Triumphant swan song of opera buffa
Gaetano Donizetti was a prolific opera composer, adept in all styles of his genre. However, he was still missing one thing: success in Paris, the opera metropolis of the era. At the end of the 1830s, his dream finally came true. The French version of his Lucia di Lammermoor and first performances of La Fille du régiment, La Favorite and Les Martyrs brought him a series of successes. On January 3, 1843, Don Pasquale, his second comic opera, was staged for the first time at the Théâtre des Italiens in Paris. The conditions were favorable, as the cast was the same that had made Bellini's I Puritani a brilliant triumph eight years earlier; in fact, Donizetti's Don Pasquale, one of the last operas of the Italian buffa genre that was so successful in the 18th century, was also a resounding success, establishing the opera's enduring popularity to this day.

Donizetti had a libretto at his disposal for his opera that was fully committed to the traditions of opera buffa and its roots in the Venetian comedia dell'arte. This stereotypical story had long since been told in countless operas and comedies; Donizetti, however, transports the material, which has already made generations laugh, into the present day: as an accomplished opera composer of his time, he breaks up the character stereotypes and musically transforms the acting archetypes of the libretto into individual characters who experience a story in their own way, as it could happen to anyone else. This is how his audience wanted - and still wants - to experience theater!