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 troublesome to suppose or write about, say, Alexander Zemlinsky with out invoking his still-more-celebrated brother-in-law, how far more troublesome is it for Salieri — with out, properly, you already know point out of a sure different composer modern to him, maybe all of the extra so in Salzburg. Or maybe not, since Salieri has been doing comparatively properly there of late. Final yr’s Mozartwoche provided him quite a few alternatives, these I heard very properly taken. This yr, the bicentenary of his demise, the Landestheater provides 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 along with his (and Lorenzo Da Ponte’s) good friend Caterino Mazzolà, who the earlier summer time 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 finest for an opera seria, when by far the larger a part of his operatic work was within the buffo style, right here taking its depart from Carlo Goldoni’s Il mondo alla reversa (one other Venice carnival piece, by Baldassare Galuppi in 1750). Some might know one other Salieri collaboration, La scuola de’ gelosi, however any alternative to acquaint oneself with additional Mazzolà in addition to additional Salieri is vastly 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 out there 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 will probably be unfamiliar to most, the essential concept is that two shipwrecked Europeans, a Rely and Marchioness are taken captive by a feminine Normal (Generala, therefore I’ve stored Italian within the forged checklist) and the island society over which she guidelines, one during which traditional gender roles have been reversed, in order that males do the home tasks, girls do the soldiering, and so forth, in order that the Rely involves take pleasure in being fought over by two girls, the Generala and a youthful Colonella, whom he favours and with whom finally he’ll elect to remain on the island. In a way, the concept is straightforward, however its ramifications aren’t, a dichotomy properly realised in Alexandra Liedtke’s staging, delivered to life in wonderful, typically excellent performances from a advantageous 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 have interaction within the crudest of seduction — although a query instantly posed by the shadow projection of its consequence is how consonant that specific act may be with the island’s ‘pure order’ of issues. Likely it may be and for some in a twenty-first century will probably be, however the query hints at an incapability 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 many others. – with which factors are made may sound didactic on the web page, but however one or two sobering exceptions, as an example a reminder of the gender pay hole at present amongst musicians, the overall 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 Start 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 interested by each other. (Within the programme, we be taught that, ‘in accordance with Salieri’, presumably Mazzolà too, the latter will find yourself partnering the Generala’s adjutant, but it surely counsels us to seek out out the that means of ‘lavender marriage’.) So the manufacturing flippantly but firmly develops the drama from its unique state, properly conscious of the variations in outlook between societies 230 years aside, but in addition of what has not modified. I used to be a bit stunned to see the Generala’s grotesquerie – the joke being she is an older lady, sung en travestie by a basso buffo – go unquestioned, however maybe that can be the purpose. We have now not moved on as a lot as we expect, and we nonetheless discover the premise largely absurd. The manufacturing’s openness to completely different standpoints is a energy and arguably a needed one.
Intention is all the time a fraught subject, 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 carry to the fore issues I believed and heard I can’t 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 enjoying from the orchestra, big-boned and delicate, characterful and situational, absolutely 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 not at all take without any consideration). I discovered significantly fascinating the way in which vocal writing and quantity type extra typically tailored or didn’t in accordance with gender reversal. Was this parody? And in that case, whose parody was it anyway? How a lot was enjoying with expectation, another way 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 very least obtained, 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 even perhaps musically.
Particular person performances have been uniformly wonderful. Daniele Macciantelli clearly had a ball as La Generala, by no means placing a stage or vocal foot unsuitable while doing so. In the event you wished to know the way soprano coloratura – and far else – may 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, properly, any lady may need finished. In a strikingly completely different function from Lucio Silla (not JC Bach’s), during which I noticed him final yr (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’ function that nonetheless appeared significantly larger, Alexander Hüttner did likewise as Girasole. Nicole Lubinger’s Marchesa’s journey to larger feminist self-knowledge was finely traced. Because the Generala’s adjutant, Katie Coventry equally mixed putting 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 take into account what else may need been finished, all the time making an allowance 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 quite an remark regarding what additional layering may be added — and probably reflecting my very own historic (and modern) preoccupations. Austrian defeats of the earlier yr 1794 (Fleurus and Aldenhoven) would probably have knowledgeable the primary vital responses of many to an opera premiered in January 1795. And there could also be motive to contemplate a gendered ingredient 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 obtained star theatrical billing, its premiere the night of the coronation itself. That, nevertheless, 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. However it was not essentially how issues appeared on the time. Comedy was typically a ‘protected’ method of expressing and exaggerating fears of social upheaval. Revolution and the revolutionary wars, which have 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 very least be feared to take action. Music might – 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
