There is nothing outrageous here: the audience enjoyed de Filippo’s devices, which were often effective, and Rossini’s musical magic survived. That I personally would have preferred a staging more sensitive to the elegant and sentimental elements characteristic of this work is not an opinion that need be held by others. Were there not room for considerable interpretive latitude, performing Italian opera would be a dreary business. No, what outraged me about this production was a musical decision, taken with what the Italians would call leggerezza (insouciance), that contradicted much of what the Rossini Opera Festival had stood for over its twenty-year history. I had been engaged to prepare suggestions for variations and cadenzas for this production. When I arrived for the piano dress rehearsal, a week before the scheduled premiere, I discovered on the piano a concert aria Rossini had prepared for a Venetian patron, Filippo Grimani, probably in 1813, “Alle voci della gloria.” I knew the piece well, having prepared this very edition for Samuel Ramey to include in a CD of Rossini arias issued by Teldec in 1992.21 But what was “Alle voci della gloria” doing in a rehearsal for La scala di seta?
Apparently it had been decided to add it for Blansac, who doesn’t otherwise have a solo aria. While in the nineteenth century operatic scores were sometimes manipulated in performance, the work of the Fondazione Rossini and the Rossini Festival had been dedicated, in principle, to presenting Rossini’s operas as he conceived them, complete and intact. When he himself created multiple versions or introduced alternative arias, these were fair game, but other interpolations had been avoided. That rigor helped define the festival for two decades. I would not cry scandal if a theater in Reggio Emilia or Paris introduced an interpolation. An argument could even be made that the Rossini Festival should experiment with the whole problem of the arias early nineteenth-century singers carried around with them (figuratively—and sometimes literally—in their “trunks,” hencearie di baule) to insert in an opera when they felt their parts were too small or the original music wasn’t flashy enough. But that was a decision to take only after a careful assessment of its implications.22
In addition to the principle, there is the piece. “Alle voci della gloria” is an elaborate scena and aria written to a text from an opera seria, with a large orchestra, employing trumpets, trombones, and percussion, none of which appear in La scala di seta. It had been accommodated to its imposed home for Pesaro by omitting the scena and the first section of the aria. This left a truncated piece in two sections, a fragment of an aria that begins in one key and ends in another, very much contrary to Rossinian practice. The tune of the florid cabaletta, furthermore, is generic (example 1.3). It resembles many other Rossinian cabalettas, such as Rosina’s “Io sono docile” from her cavatina “Una voce poco fa” in Il barbiere di Siviglia. The addition also meant that there were now four consecutive arias, decidedly unbalancing the opera’s structure. And what was gained? An able but hardly stellar Blansac struggled through half a virtuoso piece he had no business singing, and de Filippo invented a superfluous situation in which Blansac filed through and tossed away what seemed to be snapshots of his earlier conquests. While we’re at it, why don’t we give an aria to Antonio in Le nozze di Figaro (it isn’t bad enough that Mozart gave arias to Marcellina and Basilio) or Jacquino in Fidelio or Fiorello in Il barbiere di Siviglia? Poor dears, the composers neglected them: we need to compensate for their oversight.
EXAMPLE 1.3. GIOACHINO ROSSINI, “ALLE VOCI DELLA GLORIA,” MM. 104–107.
A performance is a public statement. Since scholars working with the Fondazione Rossini could not put on a counter performance, I made a public statement of my own, calling attention to what I hoped would be a “momentary aberration” in the cultural mission of the festival. That phrase led to articles in local newspapers, comments by reviewers, interviews on local and national radio, with tempers running high. Differences of opinion are fair game, but fabrications are not. Yet representatives of the festival fraudulently claimed that Rossini himself had added this aria to La scala di seta. War was averted only by the intervention of the mayor of Pesaro, who sat us down in his office overlooking the town’s main square and told us to behave ourselves. Egos and politics are never far removed when Italian opera is performed.
THEATRICAL MAGIC IN LA CENERENTOLA
Yet sometimes it all comes together. Rossini’s 1817 retelling of the Cinderella story never disappeared from the stage. In the title role he created a perfect part for coloratura mezzos, who have never relinquished it to their soprano stepsisters. But the score in use during the first seventy years of the twentieth century was appalling (the old edition of Rigoletto was perfection by comparison), clumsily reorchestrated at the end of the nineteenth century, long after Rossini’s death, and rendered intolerably noisy with added brass and banging percussion. To its shame, Ricordi had only this horrid pastiche available; to the continuing shame of the world of Italian opera, there are still opera companies who purchase reprints of this old Ricordi score (from Kalmus) and continue to use it. What renders the situation so piquant is that these companies must therefore hire additional orchestral musicians to play inauthentic material, paying much more in labor costs than it would cost them to rent an accurate edition.
In 1969, in honor of the 1968 centenary of Rossini’s death, I published a facsimile of the autograph manuscript of La Cenerentola, together with a description of its authentic sources.23 Soon after, Alberto Zedda prepared a provisional edition of the score on the basis of those sources, and Claudio Abbado’s performances in 1973 at the Teatro alla Scala in the production of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, which still circulates thirty years later, restored the opera to its rightful position in the repertory. Finally, in 1998, the Fondazione Rossini developed this preliminary edition into an accurate critical edition.24 While there are still singers who learned their roles from older scores, the corrected readings are so obviously superior that the only objection ever raised to them is that it is difficult to unlearn old habits. When the Metropolitan Opera performed La Cenerentola for the first time ever in 1997, a performance for which I served as stylistic adviser, the opera was under the baton of James Levine (a first-rate Rossini conductor), and Cecilia Bartoli was enchanting in the title role. But the friendly and accommodating Simone Alaimo, our Don Magnifico (Cenerentola’s stepfather), couldn’t get his throat around one of the corrections. In the old score of his cavatina, Magnifico interprets the “magnificent dream” from which Cenerentola’s stepsisters have awoken him, then imitates their babbling: “col ci ci, col ci ci, col ci ci, col ci ci.” But Rossini, aware that repeating the same sounds at a rapid tempo produces a tongue twister, alternated syllables: “col ci ci, col ciù, ciù, col ci ci, col ciù, ciù.” Although the latter is much more gracious to sing and the former a mistake, Alaimo never got it quite right. His difficulties became such a joke that Levine would enter rehearsals, patented towel draped over his shoulder, to the strains of “col ci ci, col ciù ciù.”
The Metropolitan’s Cenerentola was musically excellent. We shortened the opera a bit by making cuts in the recitative by Luca Agolini and omitting two pieces by the same composer performed at the opera’s premiere: a chorus for the courtiers at the beginning of the second act and an aria for one of the stepsisters, Clorinda.25 A third Agolini composition, an aria for the Prince’s tutor, Alidoro, was replaced by Rossini’s own substitute aria, “Là del ciel.” Otherwise no cuts were made, nor were they necessary, for all the singers were experts at the style and at the art of embellishing repeated passages.
The production, though, was rather mixed. There were some fine things. The chorus, apparitions from a Magritte painting, hilariously appeared and disappeared from trapdoors and holes all over the stage. Ramon Vargas was a convincing Prince (at first disguised as his own servant), and Alessandro Corbelli showed New York his widely acclaimed interpretation of Dandini (the servant disguised as the Prince). Cecilia Bartoli was musically glorious, naive, spunky, and funny as the scullery maid, but less successf
ul as the consort of the Prince. It is not clear whether the fault lay in her or in the vision of her communicated by the director, Cesare Lievi, focusing too much on her serving-girl persona. In the first-act finale, building on a line from Dandini (“Today, since I am playing the part of the Prince, I want to eat for four”), the concluding ensemble—in which food is not mentioned—became the excuse for a prolonged and vulgar food-fight. The end of the second act wasn’t much better: Don Ramiro and Cenerentola were dressed in formal garb, like dolls on a wedding cake. Sure enough, an enormous cake soon filled the stage, atop which the lovers scrambled awkwardly. This Cenerentola had much to learn about being a Princess.
A festival and a regular opera house can make different decisions. The Luca Ronconi production of La Cenerentola at Pesaro, first performed during the summer of 1998, and repeated in 2000, included every note of the score, those by Rossini and those by Agolini (though, as at the Met, replacing Agolini’s Alidoro aria with Rossini’s). Is this a good thing? These Pesaro performances were the first in modern times to incorporate the chorus by Agolini opening act 2, in which the supercilious courtiers deride Don Magnifico and his two daughters. While the music is undistinguished, the piece provides a more distinctive opening for the act then the secco recitative usually heard. More important, Ronconi staged it well (although Ruth Ann Swenson would have objected to the cigarette smoke swirling around stage from the mimes who played courtiers). But I find myself bored by Agolini’s aria for Clorinda, which seems pretentious and long. There is a reason, however, for inserting an aria at that point in the opera: it occupies the time needed to transport us back from Don Magnifico’s house to the palace. Here the Pesaro production miscalculated. The scene change was made only after Clorinda had finished, negating the practical purpose for the aria.
Yet one could forgive this flaw, for the stage design of this Cenerentola was remarkable. The opera was produced at the sports arena transformed into an opera house (the “Palafestival”). With monumental operas, filling its large stage is no trouble, as Hugo De Ana’s imposing Semiramide demonstrated in 1992; when operas are more intimate, directors and designers must not only use the large space well but also carve out smaller playing areas for their singers. For the scene in Don Magnifico’s house, Ronconi and his designer, Margherita Palli, created an intimate space, in front of a large chimney-place. There Cenerentola sat alone by the fire, Alidoro disguised as a beggar asked for alms, and the disguised Prince met his future bride. The remainder of the set was a vast concatenation of furniture, pieces piled high, with a dizzying array of surfaces, beds, chairs, dressers, sofas. This surreal mound reflected the text of the opera: since half the impoverished Magnifico’s house has fallen down, the implicit conceit was that he ended up throwing one piece of furniture on top of another. Time and space were indeterminate, but art deco skyscrapers in the back were consonant with the arrival of the disguised Dandini and the courtiers in a black limousine from the 1930s. Gags and pratfalls were made possible by the furniture, but there were ample flat surfaces so that sentimental scenes could be played straight.
When it came time for Cenerentola to be transported to the Prince’s palace, she disappeared for a moment in the direction of the chimney, still in her rags, as Alidoro began his aria. Toward its end a resplendent Cenerentola in a flame-red gown emerged from the top of the chimney in the beak of a large stork, who transported her across the top of the stage. Vesselina Kasarova—five months pregnant—sang the title role in 1998, and some were horrified to see her carried across the stage, but it was all theatrical wizardry. Neither Kasarova nor Sonia Ganassi in 2000 personally flew across the stage: doubles made that traversal. Now stagehands appeared, in work clothes and rubber boots. Down came a row of “sky-hooks,” which they attached to pieces of the furniture, and the entire set was hoisted upward. Below it the Prince’s palace (like a piece in a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle) was revealed. The backdrop flats began to twirl in a gaudy ballet of surfaces, warm lights bathed the playing area, and suddenly we were in the luxurious palace of the Prince. Several stunning chimney-places appeared, down one of which the flame-red Cenerentola (the real one) appeared. Opera lovers often scorn productions in which the biggest applause of an evening is earned by the scenery, but this brilliant set and set change were integrated into a production in which almost every element functioned. Unfortunately, the set change happened twice more in act 2—a return to Don Magnifico’s house, then back to the palace for the final scene—and it began to seem long. Ronconi needed to adopt a twentieth-century equivalent of an old nineteenth-century practice, using recitatives and the Clorinda aria to cover these scene changes, but the movements of the massive set might have been distracting. A polite audience therefore sat quietly as the luminous scene change in act 1 lost its luster in act 2.
How much recitative should be cut in an opera? Again, there is no simple answer. Jacopo Ferretti’s libretto for La Cenerentola is brilliant (especially now that its many jokes and puns have been restored to their original form). Hearing the text declaimed well is a joy, whether the singers are native Italians or simply well schooled in Italian traditions. The Pesaro audience needed no overhead projections to guffaw throughout the evening, nor could the immediacy of their reaction ever be achieved through supertitles. Overall, I believe that supertitles have had a positive role in opera, but it cannot be denied that something has been lost in their now universal adoption in the United States: James Levine’s long resistance had a core of truth.
In Pesaro, Carlo Rizzi conducted with verve the fine orchestra of the Teatro Comunale of Bologna. While none of the singers tossed him an apple, one of Don Magnifico’s pillows did fall into the orchestra pit during a performance, and Rizzi was soon on its receiving end. But the cast was superb—professionals who understood Rossini’s music and its style, knew about appoggiaturas and ornamentation, phrased well, and did not push their sound. Kasarova was the most elegant Cinderella I have ever seen and introduced remarkable details (I will never forget her tentative and self-conscious dance steps when she begs to be taken to the ball). Juan Diego Flórez showed us why he is now unmatched among Rossini tenors (throwing off the many high cs with abandon), while Bruno Praticò was a funny, yet menacing Don Magnifico.
It is rare that opera houses (whether in the mountains or by the sea) provide us with performances in which underlying musical choices, the singers, set design, and staging all serve a composer and his art to the delight of the public. But even in a disappointing production some individual interpretation or detail can make the experience memorable. All the controversies introduced in this prologue, the triumphs, the absurdities, the battles, reflect basic and recurring themes in performing Italian opera, and they will be considered at greater length in the following chapters. To treat these issues as if history (social history, music history, textual history) were irrelevant to performance is irresponsible. It is equally irresponsible to assume that performers should simply turn to history for solutions, without recognizing that every decision made in the theater today is rooted in the world in which we live and work. The purpose of this book is to suggest how scholars and performers, working toward common goals, can bring history and practice together.
PART I
Knowing the Score
2
SETTING THE STAGE
OPERA IN ITALIAN SOCIETY
Opera was at the center of Italian culture throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.1 Every major city had more than one theater, sometimes open in different seasons or specializing in different repertories. Opera lovers in Naples could attend performances not only at the great San Carlo, home of opera seria,2 but also at the Teatro del Fondo, the Teatro Nuovo, and the Teatro dei Fiorentini. The Fiorentini and later the Nuovo featured opera buffa, frequently with comic characters like Don Bartolo in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia or Don Magnifico in La Cenerentola singing and speaking in Neapolitan dialect. In Milan, seasons at La Scala were rivaled by those at the T
eatro Carcano and the Teatro della Canobbiana, and for a few years during the 1810s the Teatro Re. Rome boasted the Teatro Valle, the Teatro Argentina, and the Teatro Apollo,3 while Venice featured a host of smaller theaters, as well as the elegant La Fenice.4 Most smaller cities or villages provided a stage for operatic performances. Some had full seasons, others a few performances during annual trade fairs held in the summer or early fall.
New operas were constantly in demand. A major operatic season would consist of three or four different operas, at least one of which would be new, introduced singly, then—if all were successful—performed in repertory. When they could find the means and appropriate younger talent, provincial theaters also tried to obtain new works. Le nozze in villa, Donizetti’s first full-length opera buffa, was written for the Teatro Vecchio of Mantua, Rossini’s L’equivoco stravagante, his second opera to be staged, for the Teatro Comunale of Bologna. As a result, there were ample opportunities for composers to ply their trade.
Complaints about the terrible conditions under which Italian composers were expected to function, the dreadful pressure and impossible deadlines, must be put into context. It is perfectly true that Il barbiere di Siviglia was composed, rehearsed, and performed in less than a month, as were L’Italiana in Algeri and La sonnambula. While Donizetti continued making corrections during rehearsals, Don Pasquale was completed within the same time frame.5 But it is also true that these are all masterpieces of the operatic stage. Verdi in 1858 complained about the years he spent in frenetic activity “in the galleys,” but he used the term “galley years” to refer not only to the 1840s, during which he composed his early operas, but also to the widely admired scores of the early 1850s, Rigoletto, Il trovatore, and La traviata.6 And not all operas were prepared and performed under such intense pressure. Rossini spent at least four months (from October 1822 through the beginning of February 1823) principally concerned with Semiramide. As late as Verdi’s Aida in the early 1870s, three months was considered ample to prepare a major work. When Bellini boasted that he wrote only one opera yearly, thereby differentiating himself from those he portrayed as his workaday contemporaries (chiefly Donizetti), he did not mean it took an entire year for him to write that opera. Bellini’s actual compositional habits were largely indistinguishable from those of Donizetti, who in a career twice as long wrote seven times as many operas. Bellini’s pronouncement, of course, had an economic subtext: since he wrote fewer operas, he expected each to command a higher fee from commissioning theaters.7
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