Opera returns to Bar Harbor with Donizetti's masterpiece, “L’Elisir d’Amore”

Listen to Pavarotti's version of 'A furtive tear' by clicking on link below

BAR HARBOR, July 15, 2025 - I once asked my mother who played the piano for 80 years what was the best musical instrument.

Without hesitation she said, “The human voice.”

The answer both surprised me and taught me a lesson to broaden my own assumptions.

The voice conveys not just melody, but meaning. It can cry, whisper, laugh, ache, rejoice or be menacing - all while staying in tune. No other instrument can match its ability to express such a wide range of human emotion with such immediacy.

You don't need translation to feel the heartbreak in a lament or the joy in a gospel choir.

And when you match a song with the perfect voice, you get this - the so-called “Queen of the Night” aria by soprano Diane Damrau in “the Magic Flute” by Mozart. Just double click:

I became an opera devotee in my Twenties. I remember the exact moment. It was a dinner at a New Haven landmark, Consiglio’s, in the Wooster Street section of New Haven. Halfway through dinner, the owner introduced a tenor from the Metropolitan Opera who stood and launched into what is known as the drinking song from La Traviata. I had never heard such a voice in person.

Italy essentially invented opera in the early 1600s with composers like Monteverdi, Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and later, Verdi and Puccini.

Musical terms like allegro, forte, adagio, and aria are Italian - a sign of its foundational influence.

Mozart composed operas in Italian, though he was Austrian.

In the Seventies, a Northern Italian, a native of Modena named Luciano Pavarotti changed the genre of classical voice by popularizing famous arias giving them a “Top Forty” sensibility. He also was the first to exploit the huge, emerging TV audience.

I collected multiple Pavarotti records and played them along side the Beatles, Stones, The Who, Joni Mitchell and Glenn Miller.

It was during those helter skelter days that I heard the aria “Una furtiva lagrima” (A furtive tear) from Gaetano Donizetti’s comic opera L’elisir d’amore (The Elixir of Love), composed in 1832.

The aria is sung by Nemorino, a simple, love-struck peasant. He believed a “magic elixir” (actually just cheap wine) has made the woman he loves - Adina - fall for him. When he sees a single tear in her eye, he realized, she does love him - and it wasn't the elixir.

Here is a video of Pavarotti singing it.

Over time, I developed a hankering to see the full operas of these individual masterpieces.

So the opera gods have made it convenient. On Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday night the Bar Harbor Music Festival will feature “L’Elisir d’Amore” with a local twist to the story - set in Bar Harbor in the 1930s.

“This immersive experience, produced by Sarah Joyce Cooper and Eric Mahl and Directed by Marshall Hughes, brings love, gangsters, hilarity and joy to the Criterion theater as we travel back into the 1930s,” stated the flyer promoting the event.

The cast includes Sarah Joyce Cooper, soprano, Omar Najmi, tenor, Junhan Choi, bass-baritone, Eliam Ramos, bass-baritone and Timatha Kasten, soprano.

Marshall Hughes is the stage director. The pit ensemble will be conducted by Eric Mahl.

Tickets to the matinee may be purchased here, and the Wednesday evening performance here.

This the the return of opera to Bar Harbor after taking a year off in 2024.

The performance will be mercifully short, 2 hours and 30 minutes, for opera.

The legendary music critic of the Boston Globe, Richard Dyer, told me once to try and listen to an opera before the performance to familiarize yourself with the story and the arias.

With the gift of Youtube, we may now listen to virtually every opera in the canon.