He added three unaffectedly tuneful and vivacious operas to the opera buffa repertory: La fille du régiment, L’Elisir d’amore, and Don Pasquale. In these he is undoubtedly at his best, for he discards the affectations he cultivated in his serious work to satisfy the prevailing taste of his day and gives free rein to his imagination and his power of humorous characterization.
La fille du régiment made the rounds of the German and Italian opera houses before the Parisians were willing to reconsider their verdict after its first unsuccessful production at the Opéra Comique in 1840. It presents a tale of love which does not run smooth, but which terminates happily when a high-born mother at length allows her daughter to marry a Napoleonic officer, her inferior in birth. Though the music is slight, it is free from pretense and unaffectedly gay. Like Rossini, Donizetti settled in France after his reputation was established and suited his style to the taste of his adopted country. In a minor degree the differences between Rossini’s Tell and his Semiramide are the same as those between Donizetti’s Fille du régiment and one of his Italian operas. But there parallel ends. The ‘Daughter of the Regiment’ shows, however, that Donizetti’s lighter operas have stood the test of time better than his more serious ones.
L’Elisir d’amore (Milan, 1832) also contains some spontaneous and gracefully fresh and captivating music. The plot is childish, but musically the score ranks with that of Don Pasquale (Paris, 1843), the plot of which turns on a trick played by two young lovers upon the uncle and guardian of one of them. This brilliant trifle made a tremendous success, and in it Donizetti’s gay vivacity reached its climax. It was the last of his notable contributions to the opera buffa of the Rossinian school. Written for the Théâtre des Italiens, and sung for the first time by Grisi, Mario, Tambarini, and Lablache, its success was in striking contrast to the failure of Don Sebastien, a large serious opera produced soon afterward.
The vogue of Donizetti’s serious operas has practically passed away. To modern ears, despite much tender melody and occasional dramatic expressiveness, they sound stilted and lacking in vitality. Lucia di Lammermoor, founded on Scott’s tragic romance ‘The Bride of Lammermoor’ (Naples, 1835), immensely popular in the composer’s day, is still given as a ‘prima donna’s opera,’ for the virtuoso display of some favorite artist. The fine sextet enjoys undiminished popularity in its original form as well as in instrumental arrangements, but in general the composer’s subservience to the false standard of public taste detracts from the music. An instance is the ‘mad-scene,’ ridiculous from the dramatic standpoint, with its smooth and polished melody, ending in a virtuoso fioritura cadenza for voice and flute!
The same criticism applies to the tuneful Lucrezia Borgia (Milan, 1833), which, in spite of charming melodies and occasionally effective concerted numbers, is orchestrated in a thin and childish manner. Anna Bolena (Milan, 1830), written for Pasta and Rubini, after the good old Italian fashion of adapting rôles to singers, and Marino Faliero (1835) were both written in rivalry with Bellini, and the failure of the last-named opera was responsible for the supreme effort which produced Lucia. More important is Linda di Chamounix, which aroused such enthusiasm when first performed in Vienna, in 1842, that the emperor conferred the title of court composer on its composer. But La Favorita, with its repulsive plot, which shares with Lucia the honor of being the best of Donizetti’s serious operas, is superior to Linda in the care with which it has been written and in the dramatic power of the ensemble numbers. Spirto gentil, the delightful romance in the last act, is perhaps the best-known aria in the score. In Lucia and La Favorita Donizetti’s melodic inspiration—his sole claim to the favor of posterity—finds its freest and most spontaneous development.
While Donizetti had an occasional sense of dramatic effect, his contemporary, Vincenzo Bellini (1802-1835), the son of an organist of Catania, showed a genius which, if wanting in wit and vivacity, had much melancholy sweetness and a certain elegiac solemnity of expression. He had studied the works of both the German and Italian composers, in particular those of Pergolesi, and, like Donizetti, he fell a victim to the strain of persistent overwork. Among his ten operas—he did not attempt the buffa style—three stand out prominently: La Sonnambula (Milan, 1831), Norma (Milan, 1831), and I Puritani (Paris, 1835).
La Sonnambula, in which the singer Pasta created the title rôle, is an admirable example of Bellini in his most tender and idyllic mood. A graceful melodiousness fills the score and the closing scene attains genuine sincerity and pathos. Norma (Milan, 1831), set to a strong and moving libretto by the poet Felice Romani, is a tragedy of Druidic Britain, and in it the composer may be considered to have reached his highest level. At a time like the present, when the art of singing is not cultivated to the pitch of perfection that was the standard in the composer’s own period, a modern rendering of Norma, for instance, is apt to lose in dramatic intensity, since Bellini and the other followers of Rossini were content to provide a rich, broad flow of cantilena melody, leaving it to the singers to infuse in it dramatic force and meaning—something which Tamburini, Rubini, and other great Italian singers were well able to do.
Norma surpasses I Puritani in the real beauty and force of its libretto, and gains thereby in musical consistency; but the latter opera, which shows French influences to some extent, cannot be excelled as regards the tender pathos and sweet sincerity of its melodies, which, like those in the composer’s other works, depend on bel canto for their effect. Triumphantly successful at the Théâtre des Italiens in Paris, 1834, this last of Bellini’s works may well have been that of which Wagner wrote: ‘I shall never forget the impression made upon me by an opera of Bellini at a period when I was completely exhausted with the everlasting abstract complication used in our orchestras, when a simple and noble melody was revealed to me anew.’ In a manner Bellini may be considered a link between the exuberant force and consummate savoir-faire of Rossini’s French period and the more earnest earlier efforts of Verdi.
Though Donizetti and Bellini are the leading figures in the group of composers identified with Rossini’s operatic reforms, a few other names call for mention here: Saverio Mercadante, who composed both opera seria and opera buffa—a gifted but careless writer whose best-known work is the tragic opera Il Giuramento (Milan, 1837); Giovanni Pacini, whose Safo, a direct imitation of Rossini, was most successful; and Niccolò Vaccai, better known for his vocal exercises—still in general use—than for his once popular opera Giuletta e Romeo (Milan, 1825). Meyerbeer’s seven Italian operas, Romilda e Constanza, Semiramide riconosciuta, Eduardo e Christina, Emma di Resburgo, Margherita di Anjou, L’Esule di Granata, and Il Crociato in Egitto, which were due directly to the admiration he had conceived for Rossini in 1815, and of which he afterward repented, also properly belong in this enumeration.