Ten composers - Ten operas. 2:Don Pasquale

Several of my 10 operas are comic opera of one sort or another - and I start with one of the best - Donizetti's Don Pasquale.  I would't call myself a Donizetti enthusiast - indeed I only really know the famous bits from the other opera - but I've always loved Don Pasquale.  I am pretty certain that what introduced me to the opera was one of the superb Geraint Evans master classes in the 1970s but maybe time has played tricks with me: but I have certainly known it from an early age and it was of the first operas I purchased on LP  (there was a shop selling second hand classical LPs in Norwich in my youth and I built up a good collection on the cheap from there).













Don Pasquale has it all. Moments of high comedy, pathos, and drama.  There are arias a plenty, but it is the ensembles which really stand out. Two of the many highlights to note. First of all the big E major ensemble at the end of Act two when Don Pasquale realises what married life to Norina will actually be like.  The superb wide-ranging melody must have left its mark on Verdi when it came to the ensembles in Falstaff (more of that later).  And then by contrast the great buffo duet between Pasquale and Matalesta which never fails to bring the house down and always make me laugh out loud.  Here is Geraint Evans in fine form.

But there is another reason for my choosing Don Pasquale - it was my route into historic recordings.  I purchased an ultra cheap LP of excerpts from the opera not really realising that it was of historic recordings.  But I was hooked.  It was my first encounter with Caruso among others, but what really grabbed my attention was the famous old recording of the patter duet with de Luca and Corratetti.  Of course the two of them ham it up shamelessly and as pure singing it doesn't compare with the Geraint Evans version.  But who cares.  Scratchy the sound may be and the piano accompaniment is crude but the character and the fun just leap out of the loudspeaker.

Its sobering to think that this recording is now much closer to Donizetti's time than it is to ours.






Don Pasquale is sometimes seen as cruel, and I expect audiences of the time were probably very happy to see Don Pasquale humiliated and a figure of fun, whereas nowadays we see him more sympathetically.  But however you look at it, this is a marvellous comic opera which comes up fresh as a daisy in every performance.