Il campanello

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Work data
Title: The night bell
Original title: The campanello di notte
Title page of the libretto, Florence 1838

Title page of the libretto, Florence 1838

Shape: Farsa in one act
Original language: Italian
Music: Gaetano Donizetti
Libretto : Gaetano Donizetti
Literary source: La sonnette de nuit by Léon-Lévy Brunswick, Matheu-Barthélémy Troin and Victor Lhérie
Premiere: June 1, 1836
Place of premiere: Teatro Nuovo, Naples
Playing time: Around 1 hour
Place and time of the action: Foria (a suburb of Naples), 19th century
people
  • Don Annibale Pistacchio, pharmacist ( bass )
  • Serafina, his wife ( soprano )
  • Rosa, her mother ( mezzo-soprano )
  • Enrico, a young idiot, her nephew ( baritone )
  • Spiridione, servant of the apothecary ( tenor )
  • Relatives and guests of Don Annibale, servant ( choir )

Il campanello or Il campanello di notte ( The little bell or the night bell ) is a Farsa (original name: "melodramma giocoso") in one act by Gaetano Donizetti . The composer wrote the libretto himself based on the vaudeville La sonnette de nuit by Léon-Lévy Brunswick , Matheu-Barthélémy Troin and Victor Lhérie. The work was premiered on June 1, 1836 in the Teatro Nuovo in Naples. A revised version was first played in 1837 at the Teatro del Fondo in Naples.

action

The work is set in Foria, a suburb of the Italian city of Naples, in the first half of the 19th century.

The older pharmacist Don Annibale Pistacchio took the young and pretty Serafina out of the heartbreaker Enrico and married. The wedding guests are in a good mood. Especially Serafina's mother Rosa, who is happy that her daughter made such a good match. Enrico only has one thing in mind: revenge. He wants to spoil the wedding night for the newly wed couple. So he takes advantage of the fact that pharmacists have to be ready all night. After the wedding celebration, when the guests have said goodbye, Enrico appears in constantly changing disguises and rings the night bell. He keeps the pharmacist out of the bedroom with endless chatter and hard-to-make medicines. The next morning Don Annibale Pistacchio urgently has to go to Rome because of an inheritance. Before leaving, he admonished his young wife not to open the door to anyone and finally, to Enrico's delight, set off for Rome.

orchestra

The orchestral line-up for the opera includes the following instruments:

Work history

Raffaello Casaccia (Don Annibale Pistacchio), Giovanna Schoultz (Serafina), Amelia Schütz-Oldosi (Rosa), Giorgio Ronconi (Enrico) and Domenico Ronconi (Spiridione) sang at the premiere on June 1, 1836 at the Teatro Nuovo in Naples . She had great and long-lasting success, which is particularly due to the achievement of Casaccia.

A version revised by Donizetti himself, called "operina buffa", was first played in 1837 at the Teatro del Fondo in Naples. It contained recitatives instead of spoken dialogue. In addition, the texts written in dialect have been translated into Italian.

There were other productions, for example, in Florence and Genoa in 1839, in Desenzano and Cagliari in 1841, in Milan in 1850, in Trento in 1853, in Barcelona, ​​Ferrara and Vicenza in 1855, in Genoa again in 1856, in Palermo in 1857, in Milan again in 1860, in Siena in 1867 and in Bologna in 1875. The libretto of the world premiere has not survived. Different titles were used in later productions, so that the original title can no longer be clearly identified. There were translations in French, English, Spanish and German, even if the success abroad was slow. The work was also played frequently in the 20th century.

Web links

Commons : Il campanello (Donizetti)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Norbert Miller : Il campanello di notte. In: Piper's Encyclopedia of Musical Theater . Volume 2: Works. Donizetti - Henze. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1987, ISBN 3-492-02412-2 , pp. 12-13.
  2. ↑ June 1, 1836: "Il campanello". In: L'Almanacco di Gherardo Casaglia ., Accessed on July 30, 2019.
  3. ↑ Il campanello. Work information. In: Scriptorium: Musica e Parole, accessed July 30, 2019.
  4. ↑ Il campanello di notte (Gaetano Donizetti) in the Corago information system of the University of Bologna , accessed on July 30, 2019.