Donizetti: Lucia di Lammermoor

Donizetti's opera, based on Walter Scott's novel, is a staple of the bel canto operatic repertoire and famed above all for its vocally challenging and frequently reinterpreted 'mad scene' that precedes the lead character's death. This handbook examines the impact Lucia has had on opera and investigates why, of all of Donizetti's seventy operas, this particular work has inspired so much enthusiastic interest among scholars, directors and singers. A key feature is the sheer mutability of the character Lucia as she transforms from a lyric bel canto figure to a highly charged coloratura femme fatale, fascinating not just to opera historians but also to those working on sound studies, literary theories of horror and the gothic, the science of the mind, gender theory and feminist thought. The book places Lucia within the larger contexts of its time, while underlining the opera's central dramatic elements that resonate in the repertoire today.

• Highlights the main sources of the libretto, the genre, the original vocal score, the reception, the orchestration and instrumentation found throughout the work
• Contextualizes our understanding of early nineteenth-century opera within the larger crosscurrents of Romantic thought while underlining at the same time the central dramatic elements within Lucia that have allowed it to remain in the repertoire today
• Discusses noteworthy historical and modern productions, and reveals the opera's presence in movies from the silent film era to today's latest blockbuster