Gaetano Donizetti: ESE with a strong EIE accent

"Unlike Bellini, [he] was never envious of the successes of other composers and at all times displayed an openhearted generosity." — Britannica

"Ah! mes amis, quel jour de fête!" — Tonio, from La fille du régiment

"Spargi d'amaro pianto" — Lucia di Lammermoor, at the end of her "mad scene"

Britannica's verdict almost settles the typing on its own. Donizetti (1797-1848) is, by the unanimous testimony of those who knew him, one of the warmest and least envious figures in the history of opera — sunny, generous, prodigiously productive, sociable, and remarkably indifferent to the status-wars of his profession. He is also the composer of the most famous mad scene in all of opera, a man who fought censors for the right to stage executions and the dissolution of a human mind, and whose tragic operas reach a genuine Romantic extremity. The first set of facts makes him an ESE; the second makes the EIE accent strong and unmistakable. His biography, with his wife and children dying so soon, and him succumbing to a degenerative paralytic illness relatively early, is also tragic, and moves the register of his life towards a "minor" key regardless of type.

He was remembered by his Naples Conservatory students as warm and friendly, described as "a pleasant guy, full of good humor and energy"; "friendly and sincere," tall, handsome, jovial. His letters of the 1830s read "like telegrams in which he jovially recounts his activities and commitments" — the cheerful, energetic, sociable chatter of a man who liked people and liked being busy among them. This is the ESE's warm, contact-loving good cheer.

The textbook illustration of Donizetti's attitude to life is the letter of introduction he sent, entirely unprompted, to the French composer Berlioz — whose criticism of him in Le Journal des Débats had been consistently hostile — smoothing Berlioz's path to Prince Metternich in Vienna. One does not do this if one is keeping a tally of enemies. The same generosity shows in his lifelong gratitude and loyalty to his teacher Mayr. That is ESE caretaking in its purest form: practical, community-minded warmth directed at specific people. Note how different this is from the EIE's relationship to a national art, which tends to be missionary and self-dramatizing — see Wagner as the prophet of German music, or Verdi as the bard of the Risorgimento, both also noticeably more Talanov-Qe'ish than Donizetti. The latter's manner was custodial and kindly: keep the tradition healthy, help the youngsters, honor the man who helped you.

Donizetti's consistent work rhythm and even a certain workaholism is also a touch more ESE than EIE. And he wrote, frankly and successfully, for the audience — he always won more favour with the public than with the critics. Writing to give pleasure and reliably giving it is an ESE signature, EIE writes to seize and transform the audience rather than to delight it.

But he wasn't alien to EIE-style drama-on-state, either. His "dramatic instincts were strong, and he kept pressing against the imposed limitations" — repeatedly running afoul of the Naples censors over on-stage deaths, over placing sovereigns in mortal peril, and the whole Tudor cycle of doomed and beheaded queens (Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda, Roberto Devereux). And the summit of this is Lucia di Lammermoor — a Romeo-and-Juliet story pushed past even Shakespeare's degree of tragism (no reconciliation of the warring houses at the end, only ruin), crowned by the most famous mad scene in all opera ("it isn't over until the young lady kills", as TvTropes jokes). The reach for that extremity, that appetite for staged death and madness, is the one thread in him that an ESE base does not generate on its own, and EIE is its natural source. 

It should be noted, however, that his most-performed operas run the entire emotional gamut and are spread remarkably evenly across it: Lucia (pure tragedy), L'elisir d'amore (comedy with farcical elements), La fille du régiment (light comedy with a dramatic touch), Don Pasquale (his comic masterpiece). His desire to be equally prominent with the comic and the tragic is especially notable when Wagner, Verdi, Puccini worked in at least 80% dramatic material — it was what differentiated him from other famous opera composers of the era.

His biography is so operatically tragic that it tempts a darker typing than the evidence supports. Within roughly eight years Donizetti lost his parents, all three of his infant children, and then his young wife Virginia to cholera; he never completely recovered, locking the door of her room and refusing ever again to speak her name; and he was finally destroyed, relatively early, by the slow paralytic dissolution (syphilis, most likely), dying unable even to recognize his own scores. But before all this happened, he was, by every firsthand account sunny and generous. An ESE feels and grieves vividly, after all. Donizetti gave the nineteenth century both its most beloved operatic comedies and its most famous scene of a breaking mind, and meant each of them equally.