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Maria Stuarda (Mary Stuart) is a tragic opera, tragedia lirica, in two acts by Gaetano Donizetti to a libretto by Giuseppe Bardari based on Friedrich Von Schiller’s 1800 play MARIA STUART. It received its premiere on December 30, 1835 at La Scala and is based on the lives of Mary, Queen of Scots and her cousin Queen Elizabeth I. During the negotiations of a marriage proposal between Queen Elizabeth and the King of France, Lord Talbot, intercedes on behalf of the royal prisoner Maria Stuart, imprisoned in Fotheringay Castle since fleeing from Scotland.
The Queen is torn between sympathy for Maria and fear that she is plotting against her, but her wrath comes from The Earl of Leicester, the man she loves, who argues her rivals’ case with a passion that makes her feel betrayed. As the queens confront one another, each is already convinced that the other is haughty, yet the final triumph proves elusive to either one.
The king banned performances of the opera, and Donizetti responded by removing large segments of the score for use in a different work, Buondelmonte. However, Maria Malibran (a famous mezzo-soprano who often sang soprano parts) forced a premiere at La Scala and ignored the censoring revisions, but a ban by the city was enforced.
Realising the impossibility of a run in Italy, a London premiere was planned, but Malibran's death at the age of 28 in 1836 cancelled the project. Except for several productions of the Buondelmonte version, the work was neglected until 1958 when a production in Bergamo, Donizetti's hometown, brought the original work into popularity.
The premiere in England was held on March 1, 1966.
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