Musical Perspectives on Donizetti’s Melodrama “Lucia di Lammermoor”

Abstract

Although constrained by the rigid theatrical conventions of the opera, Gaetano Donizetti, a versatile dramatist by excellence, is distinguished by his attempts to renew certain musical opera forms, contributing to a new belcanto stage. Donizetti has complied with the belcanto tradition in order to poetize vocal expression as his coevals Rossini and Bellini did, but he also managed to pay attention to the dramatic and psychological construction of the characters, guessing the direction of the musical genre of opera and anticipating the great Verdi psychological dramas. My scientific research is based on information related to sources of inspiration and data about artists who have performed the absolute premieres of Lucia di Lammermoor, and on examining the action and structure of this unique belcanto melodrama.