Austria Salieri, Il mondo alla rovescia: Soloists, Refrain and Supplementary Refrain of the Salzburg Landestheater, Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra / Carlo Benedetto Cimento (conductor). Salzburg Landestheater, 30.4.2025. (MB)
If it typically proves tough to suppose or write about, say, Alexander Zemlinsky with out invoking his still-more-celebrated brother-in-law, how far more tough is it for Salieri — with out, effectively, you realize point out of a sure different composer up to date to him, maybe all of the extra so in Salzburg. Or maybe not, since Salieri has been doing comparatively effectively there of late. Final 12 months’s Mozartwoche supplied him quite a lot of alternatives, these I heard very effectively taken. This 12 months, the bicentenary of his demise, the Landestheater offers his 1795 dramma giocoso, Il mondo alla rovescia, on which he had begun work in 1779, solely to set it apart and return to it in 1792, renewing an preliminary collaboration together with his (and Lorenzo Da Ponte’s) buddy Caterino Mazzolà, who the earlier summer season had labored with a Salzburg composer on a revision of Metastasio’s La clemenza di Tito for Leopold II’s coronation as king of Bohemia. (Within the meantime, Mazzolà’s libretto, then entitled L’isola capricciosa, had been set by Giacomo Rust, briefly Hofkapellmeister in Salzburg, for the 1780 Venice carnival.) It’s maybe ironic that we now know Mazzolà greatest for an opera seria, when by far the higher a part of his operatic work was within the buffo style, right here taking its go away from Carlo Goldoni’s Il mondo alla reversa (one other Venice carnival piece, by Baldassare Galuppi in 1750). Some could know one other Salieri collaboration, La scuola de’ gelosi, however any alternative to acquaint oneself with additional Mazzolà in addition to additional Salieri is drastically welcome. This opera, given its fashionable premiere in 2009 within the composer’s hometown of Legnago, is now heard in a brand new model ready on the behest of conductor Carlo Benedetto Cimento by the identical musicologist and mandolinist Bernardo Ticci, now drawing on all accessible sources. Some music, together with a vocal duet with mandolin, right here performed expertly onstage by Mert E. Akyüz, thus receives its first listening to since 1795.
This isn’t the place for a synopsis, however for a piece that can be unfamiliar to most, the fundamental concept is that two shipwrecked Europeans, a Rely and Marchioness are taken captive by a feminine Normal (Generala, therefore I’ve saved Italian within the forged checklist) and the island society over which she guidelines, one by which typical gender roles have been reversed, in order that males do the housekeeping, girls do the soldiering, and so forth, in order that the Rely involves get pleasure from being fought over by two girls, the Generala and a youthful Colonella, whom he favours and with whom in the end he’ll elect to remain on the island. In a way, the thought is easy, however its ramifications are usually not, a dichotomy effectively realised in Alexandra Liedtke’s staging, delivered to life in wonderful, typically excellent performances from a superb forged and the Mozarteum Orchestra, galvanised by Carlo Benedetto Cimento, for whom this resurrection has clearly been a labour of affection.
Projection of some phrases and pictorial scenes units the scene, but it’s nonetheless a shock to see males in joyful if oppressed domesticity when the curtain rises, clad in Barbie (Ken) pink, cleansing gear at hand, quickly lorded (ladied) over by army girls who interact within the crudest of seduction — although a query instantly posed by the shadow projection of its end result is how consonant that specific act could be with the island’s ‘pure order’ of issues. Likely it may be and for some in a twenty-first century can be, however the query hints at an incapacity of any of us to flee sure points of gender roles, whether or not or not we want to take action.
The number of means – motion, designs, thought bubble interventions, and so forth. – with which factors are made may sound didactic on the web page, but however one or two sobering exceptions, as an illustration a reminder of the gender pay hole at present amongst musicians, the final tone is comedic, even comical. If one doesn’t get one reference, say to Barbie, one will most likely accomplish that one other, say to The Magic Flute or to Botticelli’s Beginning of Venus, alluding to the Rely’s arrival on land in addition to gender-reversal, as he sits to be painted. And lest you suppose this all sounds too binary, the painter and dressmaker Girasole are evidently extra inquisitive about each other. (Within the programme, we study that, ‘in accordance with Salieri’, presumably Mazzolà too, the latter will find yourself partnering the Generala’s adjutant, however it counsels us to search out out the which means of ‘lavender marriage’.) So the manufacturing evenly but firmly develops the drama from its authentic state, effectively conscious of the variations in outlook between societies 230 years aside, but in addition of what has not modified. I used to be somewhat shocked to see the Generala’s grotesquerie – the joke being she is an older girl, sung en travestie by a basso buffo – go unquestioned, however maybe that can be the purpose. Now we have not moved on as a lot as we expect, and we nonetheless discover the premise largely absurd. The manufacturing’s openness to totally different standpoints is a energy and arguably a crucial one.
Intention is at all times a fraught concern, whether or not in efficiency or ‘the music itself’ (‘TMI’), a once-fashionable problematising time period in musicology (feminist critiques included), however from which we now have principally moved on. Whether or not Cimento ‘meant’ to deliver to the fore issues I believed and heard I can not presumably know with out asking him, however I can definitely say that a lot did come to thoughts, dramatically and conceptually. Above all, he drew excellent, dedicated taking part in from the orchestra, big-boned and delicate, characterful and situational, totally conscious of construction, type, dramatic momentum, and their interplay.
No, Salieri doesn’t have the reward of musical characterisation {that a} sure ‘another person’ does, however nor does Haydn; even Gluck’s reward right here is distinctly restricted as compared. Only a few composers from any interval of musical historical past do, if certainly that’s what they’re making an attempt (which we should always under no circumstances take as a right). I discovered significantly fascinating the best way vocal writing and quantity type extra typically tailored or didn’t in accordance with gender reversal. Was this parody? And if that’s the case, whose parody was it anyway? How a lot was taking part in with expectation, otherwise from Così fan tutte, but one whose necessities for musical studying didn’t, amongst the extra knockabout materials, essentially appear much less. Furthermore, the wind and particularly brass writing, typically related, clearly sufficient, with militarism set me to suppose how a lot may this have been (re-)conceived, or at the least acquired, as an opera in wartime, coming about two years earlier than Haydn’s Missa in tempore belli. Certainly, in broader conception, Haydn’s Goldoni opera Il mondo della luna, written solely two years earlier than Salieri’s preliminary compositional work, typically got here to thoughts dramatically — and maybe even musically.
Particular person performances had been uniformly wonderful. Daniele Macciantelli clearly had a ball as La Generala, by no means placing a stage or vocal foot incorrect while doing so. In case you wished to know the way soprano coloratura – and far else – could be used to convey poisonous masculinity/femininity, Hazel McBain was your particular person as La Colonnella. George Humphreys managed the competing calls for – attract, crafty, and resolve – in addition to, effectively, any girl might need performed. In a strikingly totally different position from Lucio Silla (not JC Bach’s), by which I noticed him final 12 months (assessment right here), our Amaranto Luke Sinclair confirmed that comedy, correctly understood and offered, is a lot greater than mere amusement — while providing that too. In a ‘smaller’ position that nonetheless appeared significantly higher, Alexander Hüttner did likewise as Girasole. Nicole Lubinger’s Marchesa’s journey to higher feminist self-knowledge was finely traced. Because the Generala’s adjutant, Katie Coventry equally mixed hanging stage presence and each musical advantage, as she had as Cecilio in that Lucio Silla. Yevheniy Kapitula because the Admiral and Michael Schober’s Gran Colombo rounded off the forged in ‘smaller’ roles that but contributed to a efficiency that was a lot greater than the sum of its components.
Total, then, the overt emphasis was comedic, though creditably to not the extent one couldn’t additionally contemplate what else might need been performed, at all times allowing for that nobody staging or efficiency is prone to cowl all bases. Dramas price performing are normally extra open, if generally to the discomfort of their creators, than any single method will permit. Scenically, what I missed was a stronger sense of that wartime context. That’s not a criticism however somewhat an commentary regarding what additional layering could be added — and likely reflecting my very own historic (and up to date) preoccupations. Austrian defeats of the earlier 12 months 1794 (Fleurus and Aldenhoven) would likely have knowledgeable the primary crucial responses of many to an opera premiered in January 1795. And there could also be cause to contemplate a gendered component there too. Little greater than three years earlier, through the Bohemian coronation festivities for Emperor Francis II’s father and predecessor, Leopold II, La clemenza di Tito acquired star theatrical billing, its premiere the night of the coronation itself. That, nonetheless, was as first amongst equals in a programme that additionally included August Kotzebue’s topical, one-act comedy Der weibliche Jacobiner-Membership, pitting the Parisian Madem (sic) Duport, radicalised by revolution, towards her traditionalist husband.
There’s a case to be made that bourgeois revolutionaries strengthened gender binaries and energy relations; definitely with hindsight that appears to have been the case. But it surely was not essentially how issues appeared on the time. Comedy was typically a ‘protected’ manner of expressing and exaggerating fears of social upheaval. Revolution and the revolutionary wars, which had been how the previous most instantly manifested itself on this a part of Europe, may also threaten one other number of the ‘world turned the wrong way up’, or at the least be feared to take action. Music may – and did – deepen and query such assumptions and certainly their questioning too.
Mark Berry
Manufacturing:
Director – Alexandra Liedtke
Set designs – Philip Rubner
Costumes – Johanna Lakner
Lighting – Sebastian Schubert
Dramaturgy – Anna N.M. Lea
Refrain director – Mario El Fakih
Forged:
La Generala – Daniele Macciantelli
La Colonnella – Hazel McBain
L’ajuntata maggiora – Katie Coventry
Marchesa – Nicole Lubinger
Amaranto – Luke Sinclair
Il Conte – George Humphreys
Admiral – Yevheniy Kapitula
Il gran Colombo – Michael Schober
Girasole – Alexander Hüttner
