Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love (L’elisir d’amore in Italian) is one of the few indisputably great opera comedies and is in my opinion his greatest comic piece. It was already a hit during its debut performances in 1832 and has remained in the international repertory ever since. Why is this?
The first reason is the music of course. Though composed in just six weeks, the score is a string of memorable charmers, replete with hummable tunes ranging from the heart-breaking to the absurdly comical – Donizetti at the peak of his inspiration. Chief among them is Nemorino’s famous ‘Una Furtiva Lagrima’, which is to the early 19th century as Puccini's ‘Nessun Dorma’ is to the early 20th: a perfect jewel that never dulls with repeated exposure. But there is so much more that is brilliant – Adina’s aria (‘Prendi’) that follows immediately afterwards for instance is just as exquisitely beautiful, as are the endless profusion of inspired duets for every pairing of the four principal singers (shades of Così fan Tutte which was presented by Wild Arts last season).
These satisfying symmetries and patterns in the large-scale structure of the piece – bookended as it is by an aria each for the leading couple to underline how far the twisting story has taken us in two short hours – are the result of an expertly crafted libretto by Felice Romani, one of the best that Donizetti set to music. The plot (taken from Eugène Scribe’s libretto for Daniel Auber’s Le philtre) doesn’t feel dated – the situations are still just as funny, the keen psychological insights into the nature of human courtship, desire, pretence, and illusion remain just as telling, and we can still care about the plot and characters. This is seriously rare in opera librettos of this era. As with all timeless comedy, the humour is born of the situation rather than gags or topical references, and so we find as an audience that we are involved and moved as much as we are amused.
Alongside his already mentioned gift for melody, Donizetti responds musically to Romani’s text with unerring dramatic insight into his characters’ inner lives and outer actions. Like Handel, the astonishing thing with Donizetti always is that he can do so much with so little – so much of his harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic material is cut wholesale from the pop music formulas, routines, clichés even, of his era. And yet, at his best, as here, he is consistently able to catalyse the dramatic moment, finding just the right musical phrase for the situation. The result is a wonderfully lovable, quirky, and three-dimensional set of people, that we as an audience get to enjoy spending an evening with.
In The Elixir of Love, Romani’s basic theme (and that of Scribe before him) is deception versus sincerity. This theme is endlessly revisited among the other early romantics in more serious fare, but it always shows the greatest sophistication to be able to treat a high-minded theme with a light hand in a humorous way. As with Shakespeare’s plots, the central idea is examined in many different ways in the same piece which makes it unconsciously satisfying for us, the audience. Most obviously illustrating the theme is the quack doctor Dulcamara, a loveable rogue and huckster, selling people their own dreams in the form of the titular elixir. In the puffed-up masculinity and bravado of Belcore we see another type of illusion – someone hiding behind uniform, rank, and association, to stand in the place of genuine virtue and strength of character. His presumptuousness makes him the villain, but he is loveable in his blindness and self-belief.
Even witty, sassy, independent, modern Adina, not so obviously a charlatan, is deceiving herself about what she really wants, manipulating others to declare themselves so that she can remain a closed book and cut herself off from the dangers of genuine feeling and of a relationship. She’s too clever for her own good, which she touchingly realises by the end of the piece. Finally, with his heart on his sleeve and too simple to deceive, only Nemorino is a (mostly) honest actor, though Romani’s ingenious use of a magic potion that isn’t in fact magic, shows the power of belief to change our fates – sometimes a little bit of feigned indifference and playing hard to get is all that is needed to lure a match in the game of love – the cat with the string!
The funny twist that means that Nemorino suddenly finds himself the centre of sexual attention in Act II (no spoilers!), is another astute observation about the nature of human desire: the problem of what to value, given the infinite set of facts that lay themselves out in front of us, is an acute one for humans. Usually we outsource this intractable problem to our tribe, and discover what is desirable by watching the behaviour of others, which is especially revealed by where their attention is directed. This is a profound human phenomenon, baked into not just our psyches, but our physiology. Unlike other primates, humans have evolved to be able to see the whites of each other’s eyes, allowing us to observe with incredible accuracy not only the objects of other people’s attention, but also the feelings engendered by that object. This is a huge clue as to what they value, and by implication what we should be valuing but are missing. And so it is for Adina, another little push in her journey from controlled artifice to vulnerable sincerity.
In this production we wanted to stay true to the spirit of this admirable libretto and the warmth of the score, so I sought with my designer Sophie Lincoln to find a setting and visual language that speaks to this. We’ve chosen to set it at the seaside, a place where people seek fun and good times, a place between the known categories of solid land and chaotic sea, where there’s a sense of carnival, possibility, and searching for the unexpected. Not for nothing do so many romances start there! Belcore’s preening masculinity is amplified by making him a captain in the navy, rather than a sergeant in the army. We’ve also set it in the 1950s, an era of incredible glamour and sensitivity to image, with impossible claims in cartoonishly deceptive print advertising underlining Dulcamara’s role, and Nemorino serving as a link to old world, home-spun sincerity, while also being just a hair’s breadth away from the new culture of cool – a feigned impression of not caring what others think of you.
Above all we want you to have fun! So… sit back and enjoy the show!