Word: albaness
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Work on Donizetti's last opera, Il Duca d'Alba, was interrupted by the composer's insanity, and the score remained unfinished at his death in 1848. Completed by Journeyman Composer Matteo Salvi, it had its premiere in Rome in 1882, was rarely heard after that. Conductor Schippers, of the Metropolitan Opera, spent eight months unscrambling the "blurred, impossible handwriting" of the original score, shaved away Salvi additions, reconstructed most of the originally proposed ending from Donizetti's own figured bass and some solo sketches. What he arrived at was, said Schippers, "pure Donizetti and pure...
...opera's improbable libretto has to do with the efforts of the heroine, Amelia Egmont, to kill the Duke of Alba, 16th century Spanish governor of the conquered Low Countries. She succeeds only in killing her lover Marcello, who turns out to be Alba's long-lost son. In a preposterous ending, the duke leaves Marcello's body lying on the dock and sails for home to a cheerful mariners' chorus...
...result of a mysterious and paralyzing illness; as an artist, he was a respected court painter to Charles IV, but his searing studies of the agonies of war and the misery of the human condition still lay ahead of him. In the movie (filmed in Rome because the Alba family prevailed on Franco to lock the moviemakers out of Spain), "Paco" Goya is a beardless, hot-blooded youth (Anthony Franciosa) newly arrived in Madrid from the sticks. The duchess (Ava Gardner), a democratic type who prefers saloons to salons, eyes him ravishingly after he rescues her from a ruffian...
...world is too much with them. La Alba's common touch has drawn deep frowns from the Queen, and to save Goya's neck, the duchess renounces his attentions and ships him back to Madrid. Feverish at the thought of her fickleness, he churns out the agonized, hellborn Caprichos. In the end, the lovers are briefly, sentimentally reunited at the duchess' deathbed...
What atrocities they have not committed on history, Writers Norman Corwin and Giorgio Prosperi have dealt out to the script. Neither evidently thought that an account of the Goya-Alba romance need include mention of her husband, or of Goya's wife and 20-odd children. The characters that do manage to squeeze into the script get lines so cliché-ridden that even the Count of Monte Cristo would wince ("I'll teach her who's the Queen of Spain!" cries the Queen of Spain). Actor Franciosa brings a certain expression to the role of Goya...