A Forgotten Donizetti Opera Receives Its American Premiere After Two Centuries

Gaetano Donizetti's comic opera Il fortunato inganno, or The Happy Deception, is receiving its American premiere this month, more than two centuries after virtually disappearing from the stage. Donizetti composed the work at age 24, and it premiered in Naples in 1823, only to be abandoned after three performances. Pacific Opera Project is now presenting the opera in Los Angeles from September 4 through 13 at the Garibaldina Society, fully staged in Italian with English supertitles. The story follows members of an opera company who use their theatrical skills to help two young lovers overcome an obstacle to marriage, turning the work into a playful show-within-a-show. Pacific Opera Project artistic director Josh Shaw describes it as an almost relentlessly comic piece filled with slapstick, dancing, and theatrical gags. Conductor Alexandra Enyart, meanwhile, hears in its score early signs of the musical language Donizetti would later develop in operas such as Lucia di Lammermoor and Don Pasquale. Reviving the opera required considerable detective work. After a modern staging in Vadstena, Sweden, in 1995 and a professional Italian production in 1998, the work once again vanished from the repertory. Shaw eventually tracked down the full score in Italy, while Enyart reduced the original orchestration to 11 players for the Los Angeles production. The result offers American audiences a rare chance to encounter one of the least-known works by one of Italian opera's most celebrated composers.