La favorite

Opera in four acts by Gaetano Donizetti
Libretto by Alphonse Royer and Gustave Vaëz, with additions by Eugène Scribe, based on the drama Le Comte de Commings by Baculard d'Arnaud
First performed at the Paris Opéra on 2 December 1840

Alphonse XI, King of Castile (baritone)
Léonor de Guzman, his mistress (mezzo soprano)
Inès, her confidante (soprano)
Fernand, a novice (tenor)
Don Gaspar, a king’s officer (tenor)
Balthazar, Superior of a monastery (bass)

Chorus of monks, ladies-in-waiting and courtiers

To be sung in the original French

Like his compatriots Rossini, Bellini, and Verdi, Donizetti succumbed to the lure of Paris and its audiences, who were highly receptive to the lyric charms and dramatic energy of Italian Romantic opera. Though received somewhat indifferently at its first performance in 1840, La favorite (the composer’s 57th work for the stage) achieved enormous popularity within a short time, so much so that within two years, the young, penniless Richard Wagner, living in Paris at the time, was commissioned by a publisher to make six different instrumental arrangements of the opera for domestic salons and drawing rooms. Beyond France, La favorite became generally known in its Italian version La Favorita, translated in 1842 (but without Donizetti’s participation, for his work was now divided between Paris and Vienna). This process not only lost the rhythms and timbres of the French language as a result, but also became so obsessed with avoiding the strict Italian censorship of the day that it succeeded in emasculating the plot’s two principal elements, sex (a king and his mistress) and religion (a novice is lured away by temptations of the flesh, but finally sees the errors of his ways and returns to the monastery). Responding to an urgent commission from the Opéra, Donizetti cobbled together material from recently abandoned works, added further material (including the obligatory ballet for the Court in Act 2) and gave the result a new title and setting, with the current darling of the Parisian public and mistress of the theatre’s Director (one might say ‘La favorite’) Theresa Stoltz in the title role.

At the monastery of St James of Compostela (in the year 1340) the novitiate Fernand informs his abbot Balthazar that he cannot continue on his chosen path because he has fallen in love with a beautiful woman, whose identity he does not know. When he meets her on the island of Léon, she refuses to reveal her identity, asks him to forget her and hands him a royal military commission. She is in fact Léonor, mistress of King Alphonse who wants to marry her but relents in Fernand’s favour when she tells him that it is the young man she loves and not the King. However, what follows is a series of misunderstandings, intrigues, rejections and declarations of love, before death inevitably brings a tragic resolution to events.

Christopher Fifield