L'elisir d'amore

About the opera

• Run time: 2hrs 15min, 1 intermission
• Sung in: Italian
• Subtitles: English, Italian and other languages
• Opera house: Vienna State Opera

Soprano Kristina Mkhitaryan as the beautiful and wealthy Adina leads the cast in Otto Schenk’s production of Donizetti’s charming comedy. Bogdan Volkov is Nemorino, Adina’s love-struck admirer, who pours out his heart in the moving aria “Una furtiva lagrima.” The cast also includes baritone Stefan Astakhov as the swaggering Sergeant Belcore and Bryn Terfel as the quack Dr. Dulcamara. Evelino Pidò conducts.

Later in the opera season, another cast of world-class singers takes over, with soprano Florina Ilie as Adina, tenor Xabier Anduaga as Nemorino, baritone Clemens Unterreiner as Belcore and bass baritone Alex Esposito as Doctor Dulcamara.

Ticket information

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Vienna State Opera

Address:

Opernring 2, 1010 Vienna Google Maps

How to get there:

Subway: U1, U2, U4 to Karlsplatz

Trams: 1, 2, D, 62, 71 to Opernring

Music and Libretto

Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848) was remarkably productive, composing more than 60 operas plus orchestral and chamber music, in a career abbreviated by mental illness and premature death. Donizetti is in many ways the overlooked master of early Italian Romantic opera, and even today only several of his operas are regularly performed: L'elisir d'amore, Anna Bolena, Lucia di Lammermoor, La fille du régiment and Don Pasquale. Yet for more than a decade from 1830, Donizetti was the dominant Italian composer of his day.

Italian poet and scholar Felice Romani (1788 – 1865), wrote over 90 libretti and was considered the finest opera librettist of his day, collaborating most notably with Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini. Romani based the plot of L'Elisir d'Amore on another opera, Daniel Auber's Le philtre (1831) with a libretto by Eugène Scribe.