Would you take your children to Anna Bolena? It is about the lengths a man, at least Henry VIII, will go to in order to sleep with his new flame (Jane Seymour), when she insists – as a respectable woman – on being married to him first. That means he has to get rid of his current wife, the Queen – Anna Bolena.

To do this, Henry VIII adopts a double strategy. He summons a former lover of Anna’s (Percy, Earl of Northumberland), to rekindle their highly flammable love; and – in case that is not enough – he suborns a court musician (Smeton), infatuated with Anna, into the false admission of the consummation of their love, by promising him his (Smeton’s) life and that of Anna.

It is a sordid set-up for a sublime and majestic opera. The morals of a royal court are played out in public and in higher-value currency than normal life – and there is nothing normal about the morality and actions of Henry. There is not a single mitigating feature about him.

What confers nobility on Anna Bolena is the behaviour of everyone else beside the king. Above all, it is the nobility of Anna. She forgives Jane, in Act Two, conscious that she herself is now in the position in which she herself placed Henry’s first queen, Catherine of Aragon, who – as Anna herself says – could not go unavenged (Catherine was still alive).

However, Anna’s pardon of her successor, Jane, is far more like an act of female solidarity between old friends,[note] although Jane ultimately experiences Anna’s forgiveness as but one more torture, which began with her own love for Henry. Jane and Henry are not only physically absent from the end of the opera; they are morally absent, too, because Anna’s nobility and breakdown into temporary insanity wipe them from the scene.

For one brief moment, rather late in Act Two, the tables are turned on Henry, and he is momentarily unnerved, when Percy informs him that he and Anna are married. Anna herself is nonplussed. Percy does this because, in his desperation, he thinks that, by thus invalidating the royal marriage, Anna can somehow be saved from the ultimate fate of a disloyal queen. But this can never be. Henry immediately sees through it. Despite the heartfelt pleas of Jane Seymour to Henry for Anna’s life, her own love for Henry overwhelms her, and he is free to endorse the inescapable sentence of death on Anna.

When Anna regains her sanity at the very end of the opera, the closing words of her condemnation of Henry are sung to blood-curdling music, reminiscent of Verdi’s Lady Macbeth – ‘Coppia iniqua’ – and Anna’s forgiveness of Henry and Jane, and her previous forgiveness of Jane herself, morally eclipse and transcend the legacy of Henry’s evil.

The opera Anna Bolena is heavy with dignified grief. Donizetti’s spellbinding music expresses the passion and the misery of love, desire and contrition with the near simultaneity with which they are often experienced.

Yes, you should take your children to Anna Bolena – but they may well be shocked and frightened. Like many operas, it is a harsh lesson in unoriginal sin.

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There are at least two outstanding recordings. The first, from 1957, is with Maria Callas (as Anna) and Giulietta Simoniato (Jane). Each sound as though they could have sung the other’s part. It is a thrilling performance, but in a less-than-perfect recording that preserves some of the crackle and hiss of the age of shellac. As spectacular, and brilliantly recorded, is the version with Edita Gruberova, who acts – and not only sings – the part even more effectively than Callas. There is also a very fine DVD, with Anna Netrebko and Elina Garanca, both in superb voice, with a strong supporting cast, including Ildebrando d’Archangelo as Henry.

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note:

The relationship between Anna and Jane resembles that between Norma and Adalgisa in Bellini’s Norma, first performed a year later. It is not the only pre-echo of Norma in Anna Bolena. For one extraordinary moment in Act Two, when Jane Seymour is pleading with Henry for Anna’s life – ‘Per questa fiamma indomita’ – the opening chords of ‘Casta Diva’ seem to be heard. No wonder that the librettist Felice Romani’s wife was able to spread the false rumour that Bellini attended the première of Anna Bolena.