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Donald Macleod explores Donizetti's life and work, focusing initially on his time working at the San Carlo Opera House in Naples as house composer. It was a crucial period in his career and during the 20-odd years he spent in the city, his fame spread from the heel of Italy to the Americas.

The bane of the composer's Italian career was censorship. Lucrezia Borgia alarmed the censors with its five on-stage deaths and unflattering depiction of a pope's daughter. Maria Stuarda offended the King of Naples because it represented royalty in an unflattering light, with two queens on stage, one of them calling the other 'vile bastard'. Poliuto, passed as fit for public consumption by the censors, was nonetheless banned by the king because of its religious subject-matter. The effect was to drive Donizetti to abandon Naples for Paris, which he took by storm.

At Rossini's invitation, Donizetti previously had an opera staged at the Theatre-Italien, but his ambition was to storm that bastion of French culture, the Paris Opera, before retiring. In the event, Donizetti exceeded his goal, with productions running at all four major Parisian opera houses. It led a despairing Berlioz to complain of an 'invasion' of the city by the Italian composer.
Donald Macleod also explores Donizetti鈥檚 plentiful non-operatic music. Including the song Amor marinaro - the kind of piece the composer claimed to dash off 'while the rice was cooking', an excerpt from the last of his 18 string quartets and part of the Requiem he wrote in memory of his friend and rival Vincenzo Bellini. He then turns to the composer鈥檚commission to write Linda di Chamonix, a new opera for the Karntnertor theatre in Vienna, as well as his appointment to a prestigious honorary position as court composer to the Austrian emperor Ferdinand I . Donizetti once quipped that this was 12,000 francs 'for doing nothing'.

The programme ends with a performance of the final act of Maria di Rohan, also written for Vienna, and considered to be one of the most tautly constructed of Donizetti's romantic melodramas.

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