Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor sources at the San Pietro a Majella Conservatory historical archive, Naples

Abstract

The plan to promote the source documents hosted by the San Pietro a Majella Conservatory archive, Naples, for the year 2018 called for collaboration from a diversity of scholars, institutions and research centers, in order to disseminate awareness of the manifold research perspectives yielded by such treasure trove of historical music items. The research behind this essay aimed at first at reconstructing manipulations in early Neapolitan stagings of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor; it then developed into a more comprehensive study of local theater managers’ duty to deposit music in the Conservatory archive. It mainly focuses on the pre-Italian unification era, with passing references to later documents.