Donizetti's delayed debut.
Donizetti's Elisabeth, Thurs., July 17 at Caramoor, 149 Girdle Ridge Rd., Katonah, NY, 914-232-1252.
In 1984, Will Crutchfield, at the time a critic for the New York Times, found himself passing yet another dusty day among the haphazard archives in the basement of Covent Garden. The day, which began like so many others for the musicologist, ended up yielding a mysterious manuscript that would obsess Crutchfield for the next two decades, a labor of love that will finally come to fruition on Thursday at Caramoor.
Crutchfield's discovery: the first and third acts of an opera scrawled partly in the hand of the 19th-century Italian master Gaetano Donizetti. While not familiar with the 70 operas that Donizetti had penned during his prolific career, Crutchfield was nonetheless enchanted by the treasure he had uncovered, which resembled Donizetti's popular 1827 opera Otto mesi in due ore. Crutchfield's insatiable curiosity led him to Naples, where what remained of the original autograph of Otto mesi was housed, and later to Paris, where it appeared that Donizetti had been working on the revision.
His initial inquiries enabled him to deduce that the piece was a complete reworking of the original. It was altered to reflect Donizetti's 1830s style, which, while maintaining his preference for delicious melodies, reflected the richer orchestration and storytelling that would characterize his later operas. Donizetti had been unhappy with his original score for the opera, which tells the story of Elisabeth, a young girl who treks from Siberia to Moscow in order to convince the czar to pardon her exiled father.
The reconstruction of the lost work accelerated when conductor Richard Bonynge was rummaging around Covent Garden's basement the following year, looking for rare ballet scores upon Crutchfield's recommendation. During his search, he happened upon the middle act of the opera. Like the other two, this manuscript was a hodgepodge of pieces, with a libretto in both French and Italian. All three were scarred with burn marks, indicating that they had weathered a fire at some point during their storage. In many ways, the survival of the original autographs reflects the resiliency of the work, which Donizetti had spent nearly a decade perfecting, only to have the performances fall through for unknown reasons. The opera literally rose from the ashes to fulfill its ultimate destiny: a world premiere.
While Crutchfield (who now wears a prominent conductor's hat in addition to his musicologist one) oversaw a concert production at Covent Garden of the final draft, which was revised and retranslated back into Italian supposedly for the London audience that was to attend the premiere, he, like Donizetti, was not completely satisfied with the results. Thus he pursued a fully staged version of the French draft. "It is an absolute gem and reveals a great operatic entertainer at the top of his game," Crutchfield said of the work. Comparing this version to the concert version, he noted, "This Elisabeth contains even more of the composer's mature music."
Elisabeth tells the story of a girl, a soprano in fact, who traverses Russia with the noble task of liberating her father, encountering many obstacles on her way, including a band of Tartar thieves, a flood and the man who conspired against her father. With the help of others and through tremendous courage and buoyancy, Elisabeth succeeds in her mission, and her father is restored. For Crutchfield, the journey he took to resurrect the score was no less dramatic or impressive. In both cases, it's the audience that reaps the benefits of such determination.