 1848), Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti was very, very famous. During the 1840s L’elisir d’amore was the most performed opera in Italy and 25% of all opera performances in Italy were of Donizetti’s works. His four best-known operas are Lucia di Lammermoor, Don Pasquale, and L’elisir d’amore, and La fille du régiment. He wrote about seventy more: it is impossible to count precisely because some were revisions of earlier works.
Today Donizetti gets about half as many Google hits as Mozart and Puccini. But his life story offers connections to other composers, and to historic Bostonians.
Among Italian opera composers, he was contemporary with Rossini, Bellini (La sonnambula and Norma are within a year of L’elisir d’amore), and early Verdi. Like Rossini, he studied with Padre Stanislao Mattei at Bologna. His works exemplify the tuneful bel canto (“beautiful song”) style.
Donizetti was born on the same date (not the same year) as a handful of New England luminaries:
- 1607: John Harvard
- 1799: Amos Bronson Alcott, Transcendentalist and father of Louisa May Alcott
- 1832: Louisa May Alcott
Like Robert Schumann, Gian Carlo Menotti, George Gershwin, and Aaron Copland, Donizetti was born to a non-musical family. He and his older brother Giuseppe (1788-1856), who became chief of music for the Ottoman armies, were their family’s first musicians.
Like Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, he trained as a choirboy at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. Unlike Palestrina, he did not have a good singing voice. His teacher, leading opera composer Simon Mayr, kept him on as an outstanding composition and theory student.
Like his own character Nemorino, he had a benefactress who bought his military exemption.
Like Giuseppe Verdi, he married a patron’s daughter, and, like Verdi, he lost his wife and children to disease.
Like Benjamin Britten and Gioachino Rossini, he wrote an opera about Queen Elizabeth:
- Rossini: Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, 1815
- Donizetti: Elisabetta al castello di Kenilworth, 1829
- Britten: Gloriana, 1953
 Many of Donizetti’s opera have historical title characters, such as Anna Bolena (1830), Enrico di Borgogna (“Henry of Burgundy,” 1818), Maria Stuarda (1835), and Lucrezia Borgia (1833). Like Verdi, he struggled with the censors in Naples and recast some of his historical subjects.
Like Giacomo Meyerbeer, he wrote operas in French and Italian. Meyerbeer also wrote several operas in German, while Donizetti revised one grand opera (Dom Sébastien, roi de Portugal, 1843) into German.
Like Frederick Delius, Hugo Wolf, Robert Schumann, Bedrich Smetana, and Franz Schubert, he suffered and died from syphilis.
Like most successful Italian opera composers, he was published by Ricordi. Today Ricordi is issuing critical editions of the complete works of Rossini, Verdi, and Donizetti.
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