Micaele Sparacino General Director and Conductor

Ancestry of an opera: Before La Favorita, there was La Favorite and before that . . .

By William Ashbrook

The Italian premiere of La Favorita took place at Padua in June 1842 at a time when Donizetti was in Vienna. He had just assumed the prestigious position of Hofkapellmeister to the Hapsburg court, having brought out his Linda di Chamounix at Vienna’s Kärntnerthortheater the previous month.

The plot of La Favorite, with its mixture of sex (a king and his mistress) and religion (a novice leaves and returns to the monastery at Compostella), provided ample grounds to offend the exceedingly tender susceptibilities of the various groups of censors active in Italy before the union of the country. Soon several Italian translations were in circulation, none truly faithful, some wild indeed, that transferred the action to non-Christian climes and others disguised the work under such aliases as Elda and Riccardo e Matilda. In other Italian efforts to redeem the scandalous plot, the relationships of the characters were altered. In the least plausible of these, Balthazar is presented as the father of Alphonse’s queen and Fernand is the son, a shift that transforms him into Alphonse’s brother-in-law, all of which makes his ignorance of Léonor’s identity and position seem dim-witted indeed. No wonder Donizetti, whose career was then divided between Paris and Vienna, held himself aloof from such distortions.

In its original French form, La Favorite was, according to my count, the composer’s 57th stage work. It received its first performance at the Paris Opéra on 2 December 1840. In June of that same year he had come from France to Milan to modify the French score of the opéra comique La Fille du régiment for its introduction to Italy at La Scala as an Italian opera buffa, La figlia del reggimento first performed on 30 October. Nearly two months before Figlia was staged, however, the composer received an urgent message from the Paris Opéra. Someone had renounced his "turn" to put on a new opera — such "turns" usually came 'round at three-month intervals. The reluctant composer who passed up his "turn" may well have been Meyerbeer, who kept delaying the introduction of Le Prophète for nearly a decade until he could have the singers that pleased him. To fill that "turn," Léon Pillet, by then the director of the Opéra, asked Donizetti, eager to make his mark in Paris, to accept the upcoming blank in the Opéra’s schedule.

Back in Paris by September, Donizetti happened to have on his hands the completed score of his French opera semiseria, L’Ange de Nisida, which in 1839 had been commissioned by Théâtre de la Renaissance as a successor to his French version of Lucia, introduced at the Renaissance the previous August. L’Ange, however, although completed in December 1839 and the score ready to be delivered, remained unperformed as the manager of that establishment, one Antenor Joly, went into bankruptcy and ceased operations. Further, the composer was ready to salvage this work, as in its original form — its plot dealing with a mistress of a Neapolitan king — it stood no chance of surviving the attentions of the Italian censors. In the crisis at the Opéra in the fall of 1840, it was agreed to upgrade and modify the plot of L’Ange so that it would deal with a medieval King of Castille and his mistress and provide a cue for an extensive ballet divertissement. Pillet and the composer turned to the ever-resourceful librettist hands of Eugène Scribe to adapt the text of L’Ange, which had been written by Alphonse Royer and Gustave Vaëz.

A crucial factor in the creation of this quasi-new opera was the mezzo-soprano Rosine Stoltz, who happened to be Léon Pillet’s mistress, a diva who brooked no rivals. As the daughter of the woman who oversaw the stage door at the Opéra-Comique, little Rosine had learned at her mother’s breast the ways to advance in the world. A woman of unbridled ambition, endowed with a not inconsiderable vocal talent, la Stoltz took full advantage of her position to ensure that any major new production had an imposing role for her, one that would be mentioned in the title of the work. On those grounds and because of its (to her way of thinking) unsuitable title, she rejected Donizetti’s half-completed Le Duc d’Albe, for which the leading female role, Hélène, had been originally designed for Stoltz’s detested rival, the soprano Julie Dorus-Gras.

It was under these hurried circumstances — the premiere already set for early December — that La Favorite was put together. Few could have realized that, behind a number of passages from L’Ange de Nisida, stood the shadow of an earlier incomplete 1834 score by Donizetti, the little-known and never-produced Adelaide. Further, the discovery not long ago of the autograph of Maria Stuarda, also from 1834, revealed that two of its episodes had wound up in La Favorite. Considering its composite nature, La Favorite is unassailable evidence of the innate coherence of Donizetti’s style.

As above all a practical composer, Donizetti knew well that the success of a work largely depended upon a score containing effective solos from the principal singers. He knew that his cast would include, besides Stoltz as the prima donna, his old friend the tenor Gilbert Duprez; these romantic leads would be supported by the baritone Paul Barroilhet as the king and the famous deep bass Nicolas Levasseur as the abbot.

The parts of La Favorite that have no previous sources are the opening chorus that sets an ascending and descending C major scale, the duet for Fernand and Balthazar, Fernand’s martial air at the end of Act 1, Alphonse’s double aria at the beginning of Act 2, the ballet, and the king’s "Pour tant d’amour" and Léonor’s double aria, "O mon Fernand," that follows directly after it.

The last act comes from a combination of earlier scores: "Ange si pur" (known in Italian as "Spirto gentil") comes from Le Duc d’Albe, whose tenor roles had been designed for Duprez; the great duo at the end stems from L’Ange. The finales of Acts 2 and 3 come mostly from Adelaide, via L’Ange, but one episode, a solo passage for Léonor, was added for Stoltz while the opera was in rehearsal. From the original Stuarda came Inès’s air with chorus, "Rayons dorés," and a section of the Act 3 finale. However familiar one might be with La Favorita, one cannot grasp the true dimensions of the work, the innate gravitas of its powerful situations, until one knows the original French La Favorite.

See also Prof. Ashbrook's synopsis of the plot and Micaele Sparacino's discussion of the new edition of La Favorita produced by Opera Bel Canto.

William Ashbrook, production consultant and author of these notes and synopsis, is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Indiana University, editor of the Opera Quarterly, and author of Donizetti and His Operas (1982) and The Operas of Puccini (1985). He is a regular contributor to the Cambridge Opera Journal and Opera News. Professor Ashbrook recently contributed more than 40 articles to the new Grove's Encyclopedia of Opera.