Gaetano Donizetti

Gaetano Donizetti was born in Bergamo in November 1797, the fifth of six children in a family of modest means. He studied with Simon Mayr at the *Lezioni Caritatevoli* in Bergamo from 1806 to 1814, then at the Bologna Conservatory under Padre Mattei. His first operas were produced in Venice and Mantua from 1818, but his career took off with *Zoraida di Granata* in Rome in 1822, after which he was placed under contract by the impresario Domenico Barbaja in Naples.

His output is one of the largest in the operatic canon — some seventy operas over thirty years — and ranges across opera seria, opera buffa, and French grand opera. *Anna Bolena* (1830) established his international reputation; *L’elisir d’amore* (1832), *Lucrezia Borgia* (1833), *Maria Stuarda* (1834), *Lucia di Lammermoor* (1835), *La fille du régiment* (1840), *La favorite* (1840) and *Don Pasquale* (1843) followed in close succession. From 1838 he divided his time between Naples, Paris and Vienna, where he was briefly appointed Hofkapellmeister.

Donizetti’s last years were shadowed by the progressive syphilis that ended his career in 1845 and confined him in a Paris asylum and then in his brother’s care. He died in Bergamo in April 1848. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of his operas in twentieth-century performance.