A (Very) Belated Donizetti Premiere in South Africa

“Could Donizetti ever have imagined that the world premiere of one of his operas would take place in Africa?”

That’s the question Jeremy Silver, the director of Opera UCT, a student company from the University of Cape Town, posed to the audience before the first staged performance of “Dalinda” on Sept. 4.

But here it was, an opera discovered just a few years earlier — presented not at an ornate European opera house but at the Baxter Theater, built in the 1970s, and performed by Opera UCT with a cast largely comprising Black singers and supertitles in English and IsiXhosa.

The rediscovery of “Dalinda” is a musical detective story with its origins in Donizetti’s frustration at failing to get his opera “Lucrezia Borgia” past the censors in Naples, where he was resident at the Teatro di San Carlo. The composer of “Lucia di Lammermoor,” “La Fille du Regiment” and “Don Pasquale,” Donizetti was a prodigious worker, often producing several operas in a year. But he spent four frustrating years reworking “Lucrezia” while composing other pieces, and in 1838 he decided to change the setting and characters entirely and add new music.

He called the new opera “Dalinda,” setting the action in the Middle East at the time of the Third Crusade in the 12th century, and making his title character the dominating wife and daughter of feared Muslim leaders. But Dalinda has a secret: Her illegitimate son is a Christian knight whom she longs to know. The plot revolves around their unexpected reunion when the Franks (as the Christian Crusaders are called) and the Saracens (Muslim fighters) meet to celebrate the end of a three-year war. It doesn’t turn out well.

Like “Lucrezia,” the opera has the story of a mother and son at its heart, and Donizetti used “large chunks” of that music in “Dalinda,” the British-born Silver said in an interview at the University of Cape Town’s College of Music, which has produced alumni like Pretty Yende, Golda Schultz and Musa Ngqungwana. “But there is progressively more new music as it goes on, some of it really wonderful.”