• by Gaetano Donizetti

• In Italian with projected English translations

• Running Time: 2 hours, 30 minutes

A COMEDY WITH EVERYTHING: LOVABLE CHARACTERS, WONDERFUL ARIAS, BEAUTIFUL SETS — AND EVEN A REAL HORSE! 

Nemorino's down and out — dead-end job, hardly noticed by the ladies, and hopelessly in love with Adina, who's indifferent to his yearnings.

But she's not indifferent to the yearnings of Sergeant Belcore. (There's something about a man in uniform.) In fact, she's considering marrying the guy!

Poor Nemorino hardly stands a chance. But there's somebody who can set things right...

Dr. Dulcamara — huckster, con man, and a downright charmer who whips up an "elixir" (it's really bad Bordeaux) that makes Nemorino the go-to guy for serious lovin'!

An absolute gem of an opera — sung by a stellar cast!

Choose from two perfect pairings! Lovely Nicole Cabell, who dazzles with "superstar charm," (Chicago Tribune) teams up withItalian sensation Giuseppe Filianoti, "who has a voice one could listen to forever." The Independent, London

Susanna Phillips, whose voice is "achingly gorgeous," (Dallas Morning News) partners with top tenor Frank Lopardo, "who sings with ardor, elegance and effortless high notes." (Chicago Tribune)

The Elixir of Love

The Mrs. Thomas B. Burke and The I. A. O’Shaughnessy Foundation Production.

Revival made possible by Illinois Tool Works Inc., the NIB Foundation and Roberta L. and Robert J. Washlow.

TIME: 19^th century

PLACE: A village in southern Italy

ACT ONE

Adina’s estate, afternoon

ACT TWO

The same, late that same night

ACT ONE

On a sunny afternoon, Giannetta and the other villagers rest in the shade on Adina’s farm (Chorus: Bel conforto al mietitore). Adina sits apart from them, engrossed in a romantic novel.  Nemorino gazes lovingly at her, lamenting that she couldn’t possibly be interested in him (Cavatina: Quanto è bella).

An amused Adina looks up from her book to remark on how bizarre the story is:   (Aria with Chorus: Della crudele Isotta): A magician’s love potion made that legendary couple, Tristan and Isolde, fall in love with each other. Adina wishes she knew the recipe for the elixir!

Soldiers march in, led by Sergeant Belcore.  Presenting Adina with a flower, he likens himself to Paris in Greek mythology, who offered the apple to the most beautiful of women (Cavatina: Come Paride vezzoso).  Nemorino knows that he’d die in misery if Adina were to yield to Belcore’s wooing. Fortunately for him, Adina tells Belcore she’s in no hurry.

As Belcore and his men retire to the village square, the villagers return to their work. Nemorino begs Adina to stay for a moment. When the two are alone, Adina tells Nemorino she’s grown impatient with his sighing for her.  He would do better to go to his uncle, who is ill.  If the uncle died and left his money to someone else, Nemorino wouldn’t care: He expects to die himself, since Adina doesn’t love him. She admits that he’s a good, modest lad, but his hopes are vain, for she’s as fickle as the breeze (Duet: Chiedi all’aura lusinghiera). Nemorino again declares that he wishes to die for love of Adina, but she retorts that the only cure for him is to pick a new love every day, just as she does (Cabaletta: Per guarir di tal pazzia).

When the villagers hear a trumpet in the distance, they wonder what it can mean (Chorus: Che vuol dire codesta suonata?). They soon find out: Dr. Dulcamara makes a grand entrance, and announces that he can sell them cures for every ill (Cavatina: Udite, udite, o rustici).  Everyone departs except Nemorino, who asks if Dulcamara carries Isolde’s love potion. Indeed he does (Duet: Voglio dire, lo stupendo). Nemorino has just enough money to purchase a bottle of the “elixir,” and Dulcamara obligingly sells him a bottle of Bordeaux wine. The doctor informs Nemorino that the “elixir” will take effect within 24 hours. The quack admonishes the boy to say nothing to anyone about it to anyone. Nemorino promises to do as he is asked, while Dulcamara looks forward to getting out of town.

After Dulcamara leaves, Nemorino takes a few sips from the bottle, and instantly feels the fire of love in his veins! Adina appears, but Nemorino feigns indifference, assuming that by the next day she’ll love him. Adina returns his indifference with laughter (Duet: Esulti pur la barbara).  When Belcore enters, it’s the all-too-confident Nemorino’s turn to laugh, which annoys the sergeant (Trio: In guerra ed in amor). Belcore again asks Adina to name their wedding day, and she promises to marry him in three days time. Nemorino feels a moment of triumph, but just then news arrives that the regiment must depart unexpectedly. Therefore Adina agrees to marry Belcore that very evening. The distraught Nemorino begs Adina to reconsider. She asks Belcore to forgive Nemorino, while admitting to herself that she hopes he’ll fall repentant at her feet. Belcore remains furious, as Giannetta and her friends wonder at Nemorino’s foolishness  (Quartet with Chorus: Adina credimi, te ne scongiuro). Belcore invites everyone to the wedding feast, to which the villagers look forward (Finale: Fra lieti concenti), except for Nemorino, who cries in vain for Dulcamara to come to his aid.

ACT TWO

Late that evening, the wedding feast is in full swing (Chorus: Cantiamo, facciam brindisi), although Nemorino isn’t there, much to the dismay of the bride-to-be. She and  Dulcamara amuse the guests with a barcarolle (Barcarolle Duet: Io son ricco e tu sei bella). Belcore takes Adina inside to sign the marriage contract.  Dulcamara is attempting to enjoy the banquet when he’s interrupted by Nemorino, who’s desperate for more elixir.  He now has no money at all, so all seems lost – and Dulcamara’s leaving town in half an hour!

Belcore emerges from the house perplexed, for Adina has suddenly become hesitant to sign the contract.  The sergeant spies Nemorino, who laments his lack of funds.  Belcore tells him that he need only join the army and he will receive 20 scudi on the spot (Duet: Venti scudi!). Nemorino signs the enlistment contract, takes the money, and rushes off to find Dulcamara.

The women re-enter to clean up after the party, as Giannetta shares the latest gossip (Chorus: Saria possibile?): Nemorino’s rich uncle has died and left him a large fortune!  Nemorino appears, rather inebriated after drinking more “elixir.” The girls instantly shower him with attention. When Adina and Dulcamara enter, the latter is stunned at the effect the “elixir” seems to be producing (Quartet with Chorus: Dell’elisir mirabile). The girls drag Nemorino off.  Left behind, Adina is heartbroken (Duet: Quanto amore! Ed io, spietata!). Dulcamara attempts to convince her to try the “elixir” herself. Adina, however, believes that in her face and eyes she possesses an elixir of her own, which Nemorino will be unable to resist.

After the two have departed, Nemorino wanders in alone. He had seen a tear on Adina’s cheek as she watched him being wooed by the girls. This is certain proof to him that Adina loves him, and now he can die happily of love (Romanza: Una furtiva lagrima).  Meanwhile, Adina has bought back his contract from Belcore, and she now offers it to Nemorino (Aria: Prendi, per me sei libero).  When she starts to leave, having said nothing about love, he hands the contract back in angry disappointment.  Now all that remains to him is to die a soldier.  Adina finally confesses her love (Cabaletta: Il mio rigor dimentica).

As morning comes, Belcore enters with his regiment, ready to depart, and sees Adina with Nemorino. Adina tells the sergeant that, in effect, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.  Dulcamara is delighted, and claims the credit for the happy ending (Finale: Ei corregge ogni difetto).  He takes his leave, as everyone but Belcore bids him a fond farewell.

Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love is 19th century Italy’s equivalent of a Broadway musical comedy. Audiences flocked to it the way today’s public would for a show by, say, Rodgers and Hammerstein! If you enjoy Oklahoma! or Carousel (and who doesn’t?), you’ll have a glorious time at this most lovable of all Italian comedies, which makes a joyous return to Lyric this season.

No one appreciates the joys of Elixir more than Lyric general director William Mason: “Elixir is one of my ‘desert island’ operas, and it’s always been a piece I listen to when I want to be cheered up. It’s filled with wonderful melodies, and it never fails to bring a smile to my face!”

Sharing the central role of Nemorino in Lyric’s production are Giuseppe Filianoti and Frank Lopardo. Nicole Cabell and Susanna Phillips portray Adina, with Gabriele Viviani as Belcore, Alessandro Corbelli as Dulcamara, and Angela Mannino as Giannetta. Bruno Campanella conducts and Vincent Liotta is stage director.

If Elixir were a contemporary movie plot instead of a 171-year-old opera, Adina would be played by Reese Witherspoon and Nemorino might be a computer nerd played by Adam Sandler! Nemorino, a simple country lad, loves Adina, a wealthy landowner. When he hears her telling the Tristan and Isolde story, he longs to track down the potion that made those two fall in love.

An itinerant huckster, Dulcamara, sells Nemorino what he claims is Isolde’s elixir (it’s actually cheap Bordeaux!), which will supposedly take effect within 24 hours. But Nemorino’s overconfidence after drinking the “elixir” makes Adina angry; she decides to marry the pompous sergeant Belcore that very night, but backs out at the last minute. Belcore talks Nemorino into enlisting in the army, which would entitle him to a signing bonus. Of course, he spends the bonus buying more elixir! He thinks it’s working when local girls begin paying him more attention (they’ve heard that Nemorino’s rich uncle has left him a lot of money). Seeing Adina crying as she watches the other girls, Nemorino knows she loves him. There’s a happy ending for the two of them, prompting the villagers to immediately buy more elixir from the delighted Dulcamara.

This opera is in the great buffo (comic) tradition, but there’s always been a temptation to play it in an unnecessarily exaggerated way. That’s something tenor Frank Lopardo makes every effort to avoid. “ Buffo comes from the drama as it’s laid out by the librettist,” Lopardo asserts. “To superimpose a buffo manner on top of a buffo opera is excessive. If you go see a comedy, the comedy comes forth from the writing, and from your intellectual involvement in the piece, not because people are doing something from a sight-gag point of view.”

Elixir arrived at Lyric in 1955, with the young Bill Mason in the audience. “I wasn’t quite 14,” he remembers, “and it was with Léopold Simoneau as Nemorino. Then, during the first season that I was working backstage, Alfredo Kraus made his debut – I remember how beautifully he sang the whole role.” Lyric has had a tradition of great tenors in this opera: besides Simoneau and Kraus, Nemorino has been sung here by Luciano Pavarotti, Carlo Bergonzi, Jerry Hadley, and, in the most recent revival (1999-00), Frank Lopardo. Before Lopardo assumes the role (Feb. 7-22), it will be sung by Giuseppe Filianoti in his Lyric debut.

While Filianoti enjoys the intensity required of him in playing tragic characters like Donizetti’s Edgardo or Massenet’s Werther, the tenor feels that “sometimes you need to enjoy yourself with a character like Nemorino. His spirit is kindness and simplicity of heart. He’s more simple than comic in the way he falls in love with Adina. I try not to make him ridiculous. At the end he can’t sing [his famous aria] ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ if he doesn’t have a degree of seriousness inside him, in his character. This is Donizetti, not Rossini – we should remember that. I hope to give him a certain sensibility while also making the public laugh.”

The role, explains Filianoti, is one that “forces the tenor to be onstage moving a lot and playing, playing, playing – and then, near the end, you have one of the best-known arias in opera! For ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ you must be as fresh as you were at the beginning. After you’ve done all that staging – following Adina around, following Dulcamara – it’s not easy. You need to be in good shape physically.”

Nemorino’s aria, always a great highlight of any Elixir production, starts seemingly sadly, “but it’s a joyous aria,” insists Lopardo. “He’s very happy that things are turning out the way they are – Adina does love him, and he’s elated. The aria has a dirge feeling to it initially, and you need to counteract that. There really is a gladness that underscores the whole thing. He’s saying, ‘There’s nothing more I need to ask from this life because she loves me.’”

In viewing Nemorino’s character, Lopardo thinks of a line spoken by the hero of the movie Forrest Gump: “I’m not a smart man, but I know what love is.” The tenor finds moments in the film “where Forrest shows great understanding of human nature and great emotional intelligence. Nemorino may not be a smart man in terms of worldly knowledge, but he knows what love is and what he feels for Adina is love, as best he can define it.”

As for Adina, Nicole Cabell (who will sing the role opposite Filianoti) admits that “I tend to gravitate toward the more regal, dramatic characters. A character like Adina doesn’t give me the same kind of experience as a role like Juliette, for instance – but it’s fun! In order for me to enjoy Adina, I just have to think about having fun all night. She only gets serious for about ten minutes.”

The great challenge for Cabell as leading lady is her duet with Dulcamara, during which Adina declares that in her eyes and her face she has her own elixir that can make Nemorino hers. “That duet goes nonstop,” explains Cabell, “but, except for maybe at the beginning, there’s actually no time for your voice to really bloom.” The other great task has to do with Elixir having “a quippy kind of text,” comments Cabell. “It really has to be conversational. You have to spit those words out and do justice to them. This role is about character, about acting, with a couple of moments where you really have to sing very well – for example, the first duet with Nemorino, and then in ‘Prendi’ [Adina’s second-act aria], where I have to stop and think about technique.”

Susanna Phillips, who will make her role debut as Lopardo's onstage partner in Lyric's Elixir, was attracted to Adina “for more vocal than dramatic reasons. I love her aria, which is absolutely beautiful – although, coming so late in the show, you really have to plan! You need to know when you get to that point that you have enough buoyancy in your voice and your energy to sustain that music.”

Phillips has been singing a lot of tragic works lately, “so it’ll be really nice to do something on the lighter side.” At the same time, Phillips, like her colleagues in this production, is intent on avoiding the cutesiness that so often affects the role onstage. She will do so “by playing her as a real person. ‘Women are fickle,’ isn’t that what they say? A fun, flirtatious young girl – that’s how we are, but that doesn’t mean being a coquette. There has to be something that Nemorino loves about her, something real.”

The passages in this opera that the Italians call “i sillabati” we refer to in English as “patter” – rapid-fire articulation of the words and notes (think of the “modern Major General” in The Pirates of Penzance ). It’s the major challenge in the role of Dulcamara, who’s pattering constantly. Alessandro Corbelli, Lyric’s Dulcamara, is probably the greatest master of patter in opera today. “Both the agility and the articulation of the words I had naturally,” Corbelli admits, “but you have to study them very slowly and then increase the speed. An instrumentalist would do the same thing. I’ve actually lost my place many times, but I’ve been able to get back on track – the music keeps going, so you just mumble something and eventually you catch up!”

For Corbelli the figure of Dulcamara is not three-dimensional. “He’s a type, a stereotype of a charlatan. You’d find characters like him in the old days at country fairs. Dulcamara is the equivalent of people you see on television selling stuff nowadays. In Italy we actually had two women who were put in prison because they deceived the public – they’re today’s equivalent of Dulcamara.”

With its succession of exhilarating arias, duets, and ensembles, the joys of The Elixir of Love know no bounds. Every number is an absolute treat to listen to, and the comedy is delicious. It’s a comedy with a heart, made totally memorable by the bel canto genius of Donizetti. Enjoy!

Discography and Videography

CDs

Scotto, Bergonzi, Taddei, Cava; Teatro Comunale/Florence, cond. Gavazzeni (Pantheon)

Cotrubas, Domingo, Wixell, Evans; Royal Opera House/Covent Garden, cond. Pritchard (CBS)

Devia, Alagna, Spagnoli, Praticò; English Chamber Orchestra, cond. Viotti (Erato)

Bonney, Winbergh, Weikl, Panerai; Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, cond. Ferro. (DG)

Sutherland, Pavarotti, Cossa, Malas; English Chamber Orchestra, cond. Bonynge (Decca)

Battle, Pavarotti, Nucci, Dara; Metropolitan Opera, Levine. (DG)

Pre-1960

Noni, Valletti, Poli, Bruscantini; RAI/Rome, cond. Gavazzeni (Warner Fonit)

Carteri, Alva, Panerai, Taddei; La Scala, cond. Serafin (EMI)

Güden, di Stefano, Capecchi, Corena; Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, cond. Molinari-Pradelli (Decca)

As you can see, there are any number of distinguished names here, and it’s impossible to choose a “best” performance. The opera’s protagonist really is Nemorino, so you’ll probably want to make your decision based largely on the tenor. It’s astonishing to hear tenors like those two remarkable Verdians, Carlo Bergonzi and Plácido Domingo, lightening up beautifully for this music. Each has a delightful partner; Bergonzi’s rapport with Renata Scotto is an enormous asset to the live Florence performance (as is Scotto’s incomparable bel canto style), and Ileana Cotrubas’s musicality and buoyant personality make for an endearing Adina. There are some surprising castings in these recordings, especially in the DG performance, in which two remarkable Mozartians, Barbara Bonney and the late Gösta Winbergh, try their hand at bel canto and give enchanting portrayals. 

There are no Elixir performers more lovable than those who appear in the pre-1960 performances. A style that has become extinct in Italy is offered in the Warner Fonit performance, with the light-voiced Alda Noni and Cesare Valletti projecting character and total adorability in even the tiniest phrases. The same is true of Luigi Alva (singing opposite the elegant Rosanna Carteri) and Giuseppe di Stefano (opposite another Mozart singer of note, Hilde Güden, whose shining sound is a gift to Adina).

DVDs

Scotto, Bergonzi, Taddei, Cava; Maggio Teatro Comunale/Florence, cond. Gavazzeni (Hardy Classics)

Blegen, Pavarotti, Ellis, Bruscantini; Metropolitan Opera, cond. Rescigno, dir. Merrill. (Decca)

Battle, Pavarotti, Pons, Plishka; Metropolitan Opera, cond. Levine, dir. Copley. (DG)

Netrebko, Villazon, Nucci, d’Arcangelo; Vienna Staatsoper, cond. Éschwé, dir. Schenk. (Virgin)

The chance not just to listen to but also to watch two of Italy’s greatest artists of the past half-century, Renata Scotto and Carlo Bergonzi, in a live Elixir on home ground (in this case, Florence’s Teatro Comunale), is really a privilege. These two are simply magical, together and separately, with abundant humor complementing their vocal prowess and authoritative musicality. The simple sets and production are very much of their time (1967), but the soprano and tenor fill the stage with personality. Even though it’s more than four decades old, I wouldn’t hesitate to make this performance my top choice for an Elixir DVD.

For a whole generation of operagoers Luciano Pavarotti simply was Nemorino, and he was in splendid form for both of his Metropolitan Opera telecasts of the role. Each has been preserved on DVD, with strong colleagues in the other roles. Perhaps the earlier performance has a slight edge, with the altogether irresistible Judith Blegen as Adina and one of the great “old pros” of Italian operatic comedy, Sesto Bruscantini, as Dulcamara. The Pavarotti of 1981 was also less restricted in stage movement and more detailed in his characterization than the Pavarotti of ten years later. Indeed, the late, great tenor’s 1981 Nemorino stands beside his 1977 Met telecast of La bohème as his most endearing portrayal on video.

The Vienna Staatsoper production received a dose of major star power when Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazon took the stage in 2005. The celebrated Russian soprano and Mexican tenor indulge in a fair amount of hyperactivity in their physical characterizations, but there are many exceedingly appealing episodes and both artists are in especially splendid voice.