Italian concert programme — Donizetti, Mariani, Gomes & others

Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848)

Predestinazione (duet)

Angelo Mariani (1821-1873)

La partenza (Bruce Ford)

Ad un fiume (Bruce Ford)

Carlos Gomes (1836-1896)

Io ti vidi (Bruce Ford)

Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868)

La regata veneziana (Jennifer Larmore)

Anzoleta avanti la regata

Anzoleta co passa la regata

Anzoleta dopo la regata)

Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901)

Cupo è il sepulcro mutolo (Bruce Ford)

Ambroise Thomas (1811-1896)

Le soir (Jennifer Larmore)

Rossini

L’Orgia (Bruce Ford)

Donizetti

L’Amante spagnuolo (Jennifer Larmore)

Amor, voce del cielo (duet)

L’Aurora (duet)

interval

Rossini

Les Amants de Séville (duet)

Julius Benedict (1804-1885)

Ecco quell fiero istante (Bruce Ford)

Giovanni Pacini (1796-1867)

La Rampogna (Jennifer Larmore)

Vincenzo Gabussi (1800-1846)

La Rimembranza (duet)

Rossini

La Partenza (Bruce Ford)

Pompeo Belgiojoso (1800 - c1860)

La Rimembranza (Jennifer Larmore)

Antonio Belgiojoso (1787-1854)

Digli che e un infidele (Bruce Ford)

Luigi Arditti (1822-1903)

Il Fior di Margherita (Jennifer Larmore)

Saverio Mercadente (1795-1870)

Il pastore svizzero (Bruce Ford)

Arditti

Leggero, invisibile (Jennifer Larmore)

Donizetti

Occhio nero incendiator (arranged as a duet by anon)

The most entertaining of all musical salons must have been the “Samedi soirs” hosted by Rossini, in genial retirement in Paris, from 1858 until his death ten years later. Certainly, an invitation to spend a Saturday evening with the Rossinis in their first-floor apartment at 2 rue de la Chaussée d’Antin was a highly prized item. One major attraction was the engagingly ebullient Rossini personality itself Another was the brilliance of the company including luminaries of the literary, artistic and political worlds as well as many of the greatest musicians of the day. And then there was the quality of the music, which might be performed by regular guests like Saint-Saëns and Diémer, or Patti and the Marchisio sisters, by visitors like Joachim, Liszt, and Sarasate, or by Rossini himself introducing a new piece specially written for the occasion.

If he had lived a little longer Donizetti would have been the perfect guest at Rossini’s Samedis soirs. Rossini admired his younger colleague and had used his influence to bring him to Paris and get his operas performed there, first at the Théâtre-Italien and later at the Opéra itself. He would have known too that Donizetti was a prolific composer of songs and duets which were ideal material for salon performance. Predestinazione, one of twelve Inspirations viennoises, is a characteristic example of his writing for two voices, presented here in alternation in the quick opening section and then most seductively blended in thirds from the ecstatic “Ah sì, ah sì” onwards.

Although he was encouraged by Rossini in his early days, Angelo Mariani was much more closely associated with Verdi. He was Verdi’s favoured conductor from the first performance of Aroldo in Rimini in 1857 until, somewhat unfairly, Verdi blamed him for the cancellation of the scheduled performance of his ill-conceived brainchild, the composite twelve-composer Rossini Requiem, in Bologna in 1869. Not an opera composer himself, Mariani wrote many songs. La Partenza and Ad un fiume are two particularly stylish examples, both of them neatly constructed to include a contrasting episode before the last return of the opening theme. Of the two, Ad un fiume is perhaps the more effective in its scoring for both the voice and the piano, which latter actually shares in the melodic interest from time to time. No less stylish, although the composer was born and educated in Brazil before he settled in Italy in his late twenties, is the melodious Io ti vidi by Carlos Gomes - “a truly musical genius,” as Verdi generously described him after hearing his greatest operatic triumph Il Guarany in Ferrara in 1872.

Written in 1858, La regata veneziana must have been intended for one of the earliest of Rossini’s Samedi soirs. It is to be found in the first (Album italiano) of the thirteen books of what he called with characteristic self-deprecating irony “Péchés de vieillesse” or “Sins of Old Age” and consists of three songs in Venetian dialect - a mock-heroic aria addressed by a spectator at the regatta to her gondolier lover, her breathless commentary on the race, and her virtuoso expression of delight when he wins it. Although Verdi is known to have been a Saturday guest at 2 rue de la Chaussé d’Antin, we can be fairly certain that he did not hear his Cupo è il sepulcro mutolo performed there. Having inscribed the song in the album of Count Lodovico Belgiojoso in Milan in 1843, he seems to have forgotten about it. Certainly, it remained unknown and unpublished for more than 150 years. Very much better than the typical album piece, it is most effectively shaped in its progression from the sombre recitative at the beginning to the passionate cantilena at the end.

According to Chabrier’s famous boutade, “there are three kind of music - the good, the bad, and that of Ambroise Thomas.” On the evidence of Le soir, which was written in 1869 at the height of Thomas’s powers, just after Mignon and at about the same as Hamlet, Chabrier’s judgement seems unduly harsh. Beginning intriguingly with a one-line piano introduction in the wrong key, once it has dropped into the right key it ingeniously incorporates that wayward piano line into the vocal part at the end of the first stanza. Chabrier would no doubt have preferred the rough and tumble of Rossini’s L’Orgia, one of the Soirées musicales written, or at least collected together, during an earlier stay in Paris in the 1830s.

Donizetti’s urbane skills in this area of the repertoire are further demonstrated by L’Amante spagnuolo - an arietta in the bolero form fashionable at the time, with characteristic syncopations and melodic decorations - and two more duets. Amor, voce del cielo and L’Aurora were both published in 1836 in Nuits d’été à Pausilippe, which was Donizetti’s instant answer to Rossini’s Soirées musicales (to be followed by the Rêveries napolitaines in 1839, the Matinées musicales in 1841 and the Inspirations viennoises in 1842). One would not guess from the vigorous polonaise rhythms of Amor, voce del cielo that the Nuits d’été à Pausilippe celebrate musical evenings at the villa of the impresario Domenico Barbaja overlooking the bay of Naples from Posillipo. The scarcely less lively and texturally more elaborate L’Aurora is more to the Neapolitan point.

Interval

One of the cleverest of Rossini’s “Péchés de vieillesse” is Les Amants de Séville - a study in or, rather, a parody of the Spanish idiom - which he consigned to the third volume of the collection (Morceaux réservés) alongside a pious Ave Maria and a weirdly exotic whole-tone confection, L’Amour à Pékin. Based on the tirana, a dance-song of Andalusian origin, Les Amants de Séville boasts a piano part wittier than most of its kind, with its briefly twittering allusion to the nightingale and its imitation guitar figuration, while the delightfully overwritten duet-setting of the first stanza alternates with two solo episodes. The soprano shows rather more caution than the full-scale romantic tenor but embraces his sentiments at the end.

Sir Julius Benedict, a British musician of German birth, might seem out of place in company like this. But, although he enjoyed his studies with Weber in Dresden, he was much happier working in the Italian style. He became a protégé of Domenico Barbaja in Naples in his early twenties and wrote operas in the manner of Rossini before adapting himself to British conditions after he settled here in 1835. Unlike Rossini, who described himself as a “fourth-rate” in this respect, Benedict was an accomplished pianist, which is clearly evident in the modestly but sensitively written piano part of his otherwise somewhat self-indulgent interpretation of Metastasio’s much-set Ecco quell fiero istante. Giovanni Pacini’s comparatively modest setting of La rampogna - though a prolific composer of operas, Pacini knew his limitations - comes as a timely contrast at this point.

Another friend of Rossini, Vincenzo Gabussi had little success as an opera composer in spite of having studied, like both Rossini and Donizetti, with Padre Mattei at the Liceo Musicale in Bologna. He was, on the other hand, highly expert in the salon repertoire and was much admired, not least during his many years in London, for pieces like the melodiously nostalgic, neatly shaped and attractively scored duet, La rimembranza. If it lacks the personality of Rossini’s La Partenza, with its ostinato piano rhythms accompanying a melody borrowed from the “Di plausi quel clamor” chorus in Semiramide, that is what distinguishes Rossini from his lesser contemporaries.

The Count Lodovico Belgiojoso in whose album Verdi inscribed his Cupo è il sepulcro mutolo in 1843 was a senior member of a talented and influential family at the centre of the musical salon culture in Milan, along with the Poniatowskis and the Maffeis. Amateur musicians though the Belgioiosos were, some of them were accomplished enough to perform in professional circumstances, as Lodovico’s brother Pompeo did when he took the bass solo part in the first Italian performance of Rossini’s Stabat Mater, conducted by Donizetti, in Bologna in 1842. His La rimembranza demonstrates that he was also composer enough to write a song at least as good as the average salon item of the day and perhaps even, as when the piano urges the action on at “piangi, piangi,” rather better than that. The short but unconventional canzonetta Digli che e un infidele, with its dramatic change of tone half-way through, suggests that Pompeo’s cousin Antonio Belgiojoso might well have been the more interesting composer of the two.

Like Julius Benedict and Vincenzo Gabussi, Luigi Arditi spent much of his life in London, working mainly as a conductor and briefly succeeding another Italian, Sir Michael Costa, at Covent Garden. “He can conduct anything,” wrote Shaw, “and come off without defeat.” While he had no time in London for composing operas, he went on writing songs, some for famous sopranos, others probably for musical evenings at his home in Albany Street. A specialist in songs in dance rhythm, like his famous Il bacio waltz, the two examples offered here demonstrate that he could turn an elegantly witty if vocally challenging polka like Fior di Margherita and an acceptably idiomatic and progressively brilliant bolero like Leggero, invisibile. Between the two Arditi items there is refreshing piece by the vastly prolific Saverio Mercadente, another Italian composer introduced to the Théâtre-Italien in Paris by Rossini in the 1830s but, in his case, with disappointing results. Il pastore svizzzero is a tirolese with a vocal line entertainingly abundant in yodelling figuration.

The programme ends, as it began, with a Donzietti duet - although, were he present to hear “Occhio nero incendiato” as performed here, the composer might well be heard to declare that he could have sworn he had written it for one voice rather than two.

Gerald Larner ©2005

I am grateful to Opera Rara for their help in providing some of the less accessible material required for the compilation of these notes. G.L.