To close our Tudor trilogy, what better than a third lyrical tragedy in which we find Elizabeth I of England, this time in the twilight of her life. There is, of course, an intrigue, led by her favourite Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex and in historical fact her great cousin by her mother’s sister Mary Boleyn and more or less 30 years her junior. Let us add in passing, for accuracy’s sake, that the second husband of Devereux’s mother was none other than Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, the character around whom Maria Stuarda, the second episode of our trilogy, is triangulated. Here, against a background of tensions between Catholics and Protestants, the royal favourite returns unauthorised by the Queen from his post in Catholic Ireland. In short, the reckless earl was the last to be beheaded (with an axe) in the Tower of London in 1601, which goes to show that morals do seem to be if not changing, then at least evolving.
Composed and finished by force in 1837, after Gaetano Donizetti lost both his father and mother, his second child and then his wife after the death of the third child she had just given birth to, the opera was a great success in Naples and was performed throughout Italy and Europe until the 1880s before disappearing from the repertoire of opera houses. Until the Donizetti revival in the 1960s with Belcanto divas such as Leyla Gencer, Beverly Sills and more recently Edita Gruberova. The score, as in Anna Bolena, is closely linked to the dramatic action, lifting and accentuating every sigh or gesture of anger of Elizabeth, finally cast as the main character. Donizetti gives an in-depth psychological account, absent from Maria Stuarda, of the innermost desires for love of this solitary woman, a monarch at the end of her life and reign.
Continuing their exploration into the fictitious character of the so-called Virgin Queen, Mariame Clément and set designer Julia Hansen investigate the entrails of power and the ambiguity between state and private reasons. By bringing the contemporary issues of the characters to the fore, they take them out of the romantic ditch where the bourgeois 19th century had parked them. Here they can give themselves fully, whilst keeping up appearances, to tragedy. The passionate conductor Stefano Montanari will be back with the cast that has been with us for three years now: Elsa Dreisig as the old Queen, Stéphanie d’Oustrac as her rival, Sara Nottingham, and tenor Edgardo Rocha as the eternal favourite. They will be joined by the impressive baritone Nicola Alaimo as the powerful Lord Nottingham.
