Saturday, July 20, 2024
Alexander Kasser Theater, Montclair State University
6:00 pm Pre-opera Serenade
6:30 pm Pre-opera lecture
7:30 pm Opera

Wednesday, July 24, 2024
Rose Theater, Jazz at Lincoln Center
6:00 pm Pre-opera Serenade
6:30 pm Pre-opera lecture
7:30 pm Opera

Melodramma in two acts

Libretto: Gaetano Rossi, revised by the composer
Premiere: Autumn 1835, Teatro del Fondo, Naples

Teatro Nuovo Chorus and Orchestra
Elisa Citterio, primo violino e capo d’orchestra
Lucy Tucker Yates,  maestro al cembalo

THE COMPOSER

Uccelli’s life at a glance

1810 - Born Carolina Pazzini, to a family of minor nobility in or near Florence
c. 1827 - Marries Filippo Uccelli of Pisa, noted physician and professor; their daughter Emma born late 1820s
1827 - Debut in print: Ricordi publishes a collection of ariettas and cavatinas.
1830 - Operatic debut with Saul, Teatro della Pergola, Forence
1830-34 - Works on Eufemio di Messina (overture performed in Milan) and Anna di Resburgo
1833 - Death of Filippo Uccelli
1835 - Anna di Resburgo performed in Naples
1836 - Cantata in morte di Maria Malibran performed in Florence (Philharmonic Society)
c. 1848 - Mes rêves d’Italie (song collection) published in Paris; other individual songs in French and Italian
c. 1846-1852 - Concerts and tours with daughter Emma
1858 - Death in Florence

Biographical information on Carolina Uccelli is sparse, and some that can be found–passed from one long-ago dictionary to another without fresh research–is incorrect. The timeline above summarizes the current state (still tentative) of our knowledge about her. 

What makes such knowledge a matter of interest today is the most singular phase of her short life: For a brief time in her twenties, she aspired to break convention by pursuing a public career as a theater composer. This was strongly frowned upon for aristocrats and simply unheard-of for women. 

Young Carolina had been musically precocious and earned a reputation for her piano improvisations, singing, and chamber compositions while still in her teens. She most likely composed Anna di Resburgo in the years 1833-1835, and it was performed four times in the Autumn 1835 season of the Teatro del Fondo in Naples, with a further performance (possibly early in 1836) at the same city’s jointly managed Teatro San Carlo. The principal singers were in the top rank of stars: soprano Fanny Tacchinardi-Persiani (the original Lucia di Lammermoor), tenor Napoleone Moriani (for whom Donizetti and Verdi added new material in Lucrezia Borgia and Attila), and baritone Giorgio Ronconi (the original Nabucco). 

The libretto Uccelli chose had first been set by young Giacomo Meyerbeer in 1819, and by at least two other composers in the 1820s. Uccelli re-wrote it substantially, changed the heroine’s name (originally Emma), and brought the drama up to date for the high-Romantic age of Bellini and Donizetti. The score she produced justifies the high praise composers like Rossini and Mayr had given to her earlier works. It has a freshness of invention, clarity of characterization, and sureness of theatrical pacing that would unquestionably have found encouragement if it had been produced by a composer on the normal career path.   

Though the work was not a flop in Naples, it was thoroughly overshadowed by the premiere of another “Scottish” opera, Lucia di Lammermoor, by the same company in the same season. The barriers to acceptance of an opera by a female composer had already been high, as we know from the extensive correspondence between Uccelli and the impresario Alessandro Lanari, and after Anna she seems to have retreated from her theatrical ambitions. She returned to the social rounds of her aristocratic upbringing, giving many private concerts alongside a few public ones, and producing smaller-scale compositions. These included a cantata in memory of Maria Malibran and vocal chamber music in Italian and French, published mostly in Paris. 

From the mid 1840s her programs often featured her daughter Emma, a soprano. They made well-received appearances in London, Amsterdam, Milan, and Munich. In 1852 they were featured at one of the celebrated Parisian salon recitals hosted by Rossini, who decades earlier had supported Uccelli’s bid for a place at the men’s table in opera. We can only guess what she might have produced if that wish had been granted. Anna di Resburgo suggests that we missed out on a born opera composer of high promise.   

THE OPERA

The Names

For simplicity’s sake, these notes use the Italianized names as they occur in the opera, but for those  interested, here are the equivalents:

Resburgo = Roxburgh 
Lanerck = County Lanark, modern Lanarkshire
Roggero = Roger
Duncalmo = Duncan 
Norcesto = Norcester or Norchester
Edemondo = Edmund
Anna = Anne
Olfredo = Olfred, a variant of Alfred 
Etelia = Ethel
Elvino = Elwin or Elwen (a Cornish saint’s name) 
Egilda = Gillian or Jillian

The Story

The action of the opera is haunted by two fathers who have died before it begins. Roggero and Duncalmo were neighboring lords, and had been friends and companions in arms. But the latter, covetous of the former’s lands, murdered his comrade in secret and arranged for the blame to fall on Roggero’s own son Edemondo.

The guilt-ridden patriarch confessed on his deathbed to his own son and heir Norcesto. But Norcesto, stricken with shame for his father’s crime, has chosen to conceal the confession. 

Edemondo has fled into exile, leaving behind his wife Anna and their infant son Elvino. Anna has gone into hiding, leaving the child to be raised as an unknown orphan by a local landholder Olfredo, and disguising herself as a peasant (“Egilda”) to be near him. All the foregoing is explained in the preface to the published libretto, and is revealed gradually in dialogue during the opera. 

Act One

The curtain rises on the dawn of Olfredo’s feast-day. His daughter Etelia gives thanks for bountiful nature, and then greets her father and the community of farmers and shepherds who will later be celebrating together. Approaching trumpets signal the arrival of Norcesto, Lord of Lanerck. A herald reads a new edict: strangers may not be given hospitality in Lanerck without confirmation of their identity, until the fugitive criminal Edemondo can be found and brought to justice for the murder of his father. Privately, Norcesto shows his unease, while Olfredo and Etelia express their suspicions.  

As the latter two discuss the situation, the sound of a harp is heard. Its player is known to the county as “Egilda,” but Etelia suspects her to be a noblewoman in disguise. As we learn after her solo, Olfredo secretly knows this to be true: she is Anna, the wife of the fugitive Edemondo. He has surmised that she is the mother of Elvino, the supposed orphan he has taken under protection, and he promises the same to Anna.  

Edemondo now arrives, breaking his exile at the risk of his life because he cannot bear separation from his wife and son, whom he has not seen in over two years. He is weatherbeaten and careworn. Olfredo encounters him, but recognizes him only after Anna does so. Olfredo believes his affirmation of innocence in the death of his father. The couple is thus reunited and reliant upon Olfredo for protection from the usurper Norcesto. 

The final scene of Act One is the feast in Olfredo’s honor, unexpectedly joined by Norcesto, to whom homage is sung. Anna and Edemondo are present but hidden. To their horror, Norcesto recognizes the father’s features in the face of little Elvino, and orders the child carried away. Anna, distraught, reveals herself, but Olfredo prevents Edemondo from doing so. As the curtain falls, the child is taken to Norcesto’s castle in custody. 

Act Two 

The second act begins in the castle, where Olfredo and Etelia have come to seek Elvino. As they soon learn, Anna has come on her own for the same reason. A furious mob has followed her, to demand that Anna reveal the whereabouts of her fugitive husband. They threaten, if she refuses, to hold her and Elvino liable for his crime. Edemondo, hidden in the crowd and seeing his wife’s danger, now reveals himself in turn. He declares himself willing to face death, however unjustly, but pleads for the safety of his family. He is taken away for a hearing before the council of elders.  

Anna, however, has perceived Norcesto’s signs of a guilty conscience, and confronts him. She demands that he swear he is not the real murderer of Roggero, confident that a nobleman will not openly swear to a lie. But she does not know that his uneasy secret concerns his father’s crime, not his own. After hesitating, he swears as she demands, and Anna is confounded. 

Outside the council chamber, Etelia awaits the verdict. Her father rushes in, having witnessed the deliberations, and narrates them to her. The result: Edemondo has been condemned to execution beside the tomb of his murdered father.

The final scene takes place at the cemetery, where both Roggero and his true assassin Duncalmo lie buried. Norcesto is the first to arrive, and his agonies of remorse culminate in believing he sees the ghost of the murdered man rising to call for vengeance. Hearing the march of the approaching executioners and populace, he conceals himself behind his own father’s tomb. 

Edemondo consoles Anna and prepares to face his fate when Norcesto suddenly steps forth to admit his deception and his father’s deathbed wish to make restitution. The populace begs Edemondo’s pardon for their unjust fury. Restored to safety and to their ancestral possessions, Edemondo and Anna rejoice in a final duet.  

The Music

Both Rossini and Giovanni Simone Mayr (Donizetti’s teacher and the author of Medea in Corinto, performed in Teatro Nuovo’s debut season) wrote letters giving their impressions of Uccelli as an opera composer. Rossini was commenting on her first opera, Saul, whose premiere he attended in Florence. Mayr was reading the score of a projected Eufemio di Messina, which was never produced. No score of these operas has been found; some of Eufemio may have migrated into the eventual Anna di Resburgo (we know that to be the case with its overture). 

Uccelli set great store by these letters; it was important to her, as a woman seeking a place at the men’s table, to be able to show that some of the most important men already there thought her worthy of admission. Both senior composers praised Uccelli’s expertise in writing for the instruments of the orchestra. Mayr admired her counterpoint, “especially the bass lines,” and counseled her not to limit the recitatives to string accompaniment, but to follow the modern innovation of integrating wind instruments into them as well. The score of Anna shows that she took this advice. 

Rossini declared Saul “apt to achieve a happy success,” and vouched for the debutante’s “richness of ideas” as well as her “expressiveness and elegance in declamation and melody.” He advised her not to be so eager for performances as to risk giving them with inferior singers, but to hold out for first-rate artists, “because even the best music, deprived of that aid, is lost.” Uccelli was luckily able to follow that recommendation as well, as the all-star cast of the Anna premiere demonstrates. 

Her knowledge of singing and skill in vocal writing seems to have made this the easiest part of her daunting task; singers were eager to perform Uccelli’s music. Already she had collaborated with Adelaide Maldotti and Lorenzo Bonfigli; enlisted the support of Maria Malibran and Gilbert-Louis Duprez; and formed what would become a decades-long association with Carolina Ungher. Long after Uccelli had given up her hopes of a public theatrical career, her salon concerts continued to feature artists of similar magnitude. Among others she wrote for (and accompanied) Sofia Cruvelli, Giambattista Rubini, Giulia Grisi, and Antonio Tamburini. Each of those names speaks volumes to students of the operatic world the composer longed to join. 

The Score of Anna

Uccelli’s status as a lone female in the rough-and-tumble world of Bel Canto composition is an obvious magnet for attention. To get as far as she did, she must have been remarkable. It’s a good enough reason to look with curiosity into the opera she produced, but not a sufficient one for reproducing it in the 21st century. For that, the opera itself has to earn belief and inspire advocacy. So what do we find in this lone surviving score? 

First of all, as both Rossini and Mayr noted: assurance. She understands how the orchestra works, understands the construction of musical pieces and their distribution over a story; understands in high degree how to write for operatic voices. So far so good, but there is more. 

At several points we glimpse unconventional choices that show a willingness and ability to experiment. Having a singer experienced in “buffo” roles and their patter songs for the decidedly non-comic role of Olfredo, she produced a brilliant rarity: a rapid-fire syllabic aria that is not “buffo” but deadly serious, as the father breathlessly relates the story of the trial. It is one of the gems of the score. Another is the slow movement of the confrontation between Anna and Norcesto, where the two opponents pause to confess, separately, their anxiety at the stalemate they have reached. The orchestration here combines string accompaniment with a highly unusual pair of solo instruments, flute and timpani. The one, perhaps, for the glimmer of hope in Anna’s heart; the other for the throb of guilt in Norcesto’s. 

The final allegro (“cabaletta”) of this duet is also audacious: soprano and baritone sing their  obligatory joint reprise not in unison, not in harmony, but in canon, with dovetailing entrances one bar apart. This is a “learned composer” trick–Berlioz was fond of it–but I know no other example of it being attempted in an Italian cabaletta. It’s far from simple to combine the musical directness required by the cabaletta form with the technical challenge of canonic writing. Uccelli brings it off with striking ease and brio. 

Norcesto’s guilt, meanwhile, is somehow audible in his music even before we get a hint of it in the text. At first appearance, he sings an aria full of bonhomie, presenting himself as a benevolent lord who rejoices in the happiness of his feudal subjects–but partway through he seems to get stuck in an unexpected minor key, and to need insistent repetition of text and music to break out of it. Then, when conscience finally overtakes Norcesto at the end of the opera, he imagines the ghost of the murdered man rising to call for justice–not in the expected voice of blood and thunder, but in the plaintive whisper of an unaccompanied flute. 

Moments like those are dotted through the whole score. In the “big finale” midway through every Bel Canto opera, where the plot reaches the crisis that the second half will resolve, it was normal to have a central moment of surprise that sends everyone into lyrical reflection, the “largo concertato.” (The Sextet from Lucia and the scene of Dr. Bartolo’s stupefaction in The Barber of Seville are classic examples). Uccelli’s story contains two candidates for that moment: Norcesto’s shock at seeing the features of the banished Edemondo in the face of the supposed orphan Elvino, and Anna’s outburst when she drops her disguise and reveals that she is Elvino’s mother. Instead of choosing between them, Uccelli marks each with its own short, compact “largo”--which occasions an additional allegro between them, thus building out her finale into an even more symphonic sequence of interlocking movements. 

All these strike me as signs of a born theater composer. Do we also find signs of youth and inexperience? Of course–just as we do in the earliest operas of Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and Verdi. Very few are the composers who are not still “finding their way” in their first stage ventures. Speaking as a music critic, I would say that Uccelli is a little over-fond of certain “spicy” harmonic progressions that she liked, and used well, but too often and too close together. And sometimes when she has steered the music to a new key, she is a bit pedantic in her way of getting back to the old one. I feel sure she would have become more deft with that a few years down the road.  

But speaking as a longtime interpreter of Italian operas, I find something more important: the piece sings, and it plays. By that I mean: Uccelli has the gift of finding vocal gestures and phrases that embody the drama of the moment, and she paces those moments convincingly and in good proportion to tell the story that inspired her. We experience the parents’ danger and bravery along with them; we sense their opponent’s remorse struggling to break through his ambivalence; we are carried along with each event as it unfolds; nothing makes us wait too long or rushes us through too soon. She knows how to build the tension of a scene and how to release it into a climax. 

Those qualities are precious for an opera-maker. There are some magnificent composers (Haydn and Schubert, for instance) who never quite found them. And there are some Italians who achieved quite a lot in Uccelli’s day (Mercadante and Pacini, for instance) without having the naturalness of invention that she seems to have possessed from the start. I would not call Anna di Resburgo a masterpiece, but it has exciting stretches that make me easily believe her fourth or fifth opera might have been one. 

And there is something else: even though she is working within the familiar forms and styles of the period, her music does not sound like any of the composers mentioned above. It sounds like her. That is more than enough reason to want her voice heard again after two centuries of obscurity, and to welcome a stirring opera, not quite like any other, to the Bel Canto canon.  

- Will Crutchfield