Reading Jay Nordlinger’s review of The Elixir of Love all I can say is that I am sick, sick that I wasn’t Jay’s date that

night. (Hasty explanation: As a music critic, Jay gets TWO FREE

TICKETS to Met performances, and if it’s bel canto — which Jay knows

I adore — and he doesn’t have another date, I fill in faute de mieux.

Hey, these are $200 seats we’re talking about, at the nation’s

premier opera house.)

The Elixir is truly bel canto at its best. Anecdote: In my early

opera-infatuation days I was in one of the music megastores shopping

for recordings, and got into conversation with one of the sales

assistants. It turned out he was an opera singer. (Unless you’re a

megastar, opera singing is horribly badly paid, and a low-rank young

opera singer lives the way most actors live, i.e. by waiting tables

and the like.) Well, we got chatting about vocal technique. Overcome

by enthusiasm to illustrate by example whatever point he was trying to

make, he launched into the aria “Una furtiva lagrima” from the Elixir.

He proceeded to sing the entire aria, full voice, right there on the

sales floor of Virgin Records. Got quite a crowd.

Here are my comments on the Elixir from the operatic glossary at the

end of my opera novel, Fire from the Sun:

L’elisir d’amore (The Elixir of Love.) Opera by Donizetti, 1832. Poor peasant Nemorino adores middle-class Adina, and buys a love potion
from the quack Dulcamara. The potion is only wine, and Adina, piqued
by Nemorino’s inebriated clumsiness, agrees to marry dashing Sergeant
Belcore. Nemorino enlists in the army to get money for more of the
potion, which only brings another spell of drunken boorishness. By this
time, however, everyone but Nemorino has learned that he has inherited
a fortune; and Adina has realized his true worth, and the sincerity of his
love for her. She buys him out of the army and all ends well. Dulcamara
takes credit, and Belcore laughs off his loss philosophically. One of the
happiest of all operas. Written, words and music both, in two weeks from
a standing start. (According to tradition. Scholars have pointed out
that we do not know
this for sure. See, for example, William Ashbrook’s Donizetti and his Operas, Cambridge University Press, 1982; page 72. The principal
grounds for doubt concern the librettist, Romani, who was a world-class
procrastinator.)