Anna Bolena

Anna Bolena (1830) was the opera that put Gaetano Donizetti on the musical map. With it, the younger composer stepped out of the long shadow of Gioachino Rossini and established his own distinctive voice within the fashionable bel canto (literally “beautiful singing”) style that dominated Italian opera in the first half of the 19th century. The opera—the first of the composer’s Tudor trilogy—dramatises the life of Anne Boleyn, second wife to King Henry VIII. We open with the marriage already in trouble. After two miscarriages, Henry (already romancing his next wife, Jane Seymour) begins to doubt Anne’s ability to give him his much-wanted son. The opera ends just as Anne, charged with adultery and treason, goes to her execution. The tragic intensity of this real-life historical plot gave Donizetti new dramatic scope, inspiring music that takes the forms and conventions established by Rossini and fills them with new humanity and emotional conflict. Highlights include the shifting hierarchies and allegiances of the Act II encounter between Anne and Jane, the sextet that closes Act I, in which the King confronts Anne in front of the court, and, of course, the end of the opera: a mad-scene as compelling as any Donizetti ever wrote, in which we watch the queen by turns desperate, angry and finally—in the incredibly demanding “Coppia iniqua”—filled not with vengeance but forgiveness.