Gaetano Donizetti - Una Furtiva Lagrima (L'elisir d'amore)
Full
Song Title: Una Furtiva
Lagrima from the opera
L'elisir d'amore by
Gaetano Donizetti
This is from one of my favorite Gaetano Donizetti operas.
Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti
(born
29 November 1797 -- died 8 April
1848) was an
Italian composer from
Bergamo, Lombardy.
Donizetti came from a non-musical background but, at an early age, he was taken under the wing of composer
Simon Mayr who had set up the Lezioni Caritatevoli and had enrolled him by means of a full scholarship. There he received detailed training in the arts of fugue and counterpoint, and it was from there that Mayr was instrumental in obtaining a place for the young man at the
Bologna Academy. In Bologna, at the age of 19, he wrote his first one-act opera, the comedy
Il Pigmalione, although it does not appear to have been performed during his lifetime.
Throught his life, Donizetti wrote about 70 operas, but an offer in 1822 from
Domenico Barbaja, the impresario of the
Teatro San Carlo in
Naples, which followed the composer's ninth opera, led to his move to that city and the composition of 28 operas which were given their premieres at that house or in one of the city's smaller houses including the
Teatro Nuovo or the
Teatro del Fondo. This continued until the production of
Caterina Cornaro in January
1844. In all, Naples presented 51 of Donizetti's operas.
During this period, success came primarily with the comic operas, the serious ones failing to attract significant audiences. However, the situation changed with the appearance in 1830 of the serious opera,
Anna Bolena which was the first to make a major impact on the
Italian and international opera scene and, at the same time, to shift the balance for the composer away from success with only comedic operas. However, even after 1830, his best-known works did also include comedies such as L'elisir d'amore (1832) and
Don Pasquale (1843). But significant historical dramas did appear and became successful, sometimes outside Naples before reaching that city. Most significantly, they included
Lucia di Lammermoor (the first to be written by librettist
Salvadore Cammarano) in 1835, as well as "one of [his] most successful
Neapolitan operas",
Roberto Devereux in Up to that
point, all of his operas had been written to Italian librettos.
However, moving to
Paris in 1838, Donizetti set his operas to
French texts; these include
La favorite and
La fille du régiment and were first performed in that city from 1840 onward. It appears that much of the attraction of moving to Paris was not just for larger fees and prestige, but his chafing against the censorial limitations which existed in
Italy, thus giving him a much greater freedom to choose subject matter. By 1845 severe illness caused him to be moved back to Bergamo to die in 1848.
Along with
Gioachino Rossini and
Vincenzo Bellini, he was a leading composer of bel canto opera during the first fifty years of the
Nineteenth Century.
I hope you enjoy this marvelous piece as much as I have.
The video is also available in HD and you can buy the song on iTunes.
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I do not claim copyright or ownership of the song played in this video. All copyrighted content remains property of their respective owners!