Tag: Gaetano Donizetti
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Lucrezia Borgia—victim of her times
George DuneaChicago, IL For five hundred years, society has unfairly blackened the name of Lucrezia Borgia—in history, literature, even in opera. Living at a time when girls could be disposed of at their parents’ whim, she became a child-bride at eleven, was contracted to be married five times, had a least ten pregnancies, and died…
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Madness at the opera
It is ironic and tragic that Gaetano Donizetti, author of the most famous mad scenes in the history of opera, should himself have died in a state of utter madness from what has been described “as the most terrible of all brain diseases.”1 In two of his operas, Anna Bolena and Lucia di Lammermoor, the…