While better known as a composer of opera, Gaetano Donizetti also paid considerable attention to his songs, of which he wrote a very large number. These are settings of a wide variety of texts, including popular Neapolitan songs, and verses by Metastasio, Schiller, Victor Hugo and other French writers. In some of the songs there is an overt dramatic element, as in Il pescator and La sultana where Donizetti is alive to every nuance of the texts. Others, such as Ah, rammenta, o bella Irene, are unashamedly operatic.