My dark history with the rollicking opening of Act II of Donizetti's "Elixir of Love"

[With a certain amount of restorative touching up, including insertion of some of the missing English texts, but not including replacement of the now-gone crappy video clip, in February 2020]


At the Met this past October, conductor Maurizio Benini (with baritone Mariusz Kwiecien as the blustering Sgt. Belcore) seemed to think the thing to do with this wonderful little chorus that opens Act II of L'Elisir d'amore is to slam-bang your way through it. I think we've already heard a better solution.

by Ken

Partway through the spring trimester of my junior year in college I stopped going to classes. Just stopped clean. Oh, it wasn't an intentional class stoppage at the outset. It just felt better not going than going. After a while, though, it became a clean break. I knew there would be consequences, and I decided I would deal with them when the time came. (Ironically, by the time the time came, the entire fall trimester, during which I re-demonstrated my ability to discharge my academic responsibilities, had come and gone. I detected a whiff of irony in the righeous wrath that descended at this remove in time, but nobody else involved was in irony-detection mode.)

I don't want to point fingers here, but the principal activity with which I filled those now-blissfully-freed-up class hours was listening to a recording I happened just to have acquired at the college bookstore: the very recording of Donizetti's Elixir of Love to which we happen to have been listening, and in particular to the opening of Act II.


L'ELISIR D'AMORE IS THE EARLIER OF
DONIZETTI'S TWO COMIC MASTERPIECES

Don Pasquale (1843) is undoubtedly the more urbane and sophisticated,, but I don't know that I could rate it any deeper, more moving, or more satisfying than the country-bumpkinish L'Elisir (1832). If we start by getting that infernal idea of "better" or "worse" out of our heads, I think we can already hear the strikingly different ways in which the two pieces work just from their orchestral introductions -- a prelude in the case of L'Elisir, a fuller-fledged overture in the case of Don Pasquale.

First let's hear the Prelude and jolly opening chorus of L'Elisir d'amore.

DONIZETTI: L'Elisir d'amore: Prelude and Opening Chorus
[We're by a riverbank at the entrance to the farm of ADINA, where jolly harvesters from the village are noting that the scorch of love's flame is even harder to protect against than that of the overhead midday sun.]

Antonella Bandelli (s), Giannetta; Chorus and Orchestra of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Gabriele Ferro, cond. DG, recorded November 1986

Renza Jotti (s), Giannetta; Chorus and Orchestra of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Gianandrea Gavazzeni, cond. Live performance, June 1967

Angela Arena (s), Giannetta; Rome Opera Chorus and Orchestra, Francesco Molinari-Pradelli, cond. EMI, recorded August 1966