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)
Excavating opera: composers and archaelogists in 19th century Italy
Congreso Internacional" Imagines", La Antigüedad en …, 2008
This paper investigates the influence of contemporary archaeological discoveries on the historical operas of 19th century Italy, focussing on the destruction of Pompeii (Pacini, L'ultimo giorno di Pompei, Naples 1825). Pacini's opera attempted to situate the plot within Pompeii as known from archaeological excavations. Such accuracy might be explained by contemporary politics in Naples, where the ruler Ferdinando di Borbone endorsed the excavations of Pompeii. After this first attempt, it took more than 10 years and the publication of the novel The last day of Pompeii by the English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton for the theme to gain popularity in the melodramatic repertoire again, albeit in a very different way.
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
‘Am I in Rome, or in Aulis?’ Jommelli’s Cajo Mario (1746) as Operatic Capriccio
Eighteenth-Century Music, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1-16, 2016
In contrast to what its title suggests, Niccolo` Jommelli’s Cajo Mario (Rome, 1746) has little to do with the consul Caius Marius (157–86 BC). Instead, the opera transposes the myth of Iphigenia in Aulis to the Roman Republic, having Marius, his daughter, her lover and her villainous suitor assume the roles of Agamemnon, Iphigenia, Achilles and Ajax respectively. Thus configured, Jommelli’s opera held the stage until 1772, enjoying fifteen revivals with most of the original music intact – a record in the composer’s oeuvre. This essay seeks to clarify the reasons for that remarkable success. By juxtaposing Jommelli’s score and Gaetano Roccaforte’s libretto with a set of six paintings by the contemporary artist Antonio Joli (c1700–1777), it aims to show how Cajo Mario shares compositional strategies with a connoisseur’s genre in the fine arts: the capriccio. In keeping with Joli’s capricci, which all deploy the same structural motif, Cajo Mario incorporates a narrative structure through which the ‘parallel universe’ of related works imposes itself on the opera’s setting and action, making spectators wonder – as a character does in the course of the opera – whether they are gazing at an event from republican Rome or reliving a legend from ancient Greece.
Marino Zuccheri &Friends, Maria Maddalena Novati Laura Pronestì, Marina Vaccarini (eds.), 2018
The title of this event aims to highlight the richness of the experiences which Angelo Paccagnini (1930-1999) lived during the course of his career. When one speaks of Maestro Paccagnini, it is impossible to discuss only one of these aspects. Studying his activity means going through a series of heterogeneous documents that help to reconstruct and trace in retrospective the life of an intellectual who managed to create a important network of contacts. This versatility of his interests is clear also when the object of research is only one particular aspect, as in this case, his presence at the Studio di Fonologia di Milano della Rai.