Don Giovanni König Kandaules Die Zauberflöte Turandot Die Liebe der Danae Roméo et Juliette La Donna del Lago Helmut Lachenmann Jedermann Daponte in Santa Fe Das weite Land Young Directors Joachim Schlömer Concerts 2002 The Unfinished

Gioachino Rossini
La Donna del lago
The “Lady of the Lake” is from Scotland

Posterity sometimes sees things differently from the contemporary reception. Take Rossini, for example. Gioachino Rossini, regarded by opera-goers nowadays as the epitome of exuberance and musical wit on stage due to his numerous comic operas, was appreciated by the audiences of his time above all for one thing: for his serious operas of the heroic genre.

When he was music director at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, Europe’s most glamorous opera house in the early 19th century, he composed eight serious operas, therefore it is not at all appropriate to brand him as merely a brilliant and fast composer. Finely devised in the contrapuntal writing, composed carefully and over a long period, these operas show Rossini at the height of his mastery. In the midst of this period in 1819 came La donna del lago, the Italian version of The Lady of the Lake.

The story on which it was based came from Scotland. A decade earlier Sir Walter Scott had written his first and most popular verse novel The Lady of the Lake, which became a best seller and achieved cult status. Scott embeds a historic story in the misty romantic countryside of his Scottish homeland, in the enchanted setting of melancholy and longing that was soon to fascinate and inspire romantic writers and composers right across Europe.

How Rossini brought the touching love story set on Loch Katrine in Scotland to southern Italy and musically transported the wild and romantic scenes of the story to Mediterranean mirth is one of the most charming examples in the endless series of musical settings of stories by Scott. Seen chronologically La donna del lago was the first result of a musical adaptation of a novel by the Scottish poet; sixteen years later Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor was performed at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples.

Kerstin Unseld

Gioachino Rossini
La donna del lago
Concert peformance sung in Italian

Kleines Festspielhaus

27 August 2002, 8 p.m.
29 August 2002, 8 p.m.

Tickets available for