Il segreto di Susanna (Susanna’s Secret)

Intermezzo in one act to a libretto by Enrico Golisciani

As an Italian opera composer who was more successful in Germany than in his own country, Ermanno Wolf Ferrari was a rare phenomenon. He was born and died in Venice but he made Munich his home and most    of his operas were first staged, in German versions, in German opera houses. The duality in his professional life had its origins in his mixed family background – his mother, a pianist, was Italian, his father, a painter, was from Baden in Germany – and is reflected even in his name: Hermann Friedrich Wolf became Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari in his early twenties when he italianised his first name and, perhaps to avoid confusion with the Austrian composer Hugo Wolf, added his mother’s maiden name to his surname.

Although Wolf-Ferrari did enjoy some success in his native country in the second half of his career, only one of his first six operas to reach the stage owed its initial production to an opera house in Italy. After Cenerentola failed at La Fenice in Venice in 1900 the next five, all written between 1903 and 1913 – Le donne curiose, I quatro rusteghi, Il segreto di Susanna, I gioielli della Madonna, and L’amore medico – were first performed in Munich, Berlin or Dresden.

The reason why Italian opera houses took comparatively little interest in his work at this time could be that they were not ready for him. This is not to say that his music was too progressive for them. On the contrary: if they were looking for something in the manner of Puccini or such versimo composers as Leoncavallo and Mascagni, scores like that of Il segreto di Susanna must have seemed hopelessly old-fashioned. Wolf Ferrari was aware of that – which is why he attempted a verismo opera, Il gioielli della Madonna, in something like the style of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana. In a sense, however, that was a step back rather than forward. His natural idiom was an anticipation, by a decade or more, of the neo-classical style which, paradoxically, would be the avant-garde trend in Western music from, say, Stravinsky’s Pulcinella in 1920 to his Rake’s Progress thirty years later. By 1925, when Gli amanti sposi was presented at La Fenice, Venice had caught up with him.

Il segreto di Susanna, which was first performed at the Munich Hoftheater in 1909 in a German version called Susannens Geheimnis, is a short but inspired example of Wolf-Ferrari’s neo-classical genius. He adored Wagner and Verdi but as models for his own work he preferred composers like Pergolesi, Cimarosa, Mozart and Rossini. There is no better illustration of that than the brilliant little overture to Il segreto di Susanna which, at less than four minutes in length, is perfectly proportioned to suit the one-act comedy that follows. A display of rare contrapuntal mastery, it introduces four tunes in turn with a view to presenting them all at once towards the end. It is accomplished with such nimble wit and such lightness of touch, however, that there is not the slightest hint of the academic exercise about it.

An uncharacteristic aspect of the opera itself is that it is set in the composer’s own time rather than the 18th-century Venice of Carlo Goldoni, whose comedies supplied the libretti of no fewer than five of Wolf-Ferrari’s operas. It is based on a literary theme which, moreover, is even more relevant today than it was a hundred years ago. Susanna’s hymn in praise of the cigarette, “Oh gioia la nube leggera,” is so seductive, in fact, that it should come with a health warning. It has such melodic beauty and such effective instrumental elaboration that it could almost have been written by the composer’s Munich colleague Richard Strauss. Even so, that aria fits without incongruity into an opera that begins with a buffo episode (“Mantiglia grigia”) reminiscent of Rossini and includes a charming Mozart pastiche, heard first on piano, that recurs in the orchestral Intermezzo and at the romantic reconciliation (“Tutto è fumo”) near the end.

Taking into account the gentle duet (“Il dolce idillio”) in the manner of a minuet, the dramatic argument (“Ah! Scellerata!”) that develops a not far from Verdian intensity until it ends with an ironic reference to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and the voluptuous woodwind allusions to Debussy’s Prélude à L’Après-midi d’un faune that accompany the smoke curling up from Susanna’s cigarette in “Oh gioia la nube leggera,” it is a score that has justifiably been described as “eclectic.” And yet, because of the prevailing neo-classical spirit and, not least, the masterstroke of recalling the overture in the closing bars, it all seems to hang together in perfect unity.   

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