Read on to discover how the Donizetti opera Maria Stuarda came to a bloody end as sopranos scrapped...
Donizetti Maria Stuarda - an epic confrontation between two queens
Nineteenth-century opera is packed with scenes of fiery confrontation, from the red-hot love entanglements in Bizet’s Carmen to the apocalyptic clashes between gods, demigods and humans in Wagner’s Ring cycle. Few, though, are fierier than the convulsive episode Gaetano Donizetti placed at the heart of his opera Maria Stuarda, as he readied it for presentation at the Royal Court of Naples in 1834.
Though the opera was based on British history – its central characters are Mary, Queen of Scots and her cousin Queen Elizabeth I of England – its central scene, where the two queens meet in person, was in fact invented by the German writer Friedrich Schiller for his play Maria Stuart, on which Donizetti based his opera. The queens’ meeting, though fictional, sharply focused the intensely charged issues both personal and political between Elizabeth and Mary. It was, Donizetti and his librettist Giuseppe Bardari agreed, simply too good a dramatic opportunity to miss.
Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots trade obscene insults
But there were troubles ahead. Bardari’s text for the meeting scene, for one thing, set new standards of verbal profanity and vituperation in opera. ‘Obscene, unworthy whore,’ Mary at one point screeches, enraged by Elizabeth’s refusal to release her from prison. ‘Vile bastard,’ she continues, referencing the annulment of Elizabeth’s mother Anne Boleyn’s marriage to Henry VIII just days before Anne’s execution. This was incendiary language, especially coming from the mouth of a monarch. Would it prove too much for the Neapolitan censors?
Donizetti Maria Stuarda – the two opera divas lock horns
It certainly proved too much for the singers cast to play the parts of Mary and Elizabeth in Maria Stuarda. Giuseppina Ronzi de Begnis (Elizabeth) was an experienced soprano in her mid-thirties, but also a notorious firebrand, given to squabbling with her fellow performers. So it was unsurprising that when Ronzi met her queenly rival Anna Del Sere (also ‘naturally bad-tempered’) at rehearsals, the pair immediately locked horns, inflicting on one another a series of ‘malicious acts’ and ‘spiteful doings’, as Donizetti recorded.
Things came to a spectacular head at Maria Stuarda’s dress rehearsal. In the crucial meeting scene, Del Sere, it seems, threw her ‘whore’ and ‘vile bastard’ insults at Ronzi with rather too much vim and relish, and Ronzi took them personally. An undignified mêlée followed. ‘Elizabeth pounced on her rival,’ one journal reported, ‘pulling her by the hair, slapping her, biting her, punching her in the face, and nearly breaking her legs in a flurry of kicks.’ Del Sere fought back, but to no avail. ‘Alas, Elizabeth was the stronger, and mademoiselle Del Sere fell stunned, almost unconscious. She was carried to her bed.’
Donizetti's opera is banned for inciting passions
Donizetti himself did little to pour oil on the troubled waters. Overhearing Ronzi allege that he ‘protected that whore of a Del Sere’, he waspishly retorted, ‘I do not protect any of you, but those two queens were whores, and you two are whores too.’ His comments were distinctly unhelpful, but in any case the damage was already done. Soon after the dress rehearsal, on 4 September 1834, Donizetti’s librettist Giuseppe Bardari was summoned by the censors and asked to make changes to Maria Stuarda’s libretto.
Some attention no doubt focused on the ‘whore’ and ‘bastard’ references, but the decapitation (albeit off-stage) of a once legitimately enthroned queen would have seriously ruffled official feathers too. By now, however, the King of Naples had had enough of the whole Maria Stuarda ‘furore’ (Donizetti’s description) and of the unseemly contretemps it had engendered between the two leading ladies. He banned the opera, no doubt singed by the burning passions it had ignited.
The opera gets a new libretto
But that was not the end of the matter. Donizetti quickly re-jigged the music of Maria Stuarda to a new libretto – ‘If I had not done it, it would have been done by someone else,’ he pleaded. Re-named Buondelmonte, this new concoction was premiered on 18 October 1834 but quickly slipped into obscurity. The ‘real’ Maria Stuarda, as we know it today, was first performed a year later at La Scala, Milan, with Maria Malibran as Mary.
This time there were no prima donna fisticuffs, but there was still controversy: Malibran, empathising with her character, refused to comply with the Milanese censors’ alterations, continuing (among other things) to include the line ‘vile bastard’. The authorities were not amused, slapping a second ban on the opera. Further productions in Italy, Spain and Portugal nonetheless followed, but it would be 130 years before Maria Stuarda was finally performed in the country it was set when, in 1966, it was staged at St Pancras Town Hall in London.
