‘Love’ Comes to the Florentine Opera

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Photo by Simon Paul courtesy the Florentine Opera

Zachary Nelson

Zachary Nelson

“I grew up listening to the Metropolitan broadcasts in the car,” says baritone Zachary Nelson, Dulcamara in the Florentine Opera’s comedic Elixir of Love. “And I kinda didn’t care for it.”

The music was around the house as he grew up—mom had studied voice in college—but it wasn’t his music. Not until a high school class whose project was notating the music from a song. “Everybody was doing pop songs. I wanted to do something different,” Nelson says. He found a Verdi’s greatest hits album in mom’s collection and wrote out a bit of La Traviata. “I’ve been hooked ever since.”

The Florentine Opera’s Elixir of Love is actually Gaetano Donizetti’s 1832 L’elisir d’amore, reset in California wine country and dressed up as 1930s Art Deco America but sung in the original Italian. “The costumes are beautiful,” Nelson says. “It looks stunning. We’re entirely true to the opera’s story, just bumping it up a century. L’elisir d’amore is a popular show among opera fans. To give it a different spin will be fun for an audience that has seen it many times.”

A native of Annapolis, Maryland, Nelson has been to Milwaukee before, as Mercutio in the Florentine’s 2022 production of Romeo and Juliet. He’s happy to have worked before with three members of Elixir’s cast. “We walked into the room and it’s like no time has passed.”

The role of Dulcamara demands some of the opera repertoire’s speediest singing. He’s a fast-talking seller of patent medicines and quack nostrums. “It’s eight million words––10 words a second!” Nelson says of his dubious “doctor,” peddling cheap red wine as a love potion for Nemorino, a peasant in enthralled by Adina, a beautiful woman of the upper class. We’re rooting for him to win her hand in the last act and for Dulcamara to make another sale.

The Florentine Opera performs Elixir of Love, Oct. 13-15 at the Marcus Performing Arts Center’s Uihein Hall. For more information, visit https://www.florentineopera.org/season-events/elixir-of-love-23-24