Performance History
After its successful dress rehearsal, King of Naples banned performances of the opera "perhaps because his Queen, Maria Christina, was a direct descendant of Mary Stuart". Donizetti responded by revising and removing large segments of the score and by quickly employing a new librettist, Pietro Salatino, in order to create a different work, which he named Buondelmonte referring to a character who appears in Dante's Paradiso "who apparently caused a war between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines". Under that name, the opera was first given on 18 October 1834, but it was not successful and Donizetti withdrew it.
Finally, in its original form as Maria Stuarda, the opera was first given on 30 December 1835 at La Scala, Milan. Maria Malibran (a famous mezzo-soprano who often sang soprano parts) starred in the premiere, but she ignored the censoring revisions (vil bastarda – "vile bastard" became donna vile) and the city banned further performances.
Realizing the impossibility of a run in Italy, a London premiere was planned, but Malibran's death at the age of 28 in 1836 cancelled the project. Except for several productions of the Buondelmonte version and a few of Maria Stuarda in Oporto and Lisbon as well as Naples in 1865, the work was neglected until 1958 when a production in Bergamo, Donizetti's hometown, brought the original work into popularity.
The US premiere was as a concert performance on 16 November 1964 in Carnegie Hall, while the premiere in England followed on 1 March 1966 in London. However, the first US staged performance took place at the San Francisco Opera on 12 November 1971 with Joan Sutherland in the title role.
The first staged performances of the "Three Queens" operas together in the US took place on 7 March 1972 when the trio earned some degree of fame when American soprano Beverly Sills promoted them as a series at New York City Opera.
Since January 2009, 92 performances of 19 productions worldwide have been or will be presented, attesting to the continued popularity of Maria Stuarda. In April 2012, the Houston Grand Opera presented the Minnesota Opera's production of the work with mezzo-soprano Joyce Di Donato in the title role, something which is not uncommon today and which has been noted below.
Read more about this topic: Maria Stuarda
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