From the point of view of half a century ago no recent musical phenomenon would have seemed less likely than the extensive and so far unabating revival of Donizetti's operas. In spite of the unevenness of his output, works such as Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda and Roberto Devereux have become established in the repertory and seem unlikely ever to slip back into obscurity. Donizetti was not a great originator; he found his mature voice more slowly than most of his contemporaries; he eludes the handy labels that help us to pigeonhole composers from the past. He is a central figure, much more consistent and true to himself than one might expect of a composer whose arena was the highly eclectic and adaptive world of Italian opera in the first half of the nineteenth century. At that time a composer enjoyed little status in the musical hierarchy, especially in the jungle world of the Italian opera house, where, for instance, Méric-Lalande was paid more than nine times as much for singing the Carnival season at La Scala as the composer was paid for writing Lucrezia Borgia.

A fair estimate of Donizetti's qualities can only be achieved by considering his music in the context of the theater within which he worked, its musical conventions, and its personnel of singers and other composers, all of whom were struggling to capture and maintain the loyalty of the public.