DONIZETTI, GAETANO Italian musical composer, was born at Bergamo on Nov. 29, 1797. He studied at Naples under Simon Mayr, the operatic composer, and then under Mattei at Bologna. After his return to Bergamo, his father insisted upon his giving lessons in order to earn his living. Don izetti revolted, and enlisted in the army. His regiment was quar tered at Venice, and here the young composer's first opera, Enrico comte di Borgogna, saw the light in 1818.
The success of this work, and of a second opera brought out in the following year, established Donizetti's reputation. He ob tained his discharge from the army, and henceforth his operas followed each other in rapid and uninterrupted succession at the rate of three or f our a year. Although he had to contend suc cessively with two such dangerous rivals as Rossini and Bellini he succeeded in taking firm hold of the public, and the bril liant reception accorded to his Anna Bolena at Milan, where Pasta and Rubini appeared in it, carried his name beyond the limits of his own country. In 1835 Donizetti went for the first time to Paris, where, however, his Marino Faliero failed to hold its own against Bellini's Puritani, then recently produced at the Theatre Italien. The disappointed composer went to Naples, where the enormous success of his Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) consoled him for his failure in Paris. Returning to Paris he produced at the Opera Comique what proved eventually his most popular opera, La Fille du regiment, but it was not till after the work had made the round of the theatres of Germany and Italy that it found favour with the French. A revival in Paris of his Lucrezia Borgia, produced at Milan in 1833, was interrupted by Victor Hugo's claim for infringement of copyright, and the libretto was altered. La Favorita, generally considered Donizetti's masterpiece, was produced in 1840. His next important work, Linda di Chamounix, was written for Vienna, where it was received most favourably in 1842, and the same success attended the production of Don Pasquale in Paris in 1843. Soon after this event the first signs of a fatal disease, caused to a great extent by overwork, began to show themselves. The utter failure of Don Sebastian, a large opera produced soon after Don Pasquale, is said to have hastened the catastrophe. A paralytic stroke in 1844 deprived Donizetti of his reason, and for four years he lingered on in a state of mental and physical prostration. A visit to his country was proposed as a last resource, but he reached his native place only to die there on April 1, 1848.
- The sum total of his operas amounts to sixty-four. The large number of his works accounts for many of their chief defects. His rapidity of working made all revision impossible. It is said that he once wrote the instrumentation of a whole opera within thirty hours. And yet it may be doubted whether more elabora tion would have essentially improved his work, for the dramatic last act of the Favorita, infinitely superior to the preceding ones, is also said to have been the product of a single night.
Without boasting the sweetness of Bellini or the sparkle of Rossini, Donizetti won the popular ear by his flow of melody and by his rare skill in writing for the voice, to which qualities may be added his power of humorous delineation, as evinced in Don Pasquale and L'Elisir d'amore, which works will probably last as long as anything he ever wrote.
See F. Cicconetti, Vita di G. Donizetti (1864) ; Lettere inedite di Gaetano Donizetti (ed. Eisner-Eisenhoff, 5897) ; Ch. Malherbe, Le centenaire de Donizetti (1897) ; and A. Cametta, Donizetti (19o7).