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Love, Betrayal and Folly Bergamo
Teatro Donizetti
11/16/2025 - & 21, 29* November 2025
Gaetano Donizetti : Il furioso nell’isola di S. Domingo
Paolo Bordogna (Cardenio), Nino Machaidze (Eleonora), Santiago Ballerini (Fernando), Valerio Morelli (Bartolomeo), Giulia Mazzola (Marcella), Bruno Taddia (Kaidamà)
Coro dell’Accademia Teatro alla Scala, Salvo Sgrò (chorus master), Orchestra Donizetti Opera, Alessandro Palumbo (conductor)
Manuel Renga (stage director), Aurelio Colombo (sets & costumes), Emanuele Agliati (lighting)
(© Studio U.V./Donizetti Opera - Fondazione Teatro Donizetti)
Il furioso all’isola di Santo Domingo could be described as an unexpectedly joyous surprise. Considering this unusual opera’s strange story, one expected an oddity of merely academic interest. However, in the end it was easily the most interesting work presented at this year’s Donizetti Festival.
Created in 1833, a mere six months after L’elisir d’amore (1832) and almost a year before his finest opera, Lucrezia Borgia (1833), Il furioso all’isola di Santo Domingo is almost as musically rich as these. At the time of its creation, it was a huge hit, and its popularity continued until century’s end, when it fell into obscurity. Such was its popularity that in 1834, it opened simultaneously in three Neapolitan theatres. How could such a sensational hit fall into oblivion? The answer lies in its genre: it’s a semiseria opera, meaning neither tragic nor comic. With the changing political landscape, the genre soon lost its pertinence.
Based on an episode in the first book of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605), the opera recounts the tribulations of a man devastated by love. So unbearable was his wife’s infidelity that he went completely mad. So for once, here we find a male protagonist succumbing to folly in a bel canto opera, a genre notorious for its mad scenes by women, those supposedly fragile creatures unable to navigate the vagaries of love.
The opera recounts the story of a Spanish nobleman, Cardenio, who marries a Portuguese woman, Eleonora, despite the fact that the ship carrying her dowry has sunk. While he’s away on business, his wife has an affair with his relative. Heartbroken, he goes to pieces, escaping to the island of Santo Domingo, where he lives in the forest and terrifies the locals. Cardenio’s younger brother Fernando arrives on the island in search of him. At the same time, Cardenio’s unfaithful wife turns remorseful, and she too seeks him. But just as her ship reaches shore, she’s shipwrecked. Luckily she’s saved by the locals, and she continues her search. However, despite the joy of seeing his brother and hearing wife plead forgiveness, Cardenio jumps into the sea. He’s then promptly rescued, and with the shock of nearly drowning, his sanity returns. But still griefstricken, he wants to die. When Eleonora accepts the proposition of a double suicide and is at the point of shooting herself, Cardenio truly recognizes her love for him, and the two reconcile. Certainly sounds like an opera plot!
The staging and imaginative sets helped this production to succeed. Instead of trying to recreate an exotic tropical island, wallpaper with an exotic tropical design created an elegant and beautiful setting. The costumes of the locals, more creole settlers than natives, evoked early 1900s Cuba or Louisiana, with men in white garb and straw hats. The women looked like European versions of Aunt Jemima. One character, the native slave Kaidamà, could easily be problematic in present day productions. Wisely, the director eschewed blackface, even resorting to whiteface as a kind of mask. Various suspended objects, such as a model ship, a bicycle and a straw hat are stylised mementos of the tropics that were more effective than an elaborate recreation of the tropics.
Parallel to the action was an elderly, apparently senile man in a nursing home. He observes the action and even takes part in it. A dignified elderly woman, likely his wife, visits him, showing great affection. The cognitively impaired man is obviously the older Cardenio remembering a story that happened in the past. Pathos is often stronger when portrayed through a secondary character, one other than the protagonist. This was a brilliant tool conceived by director Manuel Renga.
The choice of interpreters was as felicitous as the staging. Baritone Paolo Bordogna sang the title role of Cardenio, a role originally created by Giorgio Ronconi (1810‑1890), the baritone who was to create Verdi’s Nabucco a decade later. Though usually a comedic actor, seen recently as Dulcamara in L’elisir d’amore in Turin, Don Magnifico in La Cenerentola in Barcelona, and Leporello in Don Giovanni in Toronto, Bordogna is endowed with immense stage presence and blessed with great acting skills. While he’s more a Mozart than a Verdi baritone, his voice is appealing and his ability to express emotion astounding. He captured the character’s every nuance, with a diction so clear that surtitles were superfluous.
The role of Eleonora is a coloratura role, and for this, Georgian soprano Nino Machaidze was a reasonable choice, despite challenges with her upper register. Her repertoire is no longer Donizetti’s Adina, Gounod’s Juliette and Bellini’s Elvira – once her signature roles. She’s more of a lyric soprano, as witnessed recently in Verdi’s Otello in Frankfurt, and Giovanna d’Arco in Parma. Despite a few forced high notes, Machaidze was a convincing Eleonora, though more impressive as an actress than a vocalist. Her heftier lyric soprano was an advantage in conveying the suffering she’d endured.
Argentinian tenor Santiago Ballerini, recently Ernesto in Don Pasquale in Toronto, is a promising young bel canto tenor. Utterly at ease in his upper register, he played Fernando, Cardenio’s brother, with elegance and superlative diction. He also acted convincingly as the loving brother, and his convincing deportment was that of a nobleman. This young singer will soon be one of the most in demand bel canto tenors – mark my words.
Baritone Bruno Taddia nearly stole the show with his interpretation of the secondary role of the slave Kaidamà. Last heard as Bajazet in Vivaldi’s Tamerlano in Piacenza, Taddia is equally impressive as an actor and singer. Without resorting to excess, he portrayed a slave with better temperament than his master or any of the other characters. His interpretation will long be remembered.
Conductor Alessandro Palumbo masterfully led the Orchestra Donizetti Opera, bringing out the richer than expected textures in the score, which alternate between the dramatic and the lighthearted. The orchestra performed spiritedly, with lush lower strings contrasting beautifully with the woodwinds and brass.
It’s rare to be so pleasantly surprised at the opera, to discover a virtual masterpiece, hitherto unknown. Hopefully, word will spread and others will also produce it. Moreover, it’s a great vehicle for a rising baritone, eager to show his stripes.
Ossama el Naggar
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