Pia de' Tolomei: Tragedia lirica in Two Parts, libretto by Salvadore Cammarano

By the mid 1830s, as he began to dominate European stages, Gaetano Donizetti was pushing the boundaries of heightened romanticism in music, seeking texts that featured increasingly melodramatic and violent emotions and the savage consequences of irrational passion. Pia de’ Tolomei ranks among his more disquietingly intense and fast-paced works. Indeed, as one historian observed, there is ample reason to recognize Pia as one of the most strikingly pre-Verdian of all Donizetti’s o…