UK Edition
Review
L’Ange de Nisida review, opera Rara, Royal Opera House: richly deserved revival of a Donizetti rarity
This has been widely heralded as the world première of a “lost” opera by Donizetti, but although the occasion proved fascinating and enjoyable, the facts aren’t quite as simple as that.
In 1839, Donizetti was all the rage in Paris following the great success of a Frenchified version of Lucia di Lammermoor. When a new work, L’Ange de Nisida (The Angel of Nisida), was commissioned, he assembled a score incorporating material from Adelaida, an opera he had left unfinished a few years previously.
But because the theatre concerned went bankrupt shortly afterwards – Donizetti described the impresario responsible as “a donkey” – L’Ange de Nisida never made it to the stage.
Prolific but never wasteful, Donizetti proceeded to turn to another producer and re-recycle about half the score into what became the still relatively familiar La Favorite, leaving the remainder as a puzzlingly incoherent collection of 470 manuscript sheets that ended up lodged in an obscure corner of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris.
By filling in the orchestration, making some informed suppositions and grafting one section from the later Maria di Rohan, modern musicologists led by Candida Mantica at the University of Southampton have spent the best part of a decade meticulously stitching everything together into a working edition of L’Ange de Nisida that can reasonably be said to represent the composer’s intentions – and this is what Opera Rara, that admirable organisation dedicated to the resuscitation of forgotten or neglected gems of the 19th-century repertory, presented in a concert at Covent Garden. A fully annotated recording will follow next year.
The libretto, broadly resembling that of La Favorite and the work of a pair of hacks, is very feeble and fatally short of dramatic impetus or psychological plausibility: the wandering soldier Leone is enamoured of Sylvia, a benevolent Spanish lady, sequestered on the remote island of Nisida, who is secretly the King of Naples’ mistress.
Following some operatically implausible understandings and displays of renunciatory virtue, Sylvia eventually dies from grief and Leone becomes a monk. What the King feels about it all is never explained.
Characterisation is perfunctory – Sylvia is dismayingly passive throughout - and the clumsy romantic intrigue is further vitiated by the interference of a bumbling Lord Chamberlain who tediously provides so-called comic relief: although that resourceful French bass-baritone Laurent Naouri was excellent in this role, one wished that he would shut up – his intrusions upset and muddle the emotional tone.
Are we meant to be taking this farrago seriously or not?
Yet once past a sluggish first act, there is a body of truly splendid music here, notably in a superb quartet, several large-scale ensembles and the charmingly wistful solos for the tenor singing Leone – rendered here with impeccably sweet bel canto elegance by David Junghoon Kim (impressing me much more than he did in Grange Park Opera’s recent Roméo et Juliette).
Sylvia lacks a real showstopper: in this relatively ungrateful assignment, the Lebanese- Canadian soprano Joyce El Khoury is technically assured and warmly expressive, even if her timbre is less than ideally velvety.
Vito Priante as the put-upon King and Evgeny Stavinsky as a baleful Father Superior added vocal lustre to the cast, as did the Royal Opera’s spirited chorus.
But it was the conductor Mark Elder, artistic director of Opera Rara, who brought this concert performance its biggest success. Never one to skate over music glibly, he proved once again, with the inestimable help of the Royal Opera’s orchestra, that Donizetti’s operas have a dignity and nobility that rank them with anything an Italian composed in the first half of of the 19th century.
Rossini could be more daringly original when he bestirred himself, Bellini had a very distinctive melodic style, and the rookie Verdi had raw energy to burn. But Donizetti was the supreme craftsman, always ready to turn his hand to the most unpromising material and animate it with his vivid sense of drama.
L’Ange de Nisida may not be on the level of his masterpieces Lucia di Lammermoor or Roberto Devereux; I can’t imagine it catching on. But it is richly worthy of revival and its sterling qualities are honoured by Opera Rara’s fine performance.