NPR World of Opera
Maria Stuarda, by Gaetano Donizetti

We can all think of performers, and artists, who have been roundly condemned -- and sometimes even banned altogether -- when people decided they had "gone too far." The groundbreaking comedian Lenny Bruce was assailed for profanity -- though it may have been his style and subject matter that truly made people uneasy.

Rock star Jim Morrison and his group, The Doors, were banned in places -- again, this was ostensibly for foul language but also because their work evoked a growing part of the culture that people preferred not to confront. More recently, the controversial work of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe got musem curators in trouble, and prompted a call to disband an entire, national funding agency. That didn't happen, of course. In fact, that very agency is currently a funder of NPR World Of Opera.

Almost no form of art, and no type of artist, has been immune to such attacks and the history of this week's opera, Donizetti's Maria Stuarda, is another example. It's a fictionalized account of the feud between Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart -- Mary, Queen of Scots. In the opera, their conflict becomes so venemous that official censors altered the drama before its scheduled debut, in Naples in 1834, and the production never took place. The notion of two monarchs behaving in such a venemous fashion was simply too much for the authorities to take.

So the opera's premiere was moved to La Scala, in Milan, and rescheduled for the following year. Naturally, it was the censors' sanitized version of the libretto that was supposed to be performed. But the famous soprano Maria Malibran liked Donizetti's first version better, and she was singing the title role of Mary Stuart.

So, on her own, Malibran ignored the changes and sang the opera as originally written. This involed Mary calling Elizabeth, Queen of England, both a "shameless prostitute" and a "vile bastard." The opera was promptly banned. For decades, only the "presentable," censored version was performed and that may be the main reason that Maria Stuarda, one of Donizetti's most fascinating and moving operas, has only recently regained its place in the world's opera houses.

Fortunately, that all happened a long time ago, and we're free to hear the opera at its fiery best. So tune in this week's NPR World Of Opera, and a smashing performance of Maria Stuarda by Opera Orchestra of New York, with Ruth Anne Swenson in the title role, and Lauren Flanigan as Elizabeth.

LINKS:

Opera Orchestra of New York
Marie Stuart: More on the real Mary Stuart
Libretto Libretto of the opera, Maria Stuarda, in Italian
NPR's At the Opera