Born in the mountain town of Bergamo in 1797, Gaetano Donizetti made his mark in Italian opera at a time when the rules of the game were strict for both composers and librettists. Solo arias and ensembles, which required beautiful melodies and opportunities for vocal display, had to be arrayed in the approved structure. In comic operas, the characters were variations on archetypes handed down through generations of commedia dell’arte tradition. More serious operas required a high moral purpose and characters of noble birth or character.

Though he composed by these rules (and at amazing speed), Donizetti imbued them with a freshness and sensitivity to character that astonished librettists and audiences alike. Even so, Marie, the heroine of The Daughter of the Regiment, is not someone whom Italian operagoers of the day would have recognized. By 1838 success had brought Donizetti to Paris, Europe’s undisputed cultural capitol at that time, to revise his opera Poliuto as Les martyrs for the Paris Opéra. A delay in the production gave Donizetti a chance to squeeze in something new—something that became his first comic opera in the French style, La fille du régiment. His Italian-style comedy The Elixir of Love had aroused an adoring public at the Parisian Théâtre-Italien, but nothing suggests that Donizetti harbored similar ambitions for his “Daughter,” who seemed rather more casually conceived and experimental. “I have writ­ten, orches­trated, and deliv­ered a lit­tle opera for the Opéra-Comique which will be given in a month or 40 days,” he wrote of it to a friend, seemingly with no expectation that it would conquer the world’s opera houses so quickly.

Then again, Donizetti’s description may have concealed a bit of coyness. He knew that the speed and skill with which he composed, often rewriting his libretto in the process, could be a sore point with colleagues—and that the tidal wave of his success in Paris was greeted with defensiveness in some quarters of the French musical establishment. Eminences including Hector Berlioz, whose writing as a music critic was often reserved and statesmanlike, were provoked. “Two major scores for the [Paris] Opéra…two oth­ers at the Renais­sance…two at the Opéra-Comique, Le Fille du rég­i­ment and another whose title is still unknown, and yet another for the Théâtre-Italien, will have been writ­ten or tran­scribed in one year by the same com­poser,” Berlioz wrote in the Journal des débats. “M. Donizetti seems to treat us like a con­quered coun­try; it is a ver­i­ta­ble inva­sion. One can no longer speak of the opera houses of Paris, but only the opera houses of M. Donizetti.”

Donizetti’s productivity might not have been so remarkable, and so enviable, if it had not come wrapped in a seemingly effortless gift for operatic characterization. His Daughter of the Regiment is unmistakably Italian in its melodic abundance, yet it captures the layered nuances and charm of its Gallic source. It’s almost irresistibly tempting to find a kinship between Donizetti and Marie based on their respective army experiences. Donizetti’s could probably have happened nowhere but Italy. Though he had demonstrated remarkable promise in early studies with several prominent music teachers, he enlisted in the army rather than support himself as a music teacher, as his father, Andrea, insisted he do; while the life of a composer seemed just too risky to satisfy Andrea’s concerns for his son’s future, Gaetano shuddered at the prospect of a career giving music lessons.

In the army Donizetti found time to compose opera on the side while serving honorably in a military regiment. Not only did his first opera, Enrico, Conte di Borgogna, mark its successful premiere during his army service; his second, Zoraide de Granata, received such favorable notice that he was discharged from the army without further military obligation. He was 25, and earned his chops as a working composer by producing a succession of successful comic operas in the style of Rossini during the next six years. (Rossini was five years his senior.) But the first major demonstration of his artistic maturity was the opera Anna Bolena, a romanticized treatment of the tale of Anne Boleyn that showed Donizetti’s flair for applying the rich sensuality of Italian compositional style to a story set far from Italian shores. Donizetti’s best-known work, Lucia di Lammermoor, would accomplish the same artistic union with a gothic romance drawn from a Waverly novel by Sir Walter Scott— an opera full of dark Scottish atmosphere and glorious Italian music.

More recently, The Daughter of the Regiment rejoined the repertory of the world’s major opera houses as part of the bel canto revival that began with Dame Joan Sutherland’s historic performances of another Donizetti masterpiece, Lucia di Lammermoor, beginning at Covent Garden in 1959. Though most audiences were not particularly interested in Dame Joan’s acting, in her Marie they discovered a gifted comedienne who was a good sport about self-parody in a role that played up her big, robust physique. What’s more, Dame Joan liked to surround herself with new artists she considered her equals, and in February 1972 in the Met’s new production of Daughter she introduced one of her discoveries to New York audiences: an unknown tenor named Luciano Pavarotti, whose galvanic performances restored the importance of Tonio’s role in the opera and earned Pavarotti the epithet “King of the High Cs.” Today, in Utah and around the world, we can expect The Daughter of the Regiment to amuse and to dazzle us thanks to their legacy.

Before the PX…

…there were cantinières — canteen girls like Marie, who survived the privations of war by meeting soldiers’ needs for merchandise and services they could get no other way. Camp-followers of this kind are probably as old as war itself; Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage” is a character based on a historical camp-follower from about 1670. The value of this kind of civilian entrepreneurship to the to the military was officially recognized In France in the 18^th Century. The official term vivandière was replaced by cantinière in 1793, giving rise to the Anglicized term “canteen girl”. Such terms were used interchangeably in France as well as in Spain, Italy and the U.S. through the 19^th Century.

Photos of French cantinières in the Crimean War from the 1850s show attractive young women in chic-looking uniforms with fitted bodices and rows of bright buttons. Marie’s English cousin aboard the HMS Pinafore is “Little Buttercup,” usually costumed in a full-skirted dress and apron (and described by her love-interest, Captain Corcoran, as “pleasantly plump”). Despite the innocent winsomeness of both characters, the question of “fraternization” with the soldiers shadowed cantinières, as we see in the final moments of The Daughter of the Regiment — when Marie’s past as a cantinière proves shocking to the guests assembled for her wedding. In the end, love triumphs over snobbishness, in part because the Marquise herself has a past…leaving us to wonder whether she will belatedly find happiness with Marie’s father figure, Sergeant Sulpice!