On 20 February at the Concert Hall soloists of the Academy of Young Opera Singers directed by Larisa Gergieva will be presenting Gaetano Donizetti’s rarely-performed opera Gemma di Vergy. Federico Santi will be conducting.
As a musician with a broad education, in his work on his operas Donizetti dedicated a great deal of attention not just to the musical components but also to the libretti, preferring to take works by Victor Hugo and Walter Scott among others as the foundations for his opuses. The theme of Gemma di Vergy was a Parisian novelty – Alexandre Dumas-père’s play Charles VII chez ses grands vassaux (1831). The events of the opera take place during the Hundred Years’ War in the home of the French Earl of Vergy, though their historical veracity is conditional in the extreme.
Written according to the canons of the time, in so-called solita forma or “conventional form”, the opera has a typical framework: a recitative, a slow songful cavatina, a transition rich in events and – to crown it all – a virtuoso cabaletta and chorus. The genre, too, was popular – tragedia lirica, the most serious of all types of opera that existed at that time, in which the heroes are noble and the passions frenetic. These two factors, coupled with Donizetti’s beautiful music, made Gemma a “hit” in its day and its international success, which subsequently endured almost sixty years, spread like lightning from St Petersburg to New York. With the dawn of the 20th century the work gradually began to depart from theatre stages until, in the 1980s, it saw a brief return thanks to the amazing Montserrat Caballé. It is a great thing indeed to hear a live performance of this rare opera today.
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