Verdi: Prelude to I masnadieri
Benjamin d’Anfray and Hilary Metzger
The history of Italian opera in England consists in part of using the previous generation’s Italians to bash the current ones. Lord Mount-Edgcumbe, one of the most detailed observers of late-Classical opera, lived on into the “bel canto” period, but confessed in his memoirs that he rarely went to the opera any more, because all the clangor of Rossini with his shrieking piccolo and pounding bass drum had obliterated the graceful melodies of Cimarosa and Paisiello that he loved. Fast-forward to Lord Byron, who depicted Verdi “at his worst opera’s noisy end” shrinking from the stern gaze of...Rossini, who had in the meantime become classic. And when verismo came along, London aesthetes heard undisciplined proletarian screaming from the unworthy successors of the (by now) noble Verdi.
All this is a way of explaining that Verdi’s only London opera, I masnadieri (1847), though planned to ensure success in every way, was mostly an occasion for the wrath of British critics to fall on him like the proverbial ton of bricks. “Verdi,” wrote the influential Henry Chorley in The Athenaeum, “is finally rejected.”
Piatti around the time of I masnadieri (unknown photographer)
The actual public seems to have liked the opera rather more, however. It featured their darling of the moment, the “Swedish Nightingale” Jenny Lind, in her only Verdi role, and a great impression was made by the surprising start of the score: not the usual overture or orchestral prelude, but a mournful “aria” for solo cello. Verdi wrote this to profit from the popularity of the young Bergamasque cellist Carlo Alfredo Piatti (1822-1901), then resident in London and in great demand for private concerts in the houses of the nobility.
Piatti went on to a long and honored career as soloist, composer, teacher, and steady chamber-music partner of the legendary violinist Joseph Joachim (1831-1907). The favorite pupil of his later years, and his frequent concert “deputy” (the British term for a substitute sent when a popular player was double-booked), was William Whitehouse (1859-1935), one of the earliest cellists to make recordings (see Record of the Week 50).
Piatti’s own compositions, meanwhile, leave us some idea of his ornamental style, in whose spirit Hilary Metzger has improvised her “bel canto” variations for this recording of the Masnadieri prelude.