Tudor Queens in extremis

Lidia Fridman sings Anna Bolena in Venice, while Ermonela Jaho's Maria Stuarda shines in Hamburg

Maria Stuarda (and double): spellbinding Ermonela Jaho Picture © Brinkhoff/Mögenburg

Donizetti’s 'Tudor Queen’ operas - Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda and Roberto Devereux - were never intended to be performed as a trilogy, even though they were written in the space of only seven years in the 1830s. Rarities until the 1970s, they are now staged throughout the world in productions designed to showcase a particular soprano or to form an historical series.

In recent years New York’s Metropolitan Opera has revived them for Sondra Radvanovsky in productions by David McVicar, streamed internationally to cinemas. Jetske Mijnsen has directed all three for Dutch National Opera, while the Grand Thêatre de Genève performed them as a trilogy built around the French-born soprano Elsa Dreisig and staged by Mariame Clément. In 2023 La Monnaie/De Munt in Brussels went further, incorporating episodes from an earlier opera about Elizabeth, Elisabetta al castello di Kenilworth (1829), into a two-evening, four-opera conflation, entitled simply Bastarda! - the notorious insult Mary Stuart delivers to her rival in their fictional encounter in Act 2. .

These operas have come a long way since Maria Callas famously championed Anna Bolena for La Scala in 1957, thereby restoring the first of the trio to the modern repertoire. Twenty years later, the three operas were introduced to LP buyers and New York City Opera patrons in Manhattan by the American diva Beverley Sills, before she was belatedly admitted by Rudolf Bing to the hallowed portals of the Met. In his autobiography, 5000 Nights at the Opera, Bing reveals that he responded to suggestions that the Met should mount the three operas for Montserrat Caballé by claiming - cattily - that Beverley Sills, having been born in Brooklyn, had a greater right to portray British royalty!