Celebrating Italian Identity

More than a decade separates L'elisir d'amore from Donizetti's final opera buffa, Don Pasquale. During that time, Donizetti himself composed only a small handful of other comic works—two one-act works for the Teatro Nuovo in Naples (Il campanello and Betly, both 1836) and La Fille du régiment for the Opéra Comique in Paris (1840). Thus it was Luigi Ricci who by the mid-1830s stood as the leading champion of opera buffa in Italy. For the remainder of his career, his operas were either comic or semiserious, with the sole exception of the 1845 opera seria, La solitaria delle Asturie, composed for Odessa. The success of Il nuovo Figaro soon led to new commissions to create comic operas for several Italian cities, including Rome, Turin, and Milan. Pivotal in establishing Ricci's supremacy was Un'avventura di Scaramuccia, to a new libretto by Felice Romani, premiered at La Scala on March 8, 1834.