Second-String Rossini

Contributing Reporter: Giuseppe Maria Foppa (Venezia)

What and Why…

Barber of Seville, Cenerentola, Semiramide, William Tell, and maybe Comte Ory, Donna del Lago, Armida, and Thieving Magpie.  That makes eight fairly well-known Rossini operas, but what was he doing in his spare time?  “They” count 39 or 40 from this guy, over 17 years, so what are the rest like?

Here’s some information about several of the others, which you can find with some difficulty on video with English, and sometimes on a stage.  Too bad, because a lot of the Second-String Rossini pieces are pretty good!

Demetrio e Polibio, Rossini’s Opera #1

This was young Giaochino’s first shot at a full opera, and he was just a kid.  Probably, this is better than I could have done at his age, which was 14.

It’s great!  Fully-fledged story, cool music, nicely produced in about 2010, at the Rossini Festival in Pesaro.

The Festival set up the stage with a lot of shipping trunks – like maybe the normal props and sets are in there, but they didn’t open them up in time.

Next oddity, which I think is gripping, is that they appear to have two different casts running at the same time.  Two guys playing Demetrio, two for Polibio, and so on.  I am pretty sure that only one of each pair was singing, but that was not clear at first.  (I thought they had just found a way to give more singers an opportunity.) 

The dual casting makes it easy to change scenes or settings – you just have the stand-ins suddenly show up on the other side of the stage, and dive into that part of the story, even before you clean up from what the same people were doing.

Fire is a big deal in this production, and I don’t believe that was something the teenage Rossini, or the librettist lady, wrote into it.  Sometimes, firemen appear on stage, in their heavy gear, even though they have no lines. 

But the most jarring aspect is that quite often, one of the singing characters will reach out with one arm, open their palm, and a little flame will be there right on their hand.  After they finish their spiel, they close their hand, which puts out the fire – no burns I guess -- and they go on with the story.  (I have been informed that this trick was used with quite a lot more impact by Laurel and Hardy, 1937.) 

Anyway, the story line has nothing to do with fire, as I see it, so that was just something the director threw in there for an interesting effect.

A word for “just something the director threw in there for an interesting effect”, in opera lingo, is “stranezza”.

I watched it, but it was a long time before Rossini himself saw it.  Turns out, a woman named Vincenzina Mombelli wrote out the libretto, and her husband Domenico paid teenaged Rossini to whip up some music.  Then, Domenico and the couple’s two daughters staged this thing for some friends of the family.

By the time someone put this on a public stage, Rossini had offered up five additional operas, no thanks to the Mombellis.  But Domenico and the girls were still hanging on, so they were right there for the Rome intro, four years after the initial little family living-room show.

They played it several times in Italy over 20 years, and that was about it.  Rossini’s #1 opera didn’t catch on.  The Rossini Festival did it again in 2019, and that’s all we can find.  But I would see it again, for fun.

 

Il Viaggio a Reims, Rossini’s Opera #36

And here we have Rossini, well into his successful career, showing off a bit.  What happened was, France in 1825 was setting up to crown their King Charles X, so Rossini cobbled together a whole 3-act opera to be performed four times for the celebration.  There were no plans after that – just, hey Gioachino, how ‘bout a top-quality grand opera for this weekend, real quick?

The Rossini Opera Festival puts it on regularly these days, and it is easy to find on OperaVision for free.  Two versions for 2023, in fact, because these are students, so they split the group in two (Cast A and Cast B) and made them both ramp up the exact same production.

It’s not a voyage to Reims – it’s a huge number of people at a resort hotel getting ready for the trip.  Viaggio is supposed to be very difficult and “one of Rossini's finest compositions”, and there was an outstanding soprano in the one I saw, and great harp work, for sure.  

But I had some trouble staying with it, and difficulty focusing on the music.   They really did spend a lot of time standing around preparing for their viaggio, without much success, and for me, the first time through required a lot of trying to figure out who all these people were, and what they were doing there.

An engaging bit – in the video I saw -- was when the soprano does her amazing solo with the harp in Act 1, she sang from the back, standing in the “royal box”, centered behind the audience.

The real stranezza here was at the end of Act II, where about half the very large cast changed clothes onstage, while singing.  Dresses, pants, shirts, shoes, coats, everything.  They had some screens up in front of the women, so good.  Quite a trick, and good work, Cast A and Cast B.  All dressed up now, but still not really heading toward Reims.

Ultimately, most of the French did not like Charles X, and when they rioted in Paris 6 years later, Charlie was packed off to Gorizia, where he died.   So far, no operas written about that, although it suggests a lively story line, I think.

 

Il Signor Bruschino, Rossini’s Opera #9

You know, this one has a reputation for being so damned funny, that I was really looking forward to it, but it wasn’t that great.  It’s a fairly long one-act, and the one I saw was handled more like a baroque Vivaldi Il Giustino thing. 

Lots of brightly colored sets and furniture, weird wigs and costumes, nonstandard ways of moving around the stage (yeah, a Segway), people hiding in plain sight behind the sofa, over-acting, all that.  Like, the verbal humor no longer has the grip it once did, so they flame it up with wacky stuff.

I don’t recall any outstanding music, so maybe I missed it because of the over-the-top presentation.  Yammering harpsichord – still 10 years to go before they bulldozed that thing from the opera houses.

This isn’t the only opera of the era that made its way based on mistaken identity of the guy or the gal.  Fine, but you have to believe that the father just isn’t that clear on who his son is.  Makes it tough for the audience, too – how are we supposed to know which one the real Bruschino is?

About the same time, young Rossini also put out four other one-act “farcical operas”, all commissioned by the guy who ran the San Moisè Theater in Venice:

·       La Cambiale di Matrimonio (Rossini’s #2),

·       L'Inganno Felice (#4),

·       La Scala di Seta (#6), and

·       L'Occasione fa il Ladro (#8). 

I haven’t seen L’Occasione, but the others have a lot in common with Bruschino.  Mixups about who is in love with whom, people in disguise, and so on.  Not objectionable, but not very memorable -- just lightweight fun.  Listening, though, it sounds like Rossini is starting to marshal his skill with lively melodies, complicated duets, and rapid-fire enunciation with everyone singing at once.

On the side, we learned from La Scala di Seta that this means “the ladder of silk” in English.  The La Scala opera house in Milan was built on the site of an old church, called La Scala, a reference to a ladder to heaven.

 

L'Equivoco Stravagante, Rossini’s Opera #3

He did better with the 2-act shows.  Equivoco is longer and more complicated, and even though it has a goofy story, for about half the running time it’s hitting you with fast and complicated duets and more (a quintet!), the hard-charging music unique to Rossini.

Again, you have a tale about a family screw-up – the father picks a rich guy, a slick dude with slick hair, for his daughter, but the girl’s already locked on to somebody else, poorer and not so self-confident.  Evidently a situation that was extraordinarily commonplace in the early 1800’s.

The way the plain fellow gets rid of the “rival” is really clever, though.  He convinces the wealthy, groovy guy that the lady is actually a man, and the reason she or he sings at such a high pitch is that they are a castrato, something they did back then, to track a kid for a career as a counter-tenor opera singer. 

Plus, he or she is wanted by the army for desertion.  OK then.  This part of the story, as far as I could tell, was never resolved.  A lot of army guys showed up with guns or whatever, and then they went away.

(But even that was too much for the authorities in Bologna, where it opened; the show was shut down by the cops after three performances.  In Bologna, no talking about desertion!)

The rich guy falls for it, and drops back.  I don’t think the army desertion rap was the thing he was worried about, though.

In the particular production I saw, they end it all up with the rich slick guy happily giving up on the lady, and hanging instead with a couple of boyfriends.  Catchy.

So, the unusual plotline is a big deal, but really, this is one place where you can listen to Rossini really tuning up the music, for the rest of his remarkable career.   He was 19 at this point.

 

La Gazzetta, Rossini’s Opera #18

Could not watch this thing.  What’s going on here, Gio?  Ya put together Barber of Seville (#17), and then this?  Look here, if you’re tired after the Barber circus, just take a little vacation in Turkey or Algiers. 

Drop the whole crazy mess, except the overture, and use that for the start of Cenerentola (#20).  He did.  It’s a killer overture.

It was said that “this opera satirizes the influence of newspapers on people's lives.”   No, it doesn’t.  It’s just a father, one more time, who wants the best guy for his daughter, so here he puts a “personal ad” in the paper, and then everyone becomes confused about which character is which, who is married to whom, and so on.

This is not still funny after 200 years, and anyway you would have to take notes and work with a stack of photos to know which person is doing what.  Don Pomponio, Lisetta, Fillipo, Alberto, Doralice, Anselmo – and maybe the seven dwarfs, I don’t know.

The good part is that here you have an appearance of Average Charles Workman, a tenor who was seen in R. Strauss’ Boring Arabella, and more interestingly in a production of Rossini’s Sad Tancredi (#10).  Workman’s fine, but he looks a bit like me, so I don’t think that is distinctive enough to rocket him to fame and fortune in the world of opera.  He’s no Fancy Pavarotti, is all I’m saying.

Plus, he should change his name for the stage, no?  His name is rather workmanlike, while Alagna and Flórez can bank on the panache and the pizazz.  Maybe promote himself as “Placido Domingo” or something like that.

An hour in, the huge nutty cast is all running around berserk on the stage, holding signs and pictures and upside-down newspapers, and then you have someone trying to interact with the orchestra conductor – credit here for a bit of stranezza –  then there’s a weak joke, and the character apologizes by clarifying to the audience, “But it is a comic opera!”  Not to me.  Enough. 

So we won’t know for sure how it all ends, but since we know the five wacky one-acts from Venice, it is extremely easy to guess.

 

Il Turco in Italia, Rossini’s Opera #13

Crazy, crazy 2½ hours of solid and intense Rossini music here.  The story line is bizarre, but I am pretty sure I could just listen to this one on the radio, like the professionals, and enjoy it without knowing who is goofing on whom up on the stage.

Here you get powerhouse arias, energetic choruses, multi-voice / multi melody complexities, packed side by side from beginning to end.  You start by listening to the astonishing overture, and if you aren’t hooked, just go see Bruschino or something.  Because this overture is right up there with the one for Barber, the one for Gazza Ladra (#21), and the one for William Tell (#40).  Woof – this is wild.

YouTube the one from the Aix Festival, with Peretyatco, Brownlee, and Corbelli.  Total knockout production; stranezza here is designed to beat Viaggio a Reims with even better on-stage disrobing.  So in Turco, the whole male chorus strips down and then they all dress up in drag, while singing.  Hard to beat that, I would say.

So what’s the problem?  The problem is, Rossini and his wingman Felice Romani wrote in no fewer than two completely superfluous roles – and too bad, but one of them is played here by Lawrence Brownlee, for no apparent reason.   Cannot tell why we have Narciso (Brownlee) and a guy called Albazar in this show.

Narciso spends most of his time lying on the floor.  I guess he is an admirer of the stunning Olga Peretyatko (as I am), so he sort of bashfully stays out of the line of sight.  He sings fine, but you don’t need Brownlee for this meager role – Vara could do it handily.

Albazar does nothing notable until, late in the show, they have him charge onto the stage with his own top hat and cane routine, bringing everything else to a halt.  A different member of the cast gestures objections to the orchestra conductor, who replies with his hands that he cannot help it, he is merely following the score.

Yet another odd choice is that Turco features a character who is himself writing a play.  This guy starts out alone on the stage, typing at his desk, and kind of tries to call the shots throughout, while the Turco visits Italia.  In this production, the role adds interest and appealing complexity, where in others, the “play within a play” thing would just be abrasive.  Thumbs up to Romani and Aix for this one.

In this case, unlike the buffa one-acts, these shenanigans are funny.  I think it is the extreme complexity of the story and the music that drive me to accept the horseplay, whereas with Bruschino, there’s just nothing else there to save it.

This is a show which illustrates how much it matters, exactly what the producers and directors decide to put on the stage.   Because there’s a 2002 Turco from the Zurich Opera which stood for years as the Rossini that I could not bear to watch.  Dull, inactive, poorly designed, silly.  Almost all the characters are superfluous.  Too bad for Cecelia Bartoli, otherwise adorable.

So who knows?  Maybe the Aix Festival will someday mount an endearing La Gazzetta, with Elina Garanča and Kate Lindsey, and I’ll change my mind about that one, too.

 

L’Italiana in Algiers, Rossini’s Opera #11

Starting with another darned good overture, L’Italiana pulls it all together, and has been my favorite Rossini since I first saw it.  Granted, the details of the story are absurd, but it nevertheless features a lengthy and complicated plot, with Rossini and his writer Angelo Anelli pumping ridiculous humor into every scene.

This one will make you happy no matter which production you see, because the tale and the music are almost constantly jumpy and energetic.  The characters themselves appear to know at every moment that this whole thing is funny.  As in Cenerentola, you see spots where the plot goes totally off the rails, everyone onstage realizes this, and they all sing maniacally about how they cannot understand what is going to happen next.

(Love this irony.  It’s stage show.  Where on earth could people be more absolutely sure about what will happen next?)

Finally, it all winds up in a ridiculous way, and Rossini draws out a kind-hearted moral lesson so we all feel good, especially about Italian women (though not so pleased with Algerian men).

Also, there are no unneeded characters as in Turco.

The production available at the NY Met website actually has Marilyn Horne as the visiting Italiana, and it is 2½ hours of big fun.  (PS. This is the only one of Rossini’s second-string operas to make it to the Met Opera video-on-demand catalog, so maybe it should be in Rossini’s Starting Squad after all.)

A recent production at the Salzburg Festival has no less than Cecelia Bartoli along with Alessandro Corbelli -- both, apparently, skilled comedians.  The boyfriend here is the mystery man from Uruguay, namely Edgardo Rocha.  Also, here’s a rare success in moving the timeframe to the present – good job, Salzburg.

Then on YouTube you can find one done in 2002 in Philadelphia (North America’s most stunning opera house) with the boyfriend sung by none other than Juan Diego Flórez, still in his 20s. Looks like a kid!

This is weird: Angelo Anelli wrote up this opera for a guy named Luigi Mosca five years earlier, and that L’Italiana opened at La Scala.  Good enough!  So how did Rossini get to compose music for a different one, with Anelli just making some changes for him?  I don’t know.  Luigi Mosca certainly backed off and disappeared.

One little beef here, Gioachino, and then I’ll let you go.  In the first act of L’Italiana, there’s a gripping, magical song they sing while they haul all the plunder off the shipwreck. The orchestra is going wild, the chorus plunderers hop over it with their delighted and confident song about plundering, and some audience members have that incredible tune stuck in their head for the rest of the week.  Unfortunately, the song lasts exactly 50 seconds.  Oh no!  Don’t stop there!  Make them go get some more stuff from the ship, or something!

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