FOR its winter season programme the newly-named Opera Ireland has chosen two of the oldest operatic favourites in the book - the mother of all weepies, Giacomo Puccini's La Boheme, and one of the best-loved comic operas of the Italian repertoire, Gaetano Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore (The Elixir of Love). This year has seen a string of "special" Bohemes in just about every opera house on earth to celebrate the 100th birthday of Puccini's tuneful tale of love and death among the artists, which took place, strictly speaking, last February, and Dublin just about manages to get in on the act before 1996 is out - but with its L'Elisir d'Amore, Opera Ireland is surely among the first companies to mark the bicentenary of Donizetti's birth in 1997.

Since its premiere in 1832 L'Elisir d'Amore has been one of the most consistently popular pieces in the opera buffa repertoire - hardly surprising, given its succession of sparkling melodies and irrepressible sense of fun. But the shadow of ambiguity occasionally falls across its glittering surface. The baiting of the simple peasant boy Nemorino, who is in love - hopelessly, it seems, until the love potion comes along - with the supercilious gentlewoman farmer Adina is usually played for laughs, but it has an unmistakable undercurrent of cruelty. Nemorino's supposed half-wittedness is itself called into question by his singing of the sensitive romanza, Una furtiva Iagrima, deservedly one of the showpieces of the tenor repertoire; and at the end of the opera, when the lovers are happily united, poor old Sergeant Belcore finds himself jilted on what should have been his wedding day.

But if L'Elisir remains, in spirit, a light-hearted comedy, nobody understood tragedy better than Gaetano Donizetti, for his own life story could furnish the libretto for one of those operas which sees the stage littered with corpses by the end of the final act. He was born in conditions of horrific poverty in Bergamo in 1797, received a thorough musical education thanks to a charity music school and achieved megastardom practically overnight with the success of his opera Anna Bolena in 1830. It was followed by a series of hits: L'Elisir d'Amore - which was allegedly written in under a fortnight, though it may have taken a whole three weeks - Lucrezia Borgia and Lucia di Lammermoor.

So Donizetti was a respected composer at the height of his rags-to-riches climb from the slums of Bergamo to the salons of Europe when his father died in December 1835, followed by his mother three months later. In February 1836 his wife Virginia gave birth to a still-born daughter - their first child, a son, had died within a few days of his birth seven years earlier. In June 1837 Virginia's third pregnancy ended with another tiny coffin, and a month later Virginia herself contracted a virulent form of measles and died, leaving Donizetti in despair. He moved to Paris and continued to write, but he underwent periodic fits of illness and was eventually diagnosed as suffering from cerebro-spinal syphilis - suffering being the word, for such a diagnosis meant not only a lingering, painful death but a life blighted by scandal and gossip as well.

WHICH makes it, perhaps, all the more extraordinary that of Donizetti's 65, mostly tragic, operas it should be the two comedies L'Elisir d'Amore and Don Pasquale on which - together with the hothouse melodrama Lucia di Lammermoor - his reputation largely rests. Perhaps next year's bicentenary will prompt a reexamination of his oeuvre as a whole; meanwhile, hopefully, Dublin audiences can lie back and enjoy Opera Ireland's production of L'Elisir d'Amore, which is directed by Mike Ashman, designed by Bernard Culshaw and conducted by Mark Shanahan with Majella Cullagh as Adina, David Newman as Nemorino and Steven Page as Belcore.

La Boheme, a reworking of the production originally conceived by Elijah Moshinsky for English National Opera, is directed by Daniel Slater, designed by Michael Yeargan and conducted by Rico Saccani, with Maria Spacagna as Mimi, Kathryn Smith as Musetta, Maurizio Comencini as Rodolfo, Andrea Zese as Marcello and Andrea Piccini as Schaunard. Lighting for both operas is by Paul Keogan.