Museo Donizettiano

The first thing that visitors see at the museum is a poster-programme of the events organized in honour of what would have been Gaetano Donizetti’s 100th birthday, dated August-September 1897. In Bergamo, local and international committees seized the occasion to remember the composer. Music and Donizetti’s operas were at the heart of the celebrations, but that’s not all: art competitions, charity raffles, and popular entertainment aimed to engage the entire citizenry in the memory of the great local opera composer.

This lithograph is proof of the importance and fame that Donizetti achieved within the European music scene. Among the caricatures of the leading musicians active in Paris in 1843, the one of Donizetti stands out, at the centre of the scene. A very active composer (so much so that he was dubbed ‘Dozzinetti’ by his detractors, a reference in Italian to ‘ordinary’ or ‘second-rate’ work), Donizetti is dressed in the uniform of a maestro of the Habsburg court, busy churning out scores at an industrial pace.

In 1815, composer and maestro Simon Mayr, increasingly convinced of Donizetti’s exceptional talent, persuaded several patrons from Bergamo and the local ‘Charity Congregation’ to finance young Gaetano’s studies in Bologna at the city’s Philharmonic Lyceum. The work of painter Biagio Martini, this portrait dates back to the time Donizetti spent in Bologna. It was commissioned by the new student of the music school as an appreciated gift to Mayr, his teacher and benefactor.