Donizetti's opera comes to a bloody end as sopranos scrap

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.

- Terry Blain

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.

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. Mary at one point screeches, enraged by Elizabeth’s refusal to release her from prison. 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?

It certainly proved too much for the singers cast to play the parts of Mary and Elizabeth in