Lucrezia Borgia

Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia was premiered at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala on 26 December 1833 and is considered one of the composer’s most important and innovative operas of the 1830s. Although, because of censorship issues, particularly in the south of Italy, it was initially slow to become popular, by the late 1830s it had become one of the composer’s most popular operas, both in Italy and abroad, and remained an essential part of the composer’s oeuvre until at least the end of the nineteenth century.

Remarkable for its daring subject matter (with an unconventional, forceful heroine), it is also renowned for its challenging mixture of the comic and the tragic, something very unusual at the time and clearly an important influence on Giuseppe Verdi’s middle period masterpieces. The present reduction for voice and piano derives from the critical edition of the score, recently published in this catalog: is based on Donizetti’s autograph manuscript (housed in the Ricordi Archives in Milan), on the libretto for the premiere, on several printed editions of voice and piano, and on numerous additional scores of the period.

It presents for the first time all the numerous additions that the composer made to the score over the course of ten years: a fascinating record of his changing music dramatic attitudes during this period. There is also a synthetic historical reconstruction of the genesis of the opera and of the description of the Sources as well as a selection of most interest to singers of Critical Commentary Notes.