Salvadore Cammarano (19 March 1801 – 17 July 1852) was an Italian librettist and playwright perhaps best known for writing the text of Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) for Gaetano Donizetti.

For Donizetti he also contributed the libretti for L'assedio di Calais (1836), Belisario (1836), Pia de' Tolomei (1837), Roberto Devereux (1837), Maria de Rudenz (1838), Poliuto (1838), and Maria di Rohan (1843), while for Giuseppe Persiani he was the author of Ines de Castro.

For Verdi he wrote Alzira (1845), La battaglia di Legnano (1849) and Luisa Miller (1849), but after he died in July 1852, Verdi worked with Leone Emanuele Bardare to complete the libretto for Il trovatore (1853).^[1] Cammarano also started work on libretto for a proposed adaptation of William Shakespeare's play King Lear, named Re Lear, but he died before completing it; a detailed scenario survives.

His father, Giuseppe, was a painter and set-designer. His son, Michele, was also a painter.

Notes

Sources

• Black, John (1982), Donizetti's Operas in Naples, 1822 to 1848, London: Donizetti Society, 1982
• Black, John (1984), The Italian Romantic Libretto: A Study of Salvadore Cammarano, Edinburgh University Press, 1984 ISBN 978-0-85224-463-0 ISBN 0852244630
• Budden, Julian, The Operas of Verdi, 2, From Il Trovatore to La Forza del destino . London: Cassell, 1984. ISBN 978-0-19-520068-3 (hardcover); ISBN 978-0-19-520450-6 (paperback).
• Warrack, John and Ewan West, The Oxford Dictionary of Opera, Oxford University Press, 1992 ISBN 0-19-869164-5

• Opera at Stanford University