Roberto Devereux, composed in Naples “in the time of cholera” in 1837, intensifies and sums up the trilogy that Donizetti devoted to the Tudor queens (prior to it came Anna Bolena and Maria Stuarda), and in many ways the whole compositional style of this son of Bergamo. It also left an indelible mark on his personal life which, as we know, was not the happiest. In that year, which represented a watershed moment, he lost his beloved Virginia and their newborn child and, against a backdrop of utter grief (“I will be unhappy forever”, he wrote in a letter to his brother-in-law), the success of Devereux at the Teatro San Carlo on 28^th October brought him satisfaction and acted as a lifeline. The Neapolitan audience immediately fell in love with the opera, appreciating the libretto too, to the extent that the accomplished Cammarano took his curtain call alongside the composer and the musicians. The work’s success continued more or less throughout the 1800s but it was the Donizetti Renaissance of the 1900s that gave the opera its permanent place in the repertoire, making it a cornerstone of romantic opera and a port of call for the vocal and theatrical virtuosity of any prima donna called on to sing the arduous role of Elisabetta. From Giuseppina Ronzi De Begnis, who was the first to interpret her, until today, the most magnificent Belcanto singers have put themselves to the test in the role as this figure, so modern, full of chiaroscuro contrast, tormented within, a woman and a queen, a mighty Donizetti character.

The boldness of the score is no less striking. Donizetti matched the urgent pace imposed by the action on stage. Subsequently, upon the work’s revival at the Théatre Italien in Paris in 1838, he rewrote only the very short initial prelude, making it truly symphonic in nature (one of his most beautiful, effective compositions, which we have chosen to perform here in Naples).

I consider it a great privilege to be conducting Roberto Devereux yet again, this time in the city where Donizetti has left his mark in countless ways, starting with the actual manuscript of this opera, preserved at the Library of the Conservatorio di San Pietro a Majella. For the same reason, I am grateful to the Teatro Massimo for having allowed me to present the full Tudor Trilogy here in Naples between 2023 and today.

Returning to conduct the Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini is always a great pleasure. This time, it’s an even greater satisfaction because I’m inaugurating the fourth edition of the Toscanini Festival, the tribute which the Foundation that bears the name of the legendary conductor has organized each summer since 2022 in Parma and some of the other most beautiful historical and artistic settings in the province. Our programme includes Mendelssohn’s Hebrides overture and the Beethoven Symphony no. 4: two works that I love for the richness of their ideas and orchestration but above all because, despite the thirty years that separate their creation, they narrate through music the new world which, from Beethoven onwards, was to become the realm of the Romantics. In between, we’re performing the Haydn Concerto no. 1 for cello and orchestra, entrusted to the exceptional talent of Philipp Schupelius from Berlin. Still in his early twenties, his name became familiar last year when Classic FM selected him as one of their Thirty Most Exciting Young Musicians in the World, but he is already a mature artist who breathes captivating new life into this work by a youthful Haydn. I think that the full programme is fascinating for the references in some of its pages to the moods and contours of a recent past, and that this feeling is intensified by the inclusion of Beethoven’s Fourth, resulting from a particularly successful year for the composer, 1806, with its stirring and only occasionally mysterious outpouring particularly in the Adagio, which enchanted Berlioz to the extent that he wrote that it ‘seems to have been breathed by the archangel Michael when, seized with a fit of melancholy, he contemplated the universe, standing on the threshold of the Empyrean’. From there to the perpetual motion of the prodigious Finale à la Haydn, it is with deep conviction that I have included this perfect, unjustly neglected symphony.