Tiroler Festspiele - Donizetti: Lucia di Lammermoor

as the operatic highlight of the winter season: the staged production of Gaetano Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. A woman has to give up her great love for family interests and becomes the victim of an arranged marriage. In the end, madness and suicide await; one might be tempted to say, “not again.” However: Donizetti's music makes the difference. It dresses all that suffering and madness in such brilliance and beauty that audiences used to ask singers for a Da Capo, wanting to hear them die twice in a row. Repetitions in opera performances are rare today – though there was one last winter with I puritani in Erl! – but the fascination remains. Hardly any opera offers so many first-class melodic ideas as Lucia di Lammermoor. It has defined a genre: anyone who speaks of the tragic masterpieces of Belcanto cannot overlook it.