Gaetano Donizetti, Rita (1860)

The story on wikipedia is that while Donizetti was waiting around for a libretto to be ready for him, he ran into Gustave Vaëz, who had written the libretto for Lucia di Lammermoor, and asked him if he could write a short something so he'd have something to occupy himself in the meantime. Vaëz dashed out this one-acter, and the rest is history. Sort of. It wasn't performed until after Donizetti's death, however.

So that's this. And musically, it's typically sparkling Donizetti-in-comic-mode; no complaints there (although it does perhaps take a little while for it to really take off). But the plot, well...this is a zany comedy about domestic violence. It has, um, not aged well. I looked for reviews online, and they generally either don't even mention this or treat it in an off-handed "oh, well, it's all just super-goofy anyway, don't think too hard about it," but I thought it was definitely...worth noting. The main thing that's worth noting, really.

Rita runs a roadside inn; she's very self-satisfied about how well she's doing, and also about her bumbling husband, Beppi, whom she whacks around whenever he gets out of line. He's a super-big improvement, she notes, over her first husband, lost at sea, who would beat her. You definitely want to be the beater rather than the beatee. But then it turns out said first husband, Gaspar, was notdead, and he comes back. Not looking to reunite with Rita, he doesn't know she's there, just to stay at the inn. It turns out he thought she was dead, and he has a Canadian fiancée. He helpfully explains to Beppi when he sees how henpecked he is that he would beat his first wife but, you know, not enough to kill her, and she'd love him, and he intends to do the same with his new wife. Whee. Anyway, when it's revealed who he is, they have an argument about who has to stay with Rita, but in the end, she and Beppi are reconciled and, apparently, nobody is going to beat anyone, and Gasparo goes on his merry way and will, presumably, inflict plenty of violence on his new wife. COOL.

I watched this 1962 teleplay, which is definitely the oldest video of an opera I've ever seen. For the record, it's actually quite well-done; I'd never heard of any of the singers (just the three of them), but they're all good, especially Federico Davia as Gasparo. He has a goofy comic-opera face that works well in the role.

Still. The music's good enough that it might be worth seeing anyway, depending on your priorities, but the story is extremely non-lovable. Easy to see why it's relatively little-known and not spoken of in the same breath as Donizetti's comic masterpieces.  There are a surprising number of productions on youtube (most without subtitles), but it's hard for me to see how you could make it much more palatable.