Lucia di Lammermoor

In Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor , love, hope and human relationships are thrown into a destructive dynamic under the pressure of patriarchal violence. At the center is Lucia, whose brother Enrico must secure the family's future and therefore pushes through her marriage to the wealthy Lord Arturo. But Lucia loves Edgardo, her brother's arch-enemy. When Enrico finds out, he sets in motion a spiral that leads to violence and death. In Katie Mitchell's production, created in 2016 for the Royal Opera House in London, Lucia's perspective is consistently at the center. Mitchell does not show her as a fragile figure falling into madness, but as a life-oriented, multi-layered personality who experiences fulfillment for the first time in her love for Edgardo. The loss of this love, the forced marriage and her murder of Arturo ultimately lead to her mental breakdown. The famous "mad scene" in the third act does not appear as an operatic convention, but as a comprehensible consequence of concrete, traumatic experiences. The production moves the action - contrary to Walter Scott's original, which is set in the late 17th century - to the 1830s and 1840s, to the era of dark romanticism. Gothic-romantic imagery creates an eerie, conspiratorial atmosphere and turns the action into a psychological thriller. In combination with Donizetti's gripping music and the bel canto singing, which relentlessly exposes the voice and emotions, Mitchell succeeds in making the work a harrowingly contemporary drama far removed from decorative historicism.

Dramma lirico in three acts
Libretto by Salvadore Cammarano,
based on the novel The Bride of Lammermoor by Sir Walter Scott

by Gaetano Donizetti