L'elisir d'amore

Otto Schenk's classic production envelops the work in a warm, "humanizing" and cheerful light. He tells the story of Adina and Nemorino in clear images, creating appealing characters from the operatic figures, whose happiness the audience literally longs for. As is so often the case with his work, his production of L'elisir d'amore is first and foremost about the sensuality of life and the characters - he was always critical of a purely intellectual, "cerebral" approach. Or, as a long-time collaborator and senior stage manager put it: "When you talk about Otto Schenk's work, the core message is probably that he was always concerned with people. With compassion, with a loving but also critical eye."

 

"I would be very happy if I had composed the love potion", enthused the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy about Donizetti's long-running opera L'elisir d'amore. He is not the only one. Not only does the all-time hit "Una furtiva lagrima" rank at the top of many private opera charts, the entire work sparkles with ingenuity and refined musical expression. The work itself is in the tradition of comic Italian opera (alongside influences from the French opéra comique), but goes beyond a model of the merely light-hearted: Alongside the comic and light-hearted, there is also - see "Una furtiva lagrima", for example - the melancholic and profound. And it is precisely this mixture that makes the love potion so magical!

 

Donizetti celebrated one of his greatest and most enduring successes with L'elisir d'amore - even if the circumstances of its creation had led him to expect anything but a triumph: in mid-April 1832, the management of Milan's Teatro della Canobbiana had desperately turned to Donizetti, who was known to work quickly, with a request for an opera because another composer had backed out at short notice. In fact, Donizetti and librettist Felice Romani created a new two-act opera, L'elisir d'amore, within a very short space of time - the literature always mentions "within two weeks". And unlike many other popular operas in music history today, the work had no initial difficulties with audiences: from its premiere on May 12, 1832, L'elisir d'am ore was a hit with audiences and was soon performed in countless opera houses in Italy and abroad.