CAPE TOWN.- “Could Donizetti ever have imagined that the world premiere of one of his operas would take place in Africa?”

That’s the question Jeremy Silver, the director of Opera UCT, a student company from the University of Cape Town, posed to the audience before the first staged performance of “Dalinda” on Sept. 4.

But here it was, an opera discovered just a few years earlier — presented not at an ornate European opera house but at the Baxter Theater, built in the 1970s, and performed by Opera UCT with a cast largely comprising Black singers and supertitles in English and IsiXhosa.

The rediscovery of “Dalinda” is a musical detective story with its origins in Donizetti’s frustration at failing to get his opera “Lucrezia Borgia” past the censors in Naples, where he was resident at the Teatro di San Carlo. The composer of “Lucia di Lammermoor,” “La Fille du Regiment” and “Don Pasquale,” Donizetti was a prodigious worker, often producing several operas in a year. But he spent four frustrating years reworking “Lucrezia” while composing other pieces, and in 1838 he decided to change the setting and characters entirely and add new music.

He called the new opera “Dalinda,” setting the action in the Middle East at the time of the Third Crusade in the 12th century, and making his title character the dominating wife and daughter of feared Muslim leaders. But Dalinda has a secret: Her illegitimate son is a Christian knight whom she longs to know. The plot revolves around their unexpected reunion when the Franks (as the Christian Crusaders are called) and the Saracens (Muslim fighters) meet to celebrate the end of a three-year war. It doesn’t turn out well.

Like “Lucrezia,” the opera has the story of a mother and son at its heart, and Donizetti used “large chunks” of that music in “Dalinda,” the British-born Silver said in an interview at the University of Cape Town’s College of Music, which has produced alumni like Pretty Yende, Golda Schultz and Musa Ngqungwana. “But there is progressively more new music as it goes on, some of it really wonderful.”

The censors weren’t persuaded. (“It’s still the story of a mass poisoning,” Silver said cheerily.) But by then Donizetti had decamped to Paris from Naples, and “Dalinda” was forgotten.

Until a day in April 2019 when musicologist Eleonora Di Cintio examined a score in the library of the Naples Conservatory. She was collaborating with Roger Parker on a critical edition of “Lucrezia Borgia,” and Parker had suggested that she look at a “strange” version, filed as “Lucrezia,” which he couldn’t fully reconcile to existing versions of the opera.

At the same time, Di Cintio discovered a libretto marked “Dalinda.” Comparing the music and the libretto, she realized they were related. “Donizetti was obviously working from a copy of ‘Lucrezia,’ but had changed a lot — moving parts, cutting sections and adding new music,” she said. “But parts were clearly missing and the order was completely wrong.”

Di Cintio painstakingly ordered the score, worked out what was missing and began to search for those sections. Over the course of several months, she found parts of “Dalinda” in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and in Bergamo, Italy, Donizetti’s birthplace. Just two fragments remained missing, she said — one was part of an easily reconstructed aria, since it was drawn from “Lucrezia”; the other a more problematic lost recitative. Then last year, while researching another Donizetti opera in Paris, she came across the missing section. The final piece of the puzzle was in place.

A concert version of “Dalinda” was given in Berlin in May 2023. But the performance in Cape Town, she said, “wasn’t just the first time the opera was fully staged, but also the first time the opera was truly complete.”

So how did “Dalinda” come to South Africa?

Ambra Sorrentino, the founder of Opera Co-Pro — an organization that connects companies for collaborative projects (“Tinder for opera,” she said) — had acquired the rights to perform “Dalinda” for five years, after hearing about it at a recital in Naples.

She immediately contacted Silver, whom she has known for many years. “He is a fab Donizetti conductor who has done two other rare Donizetti operas,” she said. “And I knew the reputation of the singers from Opera UCT.” Other companies in the Co-Pro network also committed to performing the work, with a premiere originally planned for the Czech Republic.

But a change of regional government, which now wanted only Czech productions, necessitated a new plan. Opera UCT would give the first performances.

“It never occurred to me that we would be the first staging when I told Ambra I wanted to do it,” Silver said. “I did think about whether it was the right piece for young singers,” he added, “but I knew the types of voices that would be needed, and felt our singers would shine.”

When he saw the score, he found “four really good, meaty principal roles,” he said, and “fascinating music that requires singers with all the attributes one associates with the bel canto period: great warmth and expressive line, allied to the ability to sing very fast music accurately and clearly.”

For most operas, Silver explained, word-for-word translations already exist, primarily through the work of Nico Castel, the tenor and longtime diction coach at the Metropolitan Opera who published a vast series of painstakingly annotated libretti. But for “Dalinda,” Opera UCT had to produce translations, singers’ guides and supertitles from scratch, as well as cover the costs of the production, directed by William Costabile Cisco.

“Hopefully we’ll recoup some of that when it goes to the other associated companies,” Silver said, adding that Opera UCT has existed as an independent company for only two years, and isn’t funded by the university or any other source.

Cisco, who is Italian, and was already associated with the project, said that he was shocked by the high level of the performers’ work when he arrived in Cape Town. “I knew the reputation of the school for producing singers, but I didn’t expect this,” he said. “The first time I heard them singing in Italian, I almost cried. At the bottom of the world, in a place that has nothing to do with Italy, with such a richness of their own cultures and heritage, these 20 or 30 guys and girls are here, singing in my language — and so well.”

Molly Dzangare, a student from Zimbabwe in her final year, said working on the title role was exciting, but also stressful and a bit intimidating. “People will be saying, Who sang it first? Did they do justice to the role?” The part, she added, demands “beautiful legato singing but also fast runs and vocal flourishes,” as well as dramatic intensity.

The singers all felt “a lot of pressure to do amazingly,” said Luvo Maranti, who took on the tenor role of Ildemaro, Dalinda’s son. “An opportunity like this doesn’t happen often.” Although the Middle Eastern setting, and the Muslim-Christian conflict that permeates the opera’s narrative, might have been contentious issues, both singers said that hadn’t come up in rehearsal or preparation.

Silver said the political setting “is a backdrop for a human story, almost always the case in these early 19th-century works.” The opera, he added, “is woven around Dalinda’s personal story and how she manages the personal and political tension.”

On opening night, the notably diverse audience certainly seemed indifferent to the plot’s sectarian aspects, and thrilled to celebrate the singers’ talents and a moment of international significance. “The best show I’ve ever seen,” said Gayton McKenzie, South Africa’s new minister of sports, arts and culture, who was at the premiere, posing for photographs with the singers onstage after the performance.

John Allison, the editor of the British publication Opera Magazine, attended the opening and called it “an event of quite a lot of importance.”

“This is one of those Donizetti pieces that doesn’t have as many exciting, knock-’em-flat melodies of some of the more popular pieces,” Allison said, “but it is written to a very high level. Donizetti understood how to tighten the screws for dramatic excitement and this certainly feels tighter than ‘Lucrezia’ — it has urgency and tension and doesn’t dip anywhere.”

And he was impressed by the quality of the singers. “If I needed to spot talent for my opera house, I would go to Cape Town,” he said.

Allison added that he was sure “Dalinda” would have a life in opera houses. “It’s not a poor man’s version of ‘Lucrezia,’” he said. “It stands on its own.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.