Giovanni Pacini's "'Malvina di Scozia': A View from New York (Of Love, Madness and Massacres)" in "Donizetti Society Newsletter," n. 129, October 2016 (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Handel Institute, Twelfth Triennial Conference Handel: Interactions and Influences, 2021
Paolo Rolli’s 1721 Muzio Scevola production at the Haymarket in London with music by Filippo Amadei, Giovanni Bononcini and George Frideric Handel pulls Bononcini and Handel together in one of their first public matches in Britain. However, while Handel’s music and its sources have been thoroughly investigated in recent decades, not enough attention has been paid to Bononcini’s contribution or to the contextualization of the whole opera in the European framework. For Bononcini – then at the pinnacle of his celebrity – the London production was not his first encounter with the story of Caio Muzio Cordo, the fearless Roman nobleman who burnt his hand (becoming Scevola, ‘left-handed’) to save Rome: Bononcini’s long-standing familiarity with the subject, and his desire eventually to rework and penetrate it, affected his approach to the London opera. The first Muzio Scevola that Bononcini set to music was Silvio Stampiglia’s remake of Nicolò Minato’s Venetian libretto for the 1695 carnival season in Rome. This opera was radically revised and richly re-elaborated by Bononcini for the Viennese stage in 1710. In the meantime it had been staged in Florence (1696), Naples (1698), Turin (1700) and Genoa (c. 1700), and the Roman setting had undergone several changes (supervised in one case, at least, by Bononcini) regarding dramaturgy, distribution of vocal parts, aria texts and instrumentation. In the present paper I provide an overview of Bononcini’s Muzio Scevola operas and propose a comparison between the Stampiglia-Bononcini versions (1695–1710) and the London version of 1721. In doing so I consider selected passages of the plot, aria settings and instrumentation patterns, with particular attention to the London, Turin and Vienna productions, where several texts were modified and fascinating new musical settings were employed.
Rossini and his Neapolitan operas
Lecture on Rossini's remarkable group of operas written for the Royal theatres in Naples, looking at the personalities involved, the performers and the operas themselves