The Cimarosa Affair

By Simone Perugini

The Cimarosa Affair is a collection of essays written by Simone Perugini and translated by Elizabeth Thomson. With his latest studies, Simone Perugini sheds new light on the life of the Italian composer, Domenico Cimarosa, one of the greatest exponents of the Neapolitan School in the second half of the 18th century. Using contemporary documentary sources discovered recently in various state archives in Italy, and analysing the scores and the librettos of Cimarosa’s operas, Simone Perugini retraces aspects of Cimarosa’s personal and professional life which were either unknown, or incorrectly reported, before this detailed study.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Babelcube Inc.
• Release date: Jul 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781547508112

Book preview

Language

CONTENTS

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Adaptations and manipulations in eighteenth century music theatre:

The case of l’impresario in angustie by Domenico Cimarosa and the Viennese adaptation of 1793

Historical introduction

Sources

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Secret marriages (almost): the Cimarosa family - Domenico, Cecilia, Gaetana, two Costanze, Paolo and Raffaele.

Appendix

Per far le cose in fretta – the case of "La vanità delusa" by Domenico Cimarosa - with Goldoni, Lorenzi, assistants and impresarios

The libretto, the score, self-borrowing, and re-workings

One dramma serio, two drammi giocosi and a contract - Domenico Cimarosa and his triumphs in Venice in 1782

ADAPTATIONS AND MANIPULATIONS IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MUSIC THEATRE:

THE CASE OF L’IMPRESARIO IN ANGUSTIE BY DOMENICO CIMAROSA AND THE VIENNESE ADAPTATION OF 1793

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

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In 1786, the year of the first performance at the Teatro Nuovo in Naples of L’impresario in angustie based on the libretto by Giuseppe Maria Diodati, Domenico Cimarosa was at the height of his fame in Italy. Glorying in the great triumphs of operas like Giannina e Bernardone (1780), Il mercato di Malmantile (1784) and L’Olimpiade (1783), Cimarosa was now but a step away from international acclamation. In fact, in 1787, he left for the Russian court of Catherine II to replace Giuseppe Sarti as court composer. However, in Russia, he would never fully succeed in pleasing the tsarina, and several years of mostly adapting to Russian tastes the old operas he had composed in Italy, and writing music for special occasions, he was compelled to return to Italy. During his stay in Russia, Cimarosa also threw himself into composing new works for the theatre, albeit few in number, among which two serious operas stand out, La vergine del sole and Cleopatra.

Before leaving for St. Petersburg, Cimarosa composed a one-act farsetta per musica for the 1786 Carnival season at the Teatro Nuovo: L’impresario in angustie.

In the second half of the Eighteenth century, the term farsa or farsetta in the musical culture of Naples defined a series of one-act operas, mostly comic, which over time also embraced new sentimental themes of French origins. Farse were performed at the end of theatrical soirées as the third act of more structured and extended comic operas in two acts. For almost the entire first half of the century, in fact, comic operas were canonically divided into three acts. The final act was short, and generally consisted of no more than four musical passages, amongst which it was compulsory to include a duet between the two young lovers who were always featured in the librettos of the time, emphasising the fact that the origins of the musical work had its roots in performamces staged by Commedia dell’Arte theatre companies. Over the years, the third act became increasingly shorter, until it finally died away. From the end of the 1770’s, operas in two acts were composed more and more frequently, and, to bring the evening to a finale, it became preferable to include as the third act, a new opera, performed by the same singers, interpreting different characters in different plots.

L’impresario in angustie was composed as the third act for the second revival of Il credulo instead of the farsa La baronessa stramba, which Cimarosa composed for the premiere. The new farsetta per musica was so successful that, as had happened with Pergolesi’s La serva padrona, it began a life of its own, independently of Il credulo, and triumphed in the most important theatres in Europe, while Il credulo, on the other hand, was soon forgotten.

The libretto printed for the premiere of the opera provides information on the names of the singers in the opera. They include the soprano Santoro who interpreted the role of Fiordispina, the soprano Fiorentini who interpreted Merlina, the mezzosoprano Mattei in the role of Doralba, the tenor Bruschi as Gelindo, the buffo tenor Blasio in the role of Crisobolo, and, finally the basso Fontana interpreted the role of Strabinio.

Between 1786 and 1813, the opera was staged in theatres in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Esterháza (in a revised version directed by Haydn), Lisbon, Warsaw, Vienna, Dresden, Copenhagen, and Saint Petersburg, to mention only the most important cities. The libretto was translated into Swedish, Danish, Polish, Russian, French, German and English.

With the advent of Rossini and his sweeping successes, the opera, like all Cimarosa’s works apart from Il matrimonio segreto, vanished from the theatres and reappeared, shyly, in Italy, in a production at the Teatro Regio in Turin in 1933, in the revised version of Alceo Toni.

There is no certain information on the identity of the librettist of L’impresario in angustie. Giuseppe Maria Diodati was one of the most creative librettists during the final phase of the Neapolitan School. He was almost certainly a kind of in-house librettist at the Teatro Nuovo in Naples because he worked with all the most important composers of the time when they were staging their own operas in the theatre. He wrote many librettos, both serious and comic, not only for Cimarosa, but also for Paisiello, Gazzaniga, Guglielmi, and Tritto. The archives of the Teatro Nuovo were destroyed during the Second World War, so very few documents relating to his works survive; only a few are still preserved in the State Archives of Naples, none of which provides evidence of Diodati’s professional activities; he is still, today, a legendary figure of Neapolitan music theatre to whom most composers of the time owed a great part of their success. L’impresario in angustie, as stated earlier, met with immediate international success: even today, countless European libraries preserve printed copies of the libretto and manuscript scores relating to the opera. What one notices immediately is that every manuscript score and libretto provides evidence of a different version of the work which, during its performance history, was reworked and adapted in accordance with the requirements of both the public and the singers, as was normal practice at the time.

The countless versions of L’impresario in angustie, which also include excellent reworkings (like the one for the 1790 performance in the Esterházy theatre, directed by Haydn who, for the occasion, composed a new aria for the Merlina character, and the one relating to the 1791 staging in Weimar written by Goethe who translated the libretto into German and wrote the text for two new arias to add to the opera), demonstrate on the one hand how enormously successful the opera was, and, on the other, how highly adaptable Cimarosa was as a dramaturg. From the outset, the libretto and the score provided an opera that answered perfectly to the production requirements of the theatres of the time.

After the first production in 1787, which Cimarosa attended, it appears that the aspects on which Italian theatres concentrated was the internationalisation of the libretto. As was normal practice in Neapolitan theatres of the time, Diodati wrote the text mostly in Neapolitan dialect, which was incomprehensible outside the Bourbon Kingdom of Naples. All later revivals of the opera in other Italian cities resorted to translations of the original libretto into Tuscan, often carried out by unknown translators and adapters. The extant printed librettos for those reworkings, however, show Giuseppe Maria Diodati as the only author of the text, and make no reference to the adapter. Bearing in mind that he would also have been committed to writing new librettos for the Teatro Nuovo, it is impossible that Diodati could have been present, a few months later, in the numerous theatres scattered along the Italian peninsula.

When the opera crossed the Italian borders, theatres had to face even greater problems not just concerning the Italianisation of the libretto and the adaptation of the score, which, in its original version, was thought to be out of keeping with the tastes of new audiences.

The countless revivals of the opera that took place in European theatres, however, appear to be based on two main versions whose structure was preserved: the original 1787 version, and the Viennese version of 1793 – one quite different from the other.

From 1791 to 1793, Cimarosa was the court composer of Vienna, where he replaced Salieri. He was appointed by Peter Leopold of Habsburg Lorraine who had met Cimarosa many years earlier at the premier in 1784 of La vanità delusa ossia Il mercato di Malmantile while he was Grand Duke of Tuscany. Cimarosa composed it for the Teatro alla Pergola, and based it on an adaptation of an old libretto by Carlo Goldoni. The composer wrote his masterpiece, Il matrimonio segreto, and the one-act opera, Amor rende sagace, for the Viennese court, and they were performed at the Burgtheater in Vienna in 1792 and 1793 respectively. However, during his sojourn in Vienna, Cimarosa also oversaw the adaptation of some of his older works to the refined and in some ways more demanding tastes of the Habsburg court, compared with Naples.

L’impresario in angustie is one of these adaptations; it was performed for the first time at the Burgtheater on 24 October 1793, and had dozens of re-runs after that date.

The Viennese version includes many passages that are not included in the 1786 Neapolitan version. They were probably not composed by Cimarosa because, when the opera was performed, he had already returned to Naples. His absence from the Habsburg court is confirmed by the libretto printed for the first performance of the opera at the Burgtheater. On the third page, under the names of the characters in the opera, one can read, La Musica è del Sig.re Domenico Cimarosa, all’attual servizio di S.M. il Re delle due Sicilie. The composer, therefore, had already returned to the Kingdom of Naples