Il dolce suono… Spargi d'amaro pianto (Lucia di Lammermoor)

Donizetti and Salvadore Cammarano reduced Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor to the story of a woman used as currency between feuding families; the opera reached the Teatro San Carlo in Naples on 26 September 1835. The mad scene was written for glass harmonica, an instrument replaced by flute for practical reasons and restored to major houses only in recent decades. Naples took the work up slowly. It became the point at which bel canto coloratura stopped being ornament and turned into evidence of a mind coming apart — a reading Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland made central after the war.