Donizetti’s career as a man of the theatre stretched over more than twenty-five years, and festivals devoted to him have traditionally embraced this entire arc: a broad panorama of early nineteenth-century opera, from the 1820s through the 1830s and into the early 1840s.
Donizetti Opera 2026, instead, invites audiences to take up a magnifying glass and zoom in on a single triennium, 1826–28: the years in which Alahor in Granata was unveiled on 7 January 1826 at Palermo’s Teatro Carolino; the first version of Le convenienze ed inconvenienze teatrali (Naples, Teatro Nuovo, 1827), the source of the Milanese revision of 1831 presented here; and L’esule di Roma, premiered on 1 January 1828 at Naples’s Teatro di San Carlo.
Two opere serie and a farsa—later expanded, in 1831, towards the feel of a full-fledged comic opera—offer a perfect occasion for a double comparison.
The first contrast pits a “melo-drama” (Alahor in Granata) that Palermo audiences welcomed as a “happy midpoint between the beauty of the old style and the impulses of the new,” against a “heroic melo-drama” (L’esule di Roma) that became Donizetti’s first true triumph—and a decisive milestone—in the serious genre. Neapolitans hailed passages that could “stand among the masterpieces of the modern melodramatic stage for the truth and intensity of the passions” expressed in music.
Whether in its lean 1827 form or in the more lavish 1831 expansion, Le convenienze ed inconvenienze teatrali belongs squarely to the tradition of theatre-about-theatre: a pointed parody of the quirks, vanities, rituals, whims and entrenched pretensions of the operatic star system—real or presumed. Those who recall Il piccolo compositore di musica, one of the end-of-year “academies” penned by his teacher Mayr and revived at the Festival a couple of editions ago, will remember young Donizetti grappling with precisely these backstage skirmishes. Now it is he—Donizetti the mature composer—who sets them brilliantly to music and gleefully skewers them. A fine metamorphosis: from puppet to puppeteer.
