Political Context

When Donizetti's Don Pasquale and Rossi's Il borgomastro di Schiedam appeared in the mid-1840s, another recent comic opera had been circulating widely in the Italian peninsula—Gaetano Donizetti's La figlia del reggimento. Composed for the Paris Opéra-Comique to a French libretto by Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges and Jean-François Bayard, La Fille du régiment received its world premiere at the Salle de la Bourse on February 11, 1840. A few months later, Donizetti revised the opera for the Italian premiere, which took place at Milan's La Scala on October 2 of that year under the title of La figlia del reggimento, to a translation by Callisto Bassi. La figlia del reggimento appeared a scant four weeks after the disastrous debut of Giuseppe Verdi's Un giorno di regno at the same opera house and enjoyed much greater fortune. Its popularity continues to the present day. Although the French original seems to have prevailed in recent times, the Italian version has never disappeared and is appropriately included in the forthcoming critical edition prepared by Claudio Toscani. As the opera entered the Italian peninsula, its poetry was subjected to substantial alterations. Some of them, of course, respond to the practical needs of translation and the challenge of adapting a new verbal text to previously composed music.