Maria Stuarda (Mary Stuart) is a tragic opera (tragedia lirica), in two acts, by Gaetano Donizetti, to a libretto by Giuseppe Bardari, based on Andrea Maffei's translation of Friedrich Schiller's 1800 play Maria Stuart.
The opera is one of a number of operas by Donizetti which deal with the Tudor period in English history, including Anna Bolena (named for Henry VIII's second wife, Anne Boleyn), Roberto Devereux (named for a putative lover of Queen Elizabeth I) and Il castello di Kenilworth. The lead female characters of the operas Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda, and Roberto Devereux are often referred to as the "Three Donizetti Queens". The story is loosely based on the lives of Mary, Queen of Scots (Mary Stuart) and her cousin Queen Elizabeth I. Schiller had invented the confrontation of the two Queens, who in fact never met.Ashbrook 1972, pp. 17 to 30.
After a series of problems surrounding its presentation in Naples after the final dress rehearsal – including having to be re-written for a totally different location, a different time period, and with Buondelmonte as its new title – Maria Stuarda as we know it today premiered on 30 December 1835 at La Scala in Milan.Ashbrook and Hibberd 2001, p. 235.
Composition history
The appeal of Mary Stuart and Scottish history in 19th-century Italy
In a variety of areas – drama, literature (fiction or otherwise) – England in the Tudor era (and Scotland at the time of Mary Stuart and beyond in particular, Donizetti's own Lucia di Lammermoor being an example) exerted a fascination upon continental Europeans in an extraordinary way. In literature, it has been noted that more than 20,000 books have appeared about Mary's life and that, within two years of her death, stage plays also began to appear.Summers Spring 2012, p. 25 In addition to Schiller's Maria Stuart, there had been another influential play, Count Vittorio Alfieri's Maria Stuarda written in 1778 in which "that unfortunate queen is represented unsuspicious, impatient of contradiction and violent in her attachments."
When it came to what had been handed down about Elizabeth I to Donizetti and other Italian composers, opera stage director Stephen LawlessStephen Lawless, on dallasopera.org. Note: Lawless directed Roberto Devereaux for the Dallas company in 2009 notes that the continental view would have been very different from the Anglo-centric one of Elizabeth as Good Queen Bess, as Gloriana, and as the one who routed Catholicism from England's shores. But from an Italian perspective, Elizabeth was a heretic and, indeed, a bastard since "her father Henry VIII had never obtained an annulment from the Pope to end his marriage to Catherine of Aragon in order to marry his second wife (Elizabeth's mother) Anne Boleyn" Therefore, to European Catholics, Mary was a martyr and the legitimate ruler of England, a sympathetic character contrasted with Elizabeth, who was traditionally cast in a darker role, often "as unrestrainedly jealous, willful, and easily over-wrought. This is the portrait of Elizabeth found, not too unexpectedly, in Bardari's libretto".Ashbrook 1972, p. 22
As far as Italian opera of the primo ottocento is concerned, these attitudes found their way into the works which poured forth: they covered a large portion of the Tudor era, including works about Henry VIII's first daughter, Mary, who became Queen Mary I, known as "Bloody Mary" for enforcing the country's strict return to Catholicism. The appeal of these operas has been expressed by Professor Alexander Weatherson in the 2009 Donizetti Society Newsletter as follows (with the addition of relevant opera titles associated with the named composers): Scotland’s soil was about to be profaned by a stream of operas that bore the footprint of [Elizabeth’s] rival……without Mary Stuart, Scotland might have been left in peace....In Italy alone in the earliest decades of the nineteenth century there was a Scotch broth of operas by Asap; Capecelatro; Carafa [I solitari di Scozia, 1815, and Elisabetta in Derbyshire ossia Il castello di Fotheringhay, 1818]; Carlini [Maria Stuarda, regina di Scozia, 1818]; Casalini; Casella [Maria Stuarda, 1812]; Coccia [I solitari, 1811, and Maria Stuart, regina di Scozia, 1827]; Donizetti [the subject of the Newsletter article]; Ferrari; [The Belgian], Fétis [Marie Stuart en Ecosse]; Gabrielli [Sara ovvero La pazza delle montagne di Scozia, 1843]; Mazzucato [La fidanzata di Lammermoor, 1834]; Mercadante [Maria Stuarda, regina di Scozia, 1825]; Neidermeyer [Marie Stuart, Paris 1844]; Nicolini; Pacini [Vallace, 1820, Malvina di Scozia]; Pavesi; Pugni; Rajentroph; the Ricchis [ Federico Ricci and Luigi Ricci ] [La prigione di Edimburgo, 1838]; Rossini [Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra, 1815]; Sogner [Maria Stuarda ossia I carbonari di Scozia, 1814]; and Vaccai [I solitari di Scozia, 1815] – and this is just a scratch upon the surface of the European infatuation with the decapitated Stuart and/or her northern fastness which boiled-up in the bloodbath finale of the eighteenth century, operas often rabid and inconsequential, full of fashionable confrontations and artificial conflicts, politically motivated, repetitious and soon forgotten.Weatherson February 2009, Donizetti Society
But Weatherson concludes: At the heart of the plot, however, lay an Italian, the pulp plays and novels of Camillo Federici (1749–1802) [the pen name of Giovanni Battista Viassolo] a former actor whose prolific vulgarizations of Schiller and August von Kotzebue set Italian librettists scribbling for four decades.After his death, the publication of his works was completed in 14 volumes in 1816. Another edition in 26 volumes was published at Florence between 1826 and 1827. Indeed, without him it is to be suspected that Sir Walter Scott would never have captured the imagination of so many poets, nor for so long.
The libretto for Maria Stuarda Having seen Schiller's play in Milan in an Italian translation, Donizetti approached the famed librettist Felice Romani, who had written a successful libretto in 1830 for Anna Bolena, the opera which secured the composer's place as one of the leaders of his day.Ashbrook 1982, p. 317 Wanting a strong and powerful subject for his new work, the composer's idea was to have Romani prepare a libretto about Mary Stuart, but the librettist appears to have ignored him, perhaps because of his desire to get away from writing for the theatre, which he increasingly found to be distasteful.
Therefore, the composer sought the services of Giuseppe Bardari (1817–1861), a seventeen-year-old law student with no experience, who became the librettist, thus giving Donizetti the opportunity to work closely with him, or to even write entire scenes himself and to greatly influence the structure of the work. Schiller's play had been translated into Italian by Andrea Maffei (who also translated a number of others as well) and it was this translation upon which Bardari relied.Ashbrook (1972), p. 21 Although he was forced to eliminate "almost all of the play's political and religious references and (reduce) the number of characters from 21 to six, the libretto does adds the love story of Mary Stuart and Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, which had no basis in fact, albeit that Leicester had been considered by Elizabeth to be a possible husband for Mary. At the time of the events portrayed, Dudley was actually 55, Elizabeth was 53 and Mary was 44.
However, the libretto does retain the fictional meeting between Mary and Elizabeth in a very dramatic confrontation. While its musical elements are noted below, "the confrontation....so essential to the dramatic structure of both play and opera, it is, surely, a translation into action of a clash which was implicit in history – of a clash which took place in the letters the queens exchanged".Commons, Jeremy, "Maria Stuarda", Donizetti Society Journal, Number 3
Maria Stuarda becomes Buondelmonte An incident occurred at a rehearsal of the opera which is recounted by Harold Rosenthal:
Ronzi De Begnis was to sing Queen Elizabeth (soprano) and Anna Del Serre the mezzo-soprano title-role. At one of the rehearsals an incident occurred [which Donizetti expert, William Ashbrook describes as 'one of the famous scandals of the day']. In the second act of the opera, Mary Stuart rounds on Queen Elizabeth with these words: Figlia impura di Bolena, / parli tu di disonore? / Meretrice indegna e oscena, / in te cada il mio rossore. / Profanato è il soglio inglese, / vil bastarda, dal tuo piè! [Translated as: "Impure daughter of Boleyn, do you speak of dishonour? Prostitute — unworthy and obscene, I blush for you. The throne of England is sullied by your feet, vile bastard!"] At the rehearsal, Anna Del Serre declaimed these lines with such passion, that Ronzi Di Begnis took them as a personal insult and rushed at Del Serre, pulling her hair, punching her, biting her and hitting her on her face and breast. Del Serre returned in kind, but the soprano got the better of her rival, and Del Serre was carried fainting from the theatre.Harold Rosenthal, "Rare Donizetti and Verdi at St Pancras", Opera (London), March 1966.
The rehearsal continued, she sang, the matter went no further. After its successful dress rehearsal, the King of Naples suddenly banned performances of the opera "perhaps because his Queen, Maria Christina, was a direct descendant of Mary Stuart"Osborne 1994, pp. 229–234. or "the sight of one queen calling another 'vile bastard' on the stage of the Teatro San Carlo […] was too much for the Neapolitan sensibility".Gossett, p. 158. But it has also been simply noted by Professor Weatherson that "politics were the cause" in that reputed secret seditious behavior against Elizabeth I by Mary "made the decapitated monarch unpopular in Bourbon Naples".Weatherson, "Queen of dissent" (2001): "In her time legends surrounding Mary Queen of Scots [included] a 'chain of seditious charcoal-burners' (who were) supposed to have been organised to carry out a secret struggle against the throne of Queen Elizabeth I." Note the many titles of the plays and operas of the time which include the word "carbonari" – charcoal burners – in their titles.
Donizetti responded to the ban by suggesting another subject, that being Giovanna Gray ("Lady Jane Gray"), but after it was also rejected, he set about revising and removing large segments of the score and, by quickly employing Pietro Salatino as new librettist, created a different work. He named it Buondelmonte referring to a character who appears in Dante's Paradiso "who apparently caused a war between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines". But prior to its first performance, the composer expressed his concerns in a letter to librettist Jacopo Ferretti (as quoted by Ashbrook): There used to be six characters in all? Now there are 10 or more. You can imagine what the opera has become! The same scenery, appropriate or not, will be used. I haven't been able to bring myself to ask whether it works or not…Ashbrook 1972, p. 17.
Inevitably perhaps, when Buondelmonte was first given on 18 October 1834 in Naples, it was not successful; it received only six performances and it was never performed again.Black, p. 33
When forced to simplify part of the music for the original Elisabetta, Donizetti scribbled on the margin "But it's ugly!", and further on refused a change, writing "Do it, and may you live for a hundred years!"L'Indipendente, 22 April 1865, cited in Jeremy Commons, "Maria Stuarda", The Musical Times, Vol. 107, No. 1477. (March 1966), p. 207.
Performance history Maria Stuarda appears in Italy: its 19th–century rise and fall