Salvadore Cammarano

Salvadore Cammarano (Naples, 1801 – Naples, 1852) was an Italian librettist and playwright whose texts shaped much of the Romantic opera of his time. He worked in Italian within the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and he matters because he supplied the words for two of the most performed opera composers of the nineteenth century, Donizetti and Verdi.

He was the son of Giuseppe, a painter and set designer, so he grew up around images and staging, and he soon turned to writing for the stage. His craft was to turn a story into a libretto: arranging scenes, placing the moments for singing and fitting the verse to the music the composer had in mind. For this reason his texts are best understood as parts of a collaborative work rather than as independent poems.

He wrote close to forty libretti. For Donizetti he produced Lucia di Lammermoor, Roberto Devereux and Poliuto, all driven by intense passions and characters caught between power or fate and their own desires. For Verdi he wrote Alzira, La battaglia di Legnano and Luisa Miller. The libretto of Il trovatore was later revised after his death by Leone Emanuele Bardare, at Verdi's request. He also worked for Mercadante and Pacini.

Cammarano began a libretto based on Shakespeare's King Lear, a project Verdi had long hoped to realise, but he died before finishing it; a detailed scenario survives. His legacy lies less in the fame of his name than in the craft of his libretti, which sustained Italian opera at mid-century and helped Verdi appreciate the value of a well-built text.