by Glover, Jane
WHEN TWO GREAT friends collaborate artistically and produce profoundly stirring results, there is no greater pleasure in life. But close friendship is by no means a prerequisite for such results, nor does it in any way guarantee them, for often the most unlikely alliances can produce extraordinary artistic issue. Two creators, or two performers, may have very little in common, and may not even particularly enjoy each other’s company, yet the communication between them on a supermundane level can lead to a sharing of ideas, instincts and reflexes where the total exceeds the sum of the parts. On the face of it, the collaboration between Mozart and Da Ponte was not an obvious one at all: Da Ponte was a natural partner for Salieri (they were the same age, and of the same nationality), and did indeed produce librettos for him. But between Mozart and the ‘new Italian poet’ there were vast areas of agreement, like-mindedness and vision, and it was perhaps only a matter of time before these two veritable geniuses would converge.
Lorenzo Da Ponte’s upbringing had, in its own way, been almost as extraordinary as Mozart’s. Originally called Emmanuele Conegliano, he was born in Ceneda (now Vittorio Veneto) in 1749, into a Jewish family, but had converted to Christianity, along with his father and brothers, at the age of fourteen, when his father had married his non-Jewish stepmother. At the same time he had assumed the name of the presiding Venetian bishop, Monsignor Lorenzo Da Ponte. He seems to have had no formal schooling at all up to that point, yet by the age of twenty-one he was teaching literature at a seminary in Portogruaro, and writing poetry on all manner of subjects. He took holy orders, though he was wildly unsuited to the religious calling, and so acquired his title ‘Abbate’, affording him at least a veneer of respectability as he made his colourful progress through life. By 1773, when he was twenty-four, he was in Venice, where he made the acquaintance of Casanova, and himself had many adulterous affairs. One of these led to his eventual banishment from Venice in 1779, and his being forbidden to work anywhere at all in the Venetian Republic. After short spells in Görz (Gorizia) and Dresden, Da Ponte arrived in Vienna in late 1781. He made contact with his influential countryman, Salieri; and he met and received the approval of the legendary Court Poet, Metastasio, just before he died in 1782. When, a year later, Joseph II revived Italian opera at Court, Salieri encouraged Da Ponte to apply for the post of poet at the Burgtheater, and he was duly appointed. There, his tasks were to oversee the provision of all librettos for the theatre, whether translations or adaptations of plays or existing librettos, or original creations. As Mozart observed, Lorenzo Da Ponte had ‘an enormous amount to do’.44
Da Ponte was never less than enthusiastic, admiring and courteous when discussing or making use of Metastasio’s texts. But when he came to consider the librettos for the comedies that he was supposed to supervise, he was appalled. As he recalled in his Memoirs:
. . . what trash! No plots, no characters, no movement, no scening, no grace of language or style! Written to produce laughter, anyone would have judged that most were written to produce tears. There was not a line in those miserable botches that contained a flourish, an oddity, a graceful term, calculated in any sense to produce a laugh. So many agglomerations of insipidities, idiocies, tomfooleries!45
He therefore decided that ‘it should not be a difficult matter to compose something better than that’, and determined to write his own comedies:
In mine, one would find, at least here and there, some clever turn, some smart quip, some joke; the language would be neither barbarous nor uncouth; the songs would be read without annoyance! Finding an attractive subject, capable of supplying interesting character and fertile in incident, I would not be able, even if I tried, to compose things as wretched as those I had read!
But despite this great confidence and optimism, the first original libretto that Da Ponte wrote for Salieri, Il ricco d’un giorno in 1783, was something of a disaster. And when it was followed by a work from the rival team of Paisiello and Casti, Il re Teodoro in Venezia, which became the most enormous popular success, Salieri was furious, and would not touch Da Ponte again for four years. For some time, therefore, Da Ponte retreated into the uncomfortable environs of disapproval from those in power, and it was not until 1786, which turned out to be a veritable annus mirabilis for him, that his fortunes turned. But his years in the frosty wilderness were by no means wasted, for he observed, absorbed and waited (‘I eat and drink and write and think,’ he wrote). Eventually he adapted Goldoni’s Il burbero di buon cuore for the newest and most exciting arrival in Vienna, the Spanish composer Vicente Martin y Soler (protégé of the Spanish Ambassador’s wife, who was herself said to be extremely close to the Emperor). The performances of this new opera, in early 1786, bejewelled as they were by the presence of Nancy Storace and Francesco Benucci, marked Da Ponte’s return to the limelight. And by then he was working with Mozart on Le nozze di Figaro.
For all that Mozart and Da Ponte had been cautiously prowling around each other for three years, there was by now much common ground between them. In a crucially fundamental sense, they were both disenchanted with the Enlightenment. This intellectual movement, so beloved of Mozart’s Emperor and therefore at the heart of all his reforms, had effectively turned society away from religion, and towards reason, as the chief tool for understanding human life. Education, and the idea of learning through experience, were part of this rationality, and most artistic works, including Mozart’s operas, were passionate advocates for this new Age of Reason. Yet there was something essentially empty about it. At the end of his Second Discourse, Rousseau issued a warning to a society guided only by material values: ‘We have only honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness.’ Mozart and Da Ponte both surely shared this view, as their collaborations indicate: all three works break through the barriers surrounding conventional society, with all its manners and proprieties, and release the emotional turmoil within.
Mozart and Da Ponte were both experienced in the theatre, and both had extremely definite ideas about the relationship between words and music. As it happened, these coincided perfectly, both of them realizing the very importance of text for music. Mozart had written to his father in 1781, ‘Verses are indeed the most indispensable element for music,’46 and Da Ponte clearly concurred: ‘I think poetry is the door to music, which can be very handsome, and much admired for its exterior, but nobody can see its internal beauties if the door is wanting.’47 Both Mozart and Da Ponte were highly and sensitively versatile. Just as Mozart ‘tailor-made’ his music expressly to suit specific singers, so Da Ponte realized that ‘the actors . . . had to be studied individually that their parts might fit’48; he similarly chose different subject-matter for his different composers. (For the English Stephen Storace, for example, he adapted Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, producing Gli equivoci; for the Spanish Martin y Soler he adapted a play by Luis Vélez de Guevara for Una cosa rara.) Both Mozart and Da Ponte were essentially outsiders, never fully accepted by the establishment; yet their peripatetic earlier lives, together with their current situation on the fringes of society, had furnished them with superb powers to observe, accumulate and interpret the infinite varieties of human behaviour. Each could therefore portray immense subtlety in theatrical characterization, whether for instance in the different modes of expression and colloquialism between the different classes, or in overt and covert manifestations of real human emotion – what is said not necessarily being what is felt, which nonetheless is acutely revealed. And, significantly, both Mozart and Da Ponte had experienced, first-hand, the splendid event of the Venetian Carnival. Mozart had been in Venice as a teenager, but never forgot his wild times there, with his Wider ‘pearls’; and Da Ponte had resided in that most seductive, most liberal, most degenerate perhaps of cities, with its masks and its disguises, and its illicit assignations conducted under cover of watery darkness. All three of the Mozart–Da Ponte collaborations would draw on this richest of memories, using disguise as another device with which ultimately t
o discover the truth, in a manner at once entertaining and disturbing.
Above all, Mozart and Da Ponte were both prepared to take risks, and were therefore profound innovators. Before they agreed to collaborate, Mozart had trawled disconsolately through more than 100 librettos, and found nothing to fire his imagination. What Da Ponte put before him was utterly different. No longer were they to concern themselves with the remote classical plots of opera seria; no longer would they bother with rescue operas set in exotic Eastern harems, or rely on the conventional configurations of commedia dell’arte; and they would certainly no longer stoop to devices such as mechanical geese. The three librettos that Da Ponte prepared for and with Mozart, whether adaptations of existing stories (Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni) or newly written (Così fan tutte), were all effectively portraits of the society in which they were both living, of the people who inhabited it, and of the ways in which these people treated one another and reacted to one another. In every possible way, this was truly contemporary opera.
At first glance, the selection of Beaumarchais’ La folle journée, ou Le mariage de Figaro as the basis for the first collaboration between Mozart and Da Ponte was not such a provocative one. It was, after all, the sequel to Le barbier de Seville, which, in a setting by Paisiello originally written for Catherine the Great in 1782, had been brought to Vienna in 1783 and performed by the Italian company (Storace, Mandini, Benucci) with great success. It was an entirely logical move to continue Beaumarchais’ narrative and follow these characters into their next series of adventures. In Il barbiere di Siviglia, Count Almaviva has, with the help of the cunning barber Figaro, successfully won the hand and heart of Rosina, the ward and intended bride of the elderly Dr Bartolo. But now, in Le nozze di Figaro, some of these characters have undergone a certain amount of transformation, and the whole energy of the storyline has become considerably tougher. Where in Il barbiere di Siviglia there was an essentially benevolent insolence lurking beneath the comedy, in Figaro there is a positively dangerous spirit of revolution. The marriage between Count Almaviva and his (now) Countess has already disintegrated, and the Count is exercising his droit de seigneur with as many women and girls on his estate as he pleases. Even on the day of Figaro’s wedding to the Countess’s maid, Susanna, the Count tries to postpone the ceremony for his own purposes. Figaro, Susanna and the Countess devise a plot whereby the Count’s infidelities are publicly, humiliatingly, exposed in front of his entire household. The French spirit of the 1780s, of liberty, equality and fraternity, of the imperative need for the bourgeoisie to rid itself of the ancien régime and all its outrageous practices, pervades every scene, whether overtly or subliminally. It is small wonder that Beaumarchais’ play was banned in Paris for three years, and banned again in Vienna, until it had been much cut. That Da Ponte hoodwinked the authorities sufficiently to obtain permission for its (presumably more acceptable) incarnation as an opera buffa is testimony indeed to his formidable and eloquent powers of persuasion.
Mozart and Da Ponte must have known the risks they were taking in exposing some of the more vile foibles of their audiences as well as their most engaging. And yet the concepts of fairness, decency and propriety were, for all Mozart’s passing preoccupations with the crude, utterly essential to him. Back in 1781, bristling with rage after his treatment by the representatives of Archbishop Colloredo, he had written to Leopold: ‘It is the heart that ennobles a man; and though I am no count, yet I have probably more honour in me than many a count. Whether a man be a count or a valet, if he insults me, he is a scoundrel.’49 In undertaking to collaborate with Da Ponte on this risky venture, Mozart was indeed settling some old scores.
But another great attraction of presenting the sequel to Paisiello’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, and one which may indeed have swayed the authorities to grant permission for its performance, was that some of the same singers from 1783 were still enjoying enormous success and popularity in Vienna. The bass-baritone Stefano Mandini had played the role of Count Almaviva, and he could do so again, in this now considerably less sympathetic (and therefore more interesting) light, in the sequel. The two Francescos, Benucci and Bussani, had originally been Bartolo and Figaro. Now, three years later, they were to swap these roles: Benucci had become the absolutely favourite leading man with Viennese audiences, and was the more obvious choice for the title role. Bussani had assumed greater responsibility for stage direction, but could certainly play Bartolo, and also double as the drunken gardener, Antonio. His young wife Dorotea (at just twenty-three, nearly half his age) could play the page Cherubino, and Mandini’s wife Maria could be the housekeeper Marcellina. Michael Kelly, the young Irish tenor engaged by Count Durazzo at the same time as all the Italians, and accustomed to playing comic roles of an age well beyond his own twenty-four years, could double the roles of Don Basilio (the music-master and general busybody) and the lawyer Don Curzio. Nancy Storace had originally played the part of Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia in 1783. But at the time of its 1785 revival, she had been undergoing a severe personal crisis, and Luisa Laschi, the newest arrival from Italy, had therefore taken the role. So she could continue to do so, now as the Countess Almaviva in Figaro; and Nancy Storace would be given instead the absolutely crucial and central role of Susanna. The small but dramatically riveting role of the gardener’s daughter Barbarina was given to the twelve-year-old Anna Gottlieb, daughter of two actors at the Burgtheater.
It was however the relationship between Nancy Storace and Francesco Benucci that was fundamental to this opera. As representatives of an intelligent and sympathetic bourgeoisie, Susanna and Figaro would work together as a team (though not without their own little moments of mistrust) and succeed in humiliating their master. And so one of the most fascinating and satisfying characters ever written for the opera stage was to be created by an extraordinarily talented English girl of twenty-one. Nancy Storace’s Italian father had been a double-bass player who had settled in London in the late 1750s, married an Englishwoman and, not unlike Leopold Mozart, produced two gifted children. Both Nancy and her brother Stephen were extremely musical. According to Michael Kelly’s Reminiscences, Nancy could play and sing at sight at just eight years old, and ‘evinced an extraordinary genius for music.’50 While her brother was sent to Naples to study composition, she had singing lessons in London from none other than Venanzio Rauzzini (Mozart’s old friend from Lucio Silla, and for whom he had also written his ‘Exsultate, jubilate’), who would later teach Michael Kelly too. In 1778, aged only thirteen, Nancy travelled to Italy with her parents to visit her brother, and herself began a phenomenally prodigious career, performing on the stages of most of the major opera houses in Italy. At fifteen she sang at the Teatro alla Pergola in Florence, with such success that she caused jealous fury to the resident castrato Luigi Marchesi, who demanded – and succeeded in getting – her removal. (In 1786, in Salieri’s Prima la musica e poi le parole in the Orangery at Schönbrunn, Nancy got her own back by hilariously mimicking her old adversary, and afforded great delight to the knowing audience.) Her eviction from the Teatro alla Pergola did not damage her career at all. She subsequently sang in Lucca, Parma, Livorno, Milan and Venice. And it was in the Teatro San Samuele in Venice that she was heard by Count Durazzo, and hired by him for Vienna’s Burgtheater in 1783. She was still only eighteen years old.
Nancy Storace had met Michael Kelly in Livorno, and in his Reminiscences Kelly described the hilarious incident that brought them together and initiated a friendship that would endure for the rest of their lives.
I had on a Sicilian capote, with my hair (of which I had a great quantity, and which, like my complexion, was very fair) floating over it: I was as thin as a walking stick. As I stepped from the boat, I perceived a young lady and gentleman standing on the Mole, making observations; as the former looked at me she laughed, and as I approached I heard her say to her companion in English, which of course she thought I did not understand, ‘Look at that girl dressed in boy’s clothes!’ To
her astonishment, I answered in the same language, ‘You are mistaken, Miss; I am a very proper he animal, and quite at your service!’
We all laughed until we were tired, and became immediately intimate; and these persons, my acquaintance with whom, commenced by this childish jest on the Mole at Leghorn, continued through life the warmest and most attached of my friends. All love and honour to your memories, Stephen and Nancy Storace!51
The teenagers had a wonderful time together in Livorno, parted in tears, and joyfully met up again in Venice, where Nancy was ‘quite the rage’. After they were hired by Durazzo, together with Benucci, Mandini and Bussani, they all remained a close-knit team in Vienna, appearing together constantly at the Burgtheater. Their workload was immense: in that first season (1783) alone, they performed in no fewer than six new operas, by Salieri, Cimarosa, Sarti, Anfossi and Paisiello. Nancy made a disastrous marriage to an Englishman named John Fisher, who apparently beat her (‘it was said,’ reported Kelly, ‘that he had a very striking way of enforcing his opinion’52), and the paternalistic Joseph II, ever solicitous to his beloved singers, and extremely attached to Nancy, personally intervened to have Fisher removed from Vienna. But by this stage Nancy was pregnant with a daughter, who died soon after she was born. With all these personal crises and professional pressures, it is not surprising that, still only twenty, she had a major breakdown in 1785: but it was poignantly unfortunate that this should happen on stage, and at the opening night of an opera by her brother, Gli sposi malcontenti (a title of appallingly appropriate irony). Voiceless, she retired from the limelight for several months. When she returned, Da Ponte wrote her a celebratory poem, ‘Per la ricuperata salute d’Ophelia’, which was set to music by Salieri, Mozart and a mysterious (possibly pseudonymous) third composer, Cornetti. (Neither the poem nor its musical setting has survived.) Da Ponte and Mozart briefly considered Nancy for the role of the Countess in Figaro, for she had played Rosina so successfully in Il barbiere di Siviglia; but they transferred her to that of Susanna, to which in fact she was perfectly suited in every way, physically (she was short, and perhaps a little plump), musically and temperamentally.