Imelda de' Lambertazzi

Imelda de' Lambertazzi is a melodramma tragico, or tragic opera, in two acts by Gaetano Donizetti from a libretto by Andrea Leone Tottola, based on historical events of 1274 in Bologna described by Cherubino Ghirardacci in his Della Historia di Bologna (1605), and Gasparo Bombaci in his Historia de i fatti d'Antonio Lambertacci nobile, e potente cittadin Bolognese descritta da Gasparo Bombaci (1632), and also based on the 5-act tragedy Imelda by Gabriele Sperduti (Naples, 1825). The opera received its first performance on 5 September 1830, at the Teatro San Carlo, Naples, starring soprano Antonietta Galzerani and the legendary bel canto baritone Antonio Tamburini in his vocal prime as Bonifacio Geremei.

Performance History

19th Century

Antonietta Galzerani was the daughter of the prominent Italian ballet choreographer Giovanni Galzerani (c 1789-after 1853), who composed ballets for many of the most prominent theaters of Italy, including Teatro La Fenice and Teatro Communale di Bologna.

The opera was not a great success and performances of it are very rare. Despite this, some very great singers chose to sing it. After the 1830 première, it was revived in April 1831 again at the Teatro San Carlo for four performances with Luigia Boccabadati replacing Galzerani as Imelda, and Tamburini reprising Bonifacio. Boccabadati had created the role of Amelia in Donizetti's Il castello di Kenilworth in 1829 with Adelaide Tosi and Giovanni David, and a month after her performances as Imelda, starred in the première of Francesca di Foix, again with Tamburini. Imelda de' Lambertazzi had only a few other performances in the 19th C.: twice in Barcelona (1840) with the noted Mercadante baritone Pietro Balzar (1814-1847) singing Bonifacio at the age of 26. [Balzar created Foscari in Il Bravo, Gusmano in La solitaria delle Asturie, and Orazio in Mercadante's masterpiece Orazi e Curiazi.] Two other productions of Imelda followed--one in La Corogne, Spain (1843), and in Senigallia, Italy (1856), this last with the prominent baritone Leone Giraldoni, creator of Renato in Verdi's Ballo, as Bonifacio, and Antonio Giuglini as Lamberto, a year before the start of his brilliant London career. Charles Lumley said this of Giuglini's Edgardo in London:

"About his singing there could be no possible difference of opinion. Since the days of Rubini such a remarkable combination of lovely voice with "school" and expression had not been known. The famous "maledizione" (which had sufficed to make the fortune of a tenore robusto like Fraschini), being delivered with profound emotion, took the audience by storm."

There is a transcription at Teatro La Fenice recording the appearance of the opera, but unfortunately nothing is recorded about the dates, artists involved, or number of performances of this phantom Venice production.

Modern Performances

There exist only two 'performances' of the work, one a recording, the other a recorded concert. Nuova Era Records issued the first recording, recorded on Feb. 15-19, 1989 in Lugano, Switzerland. Marc Andreae conducted the Orchestra & Coro della Radiotelevisione della Svizzera Italiana. Floriana Sovila is Imelda, Andrea Martin sings Bonifacio, Diego D'Auria is Lamberto, Fausto Tenzi is Orlando, and Gastone Sarti is Ubaldo.

A concert performance was given on 10 March 2007 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, conducted by Mark Elder, which was recorded by Opera Rara, with Nicole Cabell/Imelda, James Westman/Bonifacio, Massimo Giordano/Lamberto, Frank Lopardo/Orlando, and Brindley Sherratt/Ubaldo.

As of Dec. 2016, Imelda de' Lambertazzi remains---astonishingly---unstaged in modern times.

Roles

Role Voice type Premiere Cast, 5 September 1830
(Conductor: - )
Imelda soprano Antonietta Galzerani
Bonifacio Geremei baritone Antonio Tamburini
Lamberto tenor Berardo Winter
Orlando Lambertazzi tenor Giovanni Basadonna
Ugo bass Michele Benedetti
Ubaldo bass Gennaro Ambrosini
Customers, followers of Lambertazzi, friends of Gieremei, soldiers, people

Synopsis

"Imelda e Bonifacio": death of Bonifacio in Imelda's arms, by Giovanni Pagliarini (1809-1878)

(The plot shares elements with the Romeo and Juliet theme.)

Time: 1274
Place: Bologna[1]

ACT 1---Piazza outside the house of the Lambertazzi. A town crier affixes a poster on which is written: "The truce is over. Ghibellines, to arms." The people of Bologna call for an end to the fighting between the Lambertazzi and Geremei families. Orlando Lambertazzi, Praetor of Bologna, and patriarch of the family, chides the people of Bologna for cowardice, but his son Lamberto Lambertazzi insists on war. His sister Imelda Lambertazzi (aligned to the Guelfs) loves Bonifacio, heir of the Geremei (who support the Ghibellines). Orlando, Lamberto, and Ubaldo rally everyone to arms, Ah! s'oda lo squillo.

---Alone in her room, Imelda muses on her hopeless love in an aria, Amarti, e nel martoro. Then Bonifacio meets her disguised as a soldier messenger, and vainly asks the girl in duetto to run away with her, Non sai qual periglio. Imelda unable to dishonor herself, they part resigned to death, Restati pur...m'udrai spento. Bonifacio, solus, resolves to work for an accord, then exits. Orlando tries to convince his son to consider peace, but Lamberto will have none of it. Orlando asks him to at least hear what Bonificio has to offer.

---A hall in the Lambertazzi house. The Ghibellini are hot for war. Bonifacio proclaims, "Let the cry of peace resound." When Bonifacio proposes harmony between the families---to be sealed by their marriage---he is met with the ire of Lamberto and his father. Imelda pleads for peace for the people, A recarti delle meste genetrice. The act ends with Lamberto casting his glove down to Bonifacio, who accepts, Vanne, m'attendi al campo, and a raucous call to war.

ACT 2---The apartment as in Act One. In a duet---one of the expressive peaks of the score---Lamberto, outraged by his sister's love for the enemy Bonifacio, reminds her that Bonifacio's father Rolandin starved their own mother to death in prison, Di Bonifacio il padre. But Imelda has already forgiven the Geremei because Lamberto has killed Bonifacio's younger brother. This is one of the great bel canto soprano-tenor duettos, gaining powerful dramatic impetus from the innovative brother-sister dynamic of Donizetti's dramaturgy.

---A wood. The camp of the Geremei. Night is falling. Bonifacio laments his fate in a superb scena with male chorus, Imelda a me volgea. [Bellini must have similarly understood the quality of Tamburini's voice, as Donizetti's music for Bonifacio shares the suavity of Riccardo's aria di sortita in I puritani.]

---At night in the Lambertazzi garden---observed by Lamberto---the lovers have a desperate farewell duetto, Deh! cedi a chi t'adora! Bonifacio is fatally stabbed offstage with a poisoned dagger by Lamberto. He drags Imelda onstage, who pleads for forgiveness, but is rejected by father and brother. Having sucked the poison from Bonifacio's wound in a desperate attempt to save her lover's life, Imelda dies at her father's feet with a devastating and simple arioso, Padre! son rea, lo vedo. At the very end, only the people of Bologna, for whom Imelda sought peace, show her mercy and empathy:

-Tutti: Qual gel mi piomba al cor! Oh giorno di terror! (Quadro. Si cala il sipario.)

[Alternative Ending: Donizetti wrote an aria-cabaletta finale for four performances in Naples, April, 1831. This was at the request of the prima donna, Luigia Boccabadati-Gazzuoli (1800-1850), who surely wanted a display piece instead of the psychologically apposite and darkly veristic ending Donizetti intended. Surprisingly, the aria, M'odi almen, te ne scongiuro, is an adaption of Percy's exquisite Vivi tu from the wildly successful Anna Bolena of 1830. While very beautiful, this finale should, of course, always be eschewed for the original ending and relegated to Donizetti concerts. The composer's original conclusion to Imelda is empirical proof---concerning Donizetti and Verdi---as to who was the innovative master to whom.]

Literary and Historical Sources

Gabriele Sperduti and Adolphus Koeppen

Donizetti and Tottola changed Gabriele Sperduti’s original ending of Imelda to express a more violent Romanticism. As Phèdre had her Oenone, Imelda’s confidante Stefania---a character excised from the opera---delivers a final speech at the end of the play to describe the death scene between the lovers to Orlando, and how they died in each other’s arms, 'Entrambi io vidi/Al suol ristretti fralle braccia…' Sperduti sounds a note of tenderness by giving Orlando the grief of a father’s heart: “Orlando si abbandona muto nel suo cordoglio sul cadavere della figlia. Cala la tenda. Fine della Tragedia.” Contrast this with Tottola, who creates a starker, more Gothic horror by depicting onstage the cruelty of Imelda’s brother, while denying the lovers’ final embrace, and even empathy from Orlando, who cruelly spurns Imelda---however ambivalently we may hope he does so. This is a finale that looks forward to those of Marino Faliero, Maria di Rohan, and still further ahead to the abrupt and violent endings of verismo opera.

History records the horrendous aftermath of the lovers' catastrophe, events in starkest contrast to the conciliatory tone expressed by Shakespeare's Lords Montague and Capulet on the last page of that play. Indeed, Donizetti had enough further material to plot a French grand opéra, as seen in Adolphus Koeppen's history, The World in the Middle Ages (1854): "The factions of the Guelfs and Ghibelines proved the ruin of the prosperity and independence of Bologna. Ambitious and rival families sided under either banner. A private crime of the proud Lambertazzi, the head of the Ghibeline party, brought on the most frightful disasters. The offended Geremei, the chief family of the Guelfs, drove the former, at the sword's point, out of the city, in 1274, with fifteen thousand of their partisans and defendants. Imelda de' Lambertazzi loved the young Boniface Geremei, whose family had long been separated by the most inveterate enmity from her own. During a secret interview, the lovers were surprised by the Lambertazzi, the brothers of the young lady. Imelda escaped, but the lover was stabbed to the heart by the poisoned daggers of the Lambertazzi. In her despair, Imelda returned; she found his body still warm, and a faint hope suggested the remedy of sucking the venom from his wounds. But it only communicated itself to her veins; and the two unhappy lovers were found by her attendants stretched lifeless by each other's side. So cruel an outrage wrought the Geremei to madness: they formed an alliance with the democratic party in the city, and with some neighboring republics: the Lambertazzi took the same measures among the nobility, and after the most frightful battle in the streets of Bologna of forty days' duration, wherein palaces and towers were stormed, and part of the city destroyed, all the Ghibellini were driven out, their houses razed, and their estates confiscated."

Tottola and Shakespeare

While reminding us of Romeo and Juliet, Imelda de' Lambertazzi isn't really a reworking of this story. It shouldn't be viewed through a Shakespearean lens of expectations. We shouldn't look for balconies, love potions or a sleeping girl in a tomb in the libretto, but understand Tottola's Imelda and Bonifacio as a great tragic couple of Italian history in their own right, a history which unfortunately contains many examples of private people ground down by political strife. There's a certain quality in the bluntness of the story, the spare use of fioritura and heavy use of recitative, the unbroken flow of scenes, the darker proto-modern lack of 'redemption', that ever so faintly points far ahead to verismo, a bit more Cavalleria than Capuleti.

Gasparo Bombaci

Gasparo Bombaci---in his Historia de i fatti d'Antonio Lambertacci nobile, e potente cittadin Bolognese descritta da Gasparo Bombaci (1632)---describes the historical events of Imelda and Bonifacio.

John Adams and Cherubino Ghirardacci

The story certainly made an impression on our second president, John Adams, who wrote voluminously about Italian history and politics (The Works of John Adams, Vol 5, 316. Boston, 1851), and recorded his thoughts on the following passage from Cherubino Ghirardacci, in his Della Historia di Bologna (1605):

---"There were in Bologna two most noble families, the Gieremei and the Lambertazzi, between whom, not only the party prejudices of Guelphs and Ghibellines, but a rivalry for power and preeminence in the state, had long subsisted; but neither party animosities nor family jealousies were able to prevent Imelda, a daughter of Orlando Lambertazzi, a most beautiful young lady, from entertaining a partiality for Boniface, a son of Gieremia de Gieremei, a very handsome young man, who was desperately in love with her. This mutual passion thus increasing in their hearts from day to day, the two lovers at last found an opportunity to meet. The lady's brothers being engaged in some amusement at the house of the Caccianemici, having information of this interview, went to their sister's chamber, and finding Boniface there, fell upon him with poisoned weapons, and in an instant pierced his breast and his heart, their miserable sister flying in despair from their fury. Having committed the murder, they concealed the body in a sink, which ran under some apartment in the house, and fled from the city. The murderers having departed, Imelda, full of apprehensions and terrible presages of what she should discover, ventured to return to her chamber, and seeing upon the floor a rivulet of blood, she followed its direction, and opening the place where her lover lay she threw herself on the delicate body, still warm and bleeding, and distracted with tenderness and grief, applied her lips to his wounds, and drew in the poison with his blood; and whilst sorrowfully lamenting the loss of her lover, the poison spread over her whole frame to her heart, and Imelda fell dead in his arms."

'A catastrophe so tragical could not be recited on a stage without affecting in the most sensible manner the most unfeeling audience. The discovery of it to the public in Bologna could not, one would think, but melt the most obdurate heart of faction, and soften the savage monster to humanity; but the effect of it was so contrary to this, that it wrought up the hatred between the two factions to a mortal contagion, which increased and spread till it ruined and enslaved the republic.'---John Adams, U.S. president

It's hard to imagine an audience today, presented with an inspired production---with great singing---of Imelda de' Lambertazzi failing to respond any differently. Inexplicably, Donizetti's pre-Bolena, ruggedly youthful, intensely Italian masterpiece still awaits the appreciation it deserves. A score that boasts the powerful Imelda-Lamberto duet, a baritone scena of exquisite lyricism, a starkly innovative finale, and Donizetti's innovative reversal of tenor/baritone roles deserves to be realized on stage in a production worthy of its beauty.

Recordings

Year Cast:
Imelda, Lamberto,
Orlando Lambertazzi,
Bonifacio		 Conductor,
Opera House and Orchestra		 Label[2]
1989 Floriana Sovilla,
Diego D' Auria,
Fausto Tenzi,
Andrea Martin		 Marc Andreae,
Italian Switzerland Radio/TV Orchestra
(Recorded in Lugano, 15–19 February) 		Audio CD: Nuova Era
Cat: 6778/6779
2007 Nicole Cabell,
Massimo Giordano,
Frank Lopardo,
James Westman 		Mark Elder,
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Geoffrey Mitchell Choir		 Audio CD: Opera Rara
Cat: ORC 36

References

Notes

  1. ↑ Osborne 1994, p. 192
  2. ↑ Source for recording information: Recording(s) of Imelda de' Lambertazzi on operadis-opera-discography.org.uk

Cited sources

Other sources

External links

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