Gaetano Donizetti (undated engraving), Anne Boleyn (Hever Rose Portrait, c.1550, artist unknown), Mary Stuart (Drawing by François Clouet, 1559), Elizabeth Tudor (Armada Portrait, 1588, artist unknown)
“Amor mi fe’ colpevole, m’aprì l’abisso amor…”
My current research focuses on a historical and dramatic comparison of the real lives of Anne Boleyn, Mary Stuart, and Elizabeth I, and their transformation into operatic heroines in Gaetano Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda, and Roberto Devereux. I examine what of history is preserved, what liberties are taken, to what effect, and how these choices adapt Tudor narratives through the artistic, political, and cultural lens of nineteenth-century Italy—shaped by censorship, the Risorgimento, and the symbolic weight of monarchy. My focus lies on how these operas construct their heroines musically and dramatically, and what they reveal about enduring archetypes of power, gender, and sacrifice.
From this spine, I focus on Donizetti’s queens: distinct in their stories, yet consistent in their portrayal of women whose downfall lies in loving. Their punishment becomes spectacle: a public staging of suffering that both fascinates and suggests redemption through resilience of spirit. These operas dramatize a longstanding ritual in which women—especially those of power and prominence—are made canvases for cultural projection of shadow, absorbing masculine fear, insecurity, and desire, and framed by gender codes that echo both early-modern and nineteenth-century sexual politics. Much like the historical queens themselves, scrutinized, vilified, or sanctified according to cultural need, Donizetti’s heroines embody the enduring dynamic of women cast as either saint or whore, icon or monstrosity, condemned for beauty, ambition, or simply existing in the public eye.
This ritualization of female sacrifice reflects a broader cultural fixation in which women’s pain is aestheticized, exploited, and made redemptive—from ancient attitudes toward sex and gender, through Tudor chronicles, Romantic and Gothic sensibilities that shaped nineteenth-century reception, and into today’s media landscape. Yet Donizetti’s operas resist this reductive trend. His queens are not hollow emblems but among the most musically and psychologically “fully formed” characters in the repertoire. Through the marriage of historical drama and the bel canto tradition, Donizetti forges heroines whose dignity survives their undoing, and whose voices continue to carry the weight of history, the depth of timeless archetype, and the enduring strength of a spirit that will not be silenced.
Here the voice itself becomes central. These works stand as pivotal and defining examples of the emerging assoluta voice type, demanding unprecedented range, stamina, and expressive depth—charting a course that Verdi and his contemporaries would carry forward. This dimension of vocal writing cannot be separated from the singers for whom the roles were conceived. Giuditta Pasta, Maria Malibran, and Giuseppina Ronzi de Begnis each embodied different aspects of the assoluta ideal, their artistry forged within the theatrical culture of early nineteenth-century Italy and inseparable from Donizetti’s musical imagination. Their training, careers, and repertoires illuminate both the distinctions and the shared expressive language of these works
These roles are not only the focus of my research but central to my practice as a soprano: I sing and study Anna, Maria, and Elisabetta, together with related roles by Handel, Mozart, Rossini, Bellini, and Verdi. My direct engagement in singing this repertoire provides embodied insight into the technical, expressive, and stylistic demands that animate these works: I know them from the inside out. In research, I situate these roles within a nexus of history, politics, gender, and archetype, and within their musical context: the bel canto tradition, the world of nineteenth-century Italian opera, and Donizetti’s circle, including his most important teacher Simon Mayr.
Ultimately, these operas live not as relics but as embodied acts: stories breathed into sound, voices reclaiming sovereignty from silence. Though Anne, Mary, and Elizabeth have been dead for centuries, they remain figures who shaped the course of history. Donizetti’s treatment of their stories, however dramatized, honors their lives and legacy through music, sustaining their cultural resonance—and my own engagement with this repertoire seeks to do the same.
Connected Lines of Inquiry…
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Donizetti, Rossini, and Bellini as the definitive “singing composers”: writing music that is intrinsically vocal, in contrast to others, past and present, who treat the voice as an instrument rather than according to its own design.
Donizetti as a bridge to Verdi, with emphasis on Verdi’s evolution from bel canto traditions.
The influence of Italian language on vocal style and tradition, in comparison to French, German, and English.
Tracing the evolution from early pedagogical traditions to modern training approaches, and what was lost along the way.
Comparative treatments of passaggi in the music of Donizetti, Bellini, and Rossini.
Breath, phrasing, and gesture in bel canto; the science and pacing of breath, and music that itself teaches good singing through its very structure.
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Internal acoustics of singing: mapping singers’ felt and auditory experiences in relation to the physiological and mechanical principles that underpin them.
Bridging the gap between perception and reality in singing.
The vocal ideal: defining and isolating the conditions that produce balance of tone, flexibility, control, freedom, resonance, and legato— examining the ways in which these qualities are connected and interdependent.
Analysis of voice type in relation to physiology and physical characteristics.
Perceptual skills in singing: shifting between micro-focus and macro-awareness, the cognitive flexibility required to shape vocal performance.
Temporality in singing: giving shape to time in practice and performance, balancing the planned, the present, and the forward-reaching in a single suspended experience.
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The psychology of teaching and of singing: balancing correction with reinforcement of what is already working.
The innovation of recording and its impact on vocal practice—enriching self-awareness while risking the trap of imitation and the valuation of sound over process.
The role of the teacher/coach within the inherent power-dynamics of the studio. The impossible task of developing independent artists within a system built on dependency and deference. Calling for sustainable and empowering approaches to teaching.
“The doing is all”: technique that emerges experientially, prioritizing discovery over prescription and inquiry over demonstration.
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Wealth and patronage in opera: from historical structures to modern-day training models and institutional funding.
Economic barriers to opera: accessibility, cost of training, privilege, and statistical realities.
The decline in new opera composition and production: hunger for newness hindered by the obstacle of economics, audience taste, and nostalgia. The future of opera—artefact or living art form?
Patriarchal inheritances and hierarchies of power in opera.
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The real lives of figures such as Mary Magdalene and Joan of Arc, and how they have been represented in the canon of Western classical vocal literature.
Primal vocal gestures—nonverbal sounds that precede and transcend language—in written music through diverse historical and cultural contexts.
Comparative study of La Traviata (after Alexandre Dumas fils’ La Dame aux Camélias) and Massenet’s Manon (after Abbé Prévost’s Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut), examining the operas in relation to their literary sources.
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During my master’s studies (2011-13), I completed two research projects on twentieth-century opera: Alban Berg’s Lulu and Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw. Below are brief summaries of each.
Lulu: The Femme Fatale and the Question of Female Agency
This project focused on Alban Berg’s Lulu, examining its palindromic architecture—dramatically, through character mirroring, and musically, through the symmetry of its twelve-tone composition. My analysis traced Lulu’s construction and progression as a femme fatale, framed by broader cultural resonances of gender, sexuality, and violence. I discussed Berg’s twelve-tone language not only as a technical device but as a dramatic engine, shaping the opera’s structural symmetry, self-referential design, and psychological trajectory. Central to my approach was understanding the characters, their needs, and the relational dynamics through which they collide, producing reactions that create a fatal momentum. Berg’s palindromic design crystallizes this momentum into structural inevitability, binding the characters in a symmetry of action and response as a closed circuit, in which every impulse is mirrored, every force reflected back until destruction becomes inevitable. In this sense, I framed Lulu less as a fully realized individual than as a symbolic construct—an amalgamation of projections, shaped by the expectations and desires of her male counterparts. Her reduction to symbol serves as a commentary on gender, society, and sexual politics, while at the level of character it reflects a traumatized psyche: a self split into fragments, where agency defers to the fundamental drive for connection and, ultimately, survival.
This work of dramatic and thematic analysis, with attention to cultural resonance, was paired in dialogue with close study of Berg’s musical language, and inherent dramatic function. I situated the opera within its literary lineage by analyzing it in relation to Berg’s source material, Frank Wedekind’s plays Erdgeist (1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (1904), which had already positioned Lulu as both femme fatale and victim. At its core, the study asked whether Lulu is a character in her own right or a cultural construction, embodying turn-of-the-century anxieties around sexuality, morality, and female agency.
Turning the Screw: Desire, Repression, and Madness
My second project was a dramatic and musical analysis of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw. The study focused on Britten’s use of the recurring “screw theme” and its variations as a structural and psychological device, tracing its relationship to the progressive mental state of the Governess. Particular attention was given to the function of desire, sexuality, repression, and shame in shaping her psychological trajectory, as well as the roles of responsibility and isolation in accelerating her unraveling. Through close study of Britten’s motivic design and varied musical language, I examined how the score blurs inner and outer worlds—rendering the Governess’ shifting mental states, intensifying dramatic stakes, and evoking an atmosphere at once uncanny and charged with psychological tension. In doing so, the analysis revealed the fissure between her collapsing inner world and the fragile outward control she struggles to maintain. This tension is further complicated by the question of appearances—both the Governess’ need to maintain social and moral acceptability, and the unstable perceptions through which her own reality is filtered.
The project also explored Britten’s rendering of psychological ambiguity—between reality and imagination, authority and vulnerability—illuminating the unstable boundary between music as dramatic environment and music as inner voice. At the heart of this reading was the question of agency: whether the screw is turned by fate, by sinister external forces, or by the Governess herself, tightening the screw through the very distortions of her perception. A close comparison with Henry James’ novella further highlighted how Britten’s libretto and score reshape the source material, culminating in an in-depth character study of one of opera’s most hauntingly desperate protagonists.
