L'Olimpiade (Pergolesi)

Title page of the printed libretto of the opera

L'Olimpiade is an opera in the form of a dramma per musica in three acts by the Italian composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. Pergolesi took the text, with a few modifications, from the libretto of the same name by Pietro Metastasio. The opera first appeared during the Carnival season of 1735 at the Teatro Tordinona in Rome and "came to be probably the most admired"[1] of the more than 50 musical settings of Metastasio’s drama.[2]

It is regarded as "one of the finest opere serie of the early eighteenth century".[3]

Background

The new Bourbon dynasty which had taken power in Naples in May 1734[4] probably regarded Pergolesi with suspicion because of his links with the aristocratic circles of the previous Austrian Viceroyalty.[5] Perhaps as a result of these suspicions, or simply because of the box office failure of his opera Adriano in Siria (produced the same year at the Teatro San Bartolomeo and even appreciated, it was said, by the new king Charles VII), Pergolesi was not invited to participate in the 1735 theatrical season in Naples. He consequently decided to accept a commission from the Teatro Tordinona in Rome to compose an opera to open the Carnival season with a libretto recently written by Metastasio which had already been set to music by Antonio Caldara in 1733 and Antonio Vivaldi in 1734.[6]

The Teatro Tordinona was a long-established theatre with its roots in the 17th century, which had recently been rebuilt and was the property of the Apostolic Camera: the precarious financial conditions in which it operated certainly made it no rival for the Neapolitan theatres with which Pergolesi had worked until that point.[7] Metastasio was annoyed that the chorus had to be cut completely because the theatre could not afford one, while its company of singers enjoyed no great reputation.[8] The papal prohibition on women participating on stage in Rome determined the proliferation of castrati, who also performed the female roles; five members of the cast belonged to this category, the remaining two parts being given to tenors. Two of the castrati had sung in the premiere of Vivaldi's L'Olimpiade in Venice: Marianino Nicolini was promoted from the minor character Aminta to the "prima donna" role of Aristea,[9] while Francesco Bilancioni (or Bilanzoni) exchanged the role of Megacle for Licida. For the leading man the theatre turned to an outstanding singer from the Sistine Chapel, Domenico Ricci, who had permission to take part in theatrical performances in Rome.[10] The principal tenor role was handed to the experienced baritenor Giovanni Battista Pinacci, who had enjoyed a career lasting twenty years and had recently returned from London where he had performed in Handel operas;[11] the second lady was sung by the young castrato Giovanni Tedeschi, later to become famous in the 1760s as the impresario of the Teatro San Carlo.[12] The rest of the cast was made up of two obscure comprimario singers, Nicola Licchesi (Lucchesi?), a tenor, and Carlo Brunetti, a contralto (the only singer with this vocal register among the group of high voices), who were nevertheless gratified by the extra attention Pergolesi paid their roles in his score. If the chorus was absent and the singers were of no great reputation, the orchestra was "more sizeable than the Neapolitan orchestras of the time, as demonstrated by the use of two trumpets and two hunting horns, sometimes simultaneously."[13]

Performance history

Caricature of Pergolesi

The opera made its debut in January 1735[14] as the first opera of the season, and had a rather troubled time because official mourning for the death of Princess Maria Clementina Sobieska, wife of the pretender to the British throne James Stuart, led to theatrical performances being suspended between the 17th and 23 January while the subsequent closure of the theatres for Candlemas prevented extra performances before the second opera of the season, Francesco Ciampi's Demofoonte, took the stage.[15] No reviews of the premiere exist. The only account we have comes from what the composer Egidio Duni, Pergolesi's rival, told his colleague André Grétry[16] decades later, namely that the performance was a total fiasco, so much so that during the disputes it provoked Pergolesi was hit on the head by an orange thrown by an angry member of the audience.[17] Nevertheless, the opera rapidly won international fame and "over the next ten years Pergolesi's music all but monopolized L'Olimpiade pasticcios throughout Europe." Productions based on Pergolesi's setting were performed in various cities: in Perugia and Cortona in 1738, in Siena in 1741, perhaps in Florence in 1737, certainly in London in 1742,[18] where the pasticcio presented at the King's Theatre under the title of Meraspe was largely based on Pergolesi's score (with the addition of four or five arias by Giuseppe Scarlatti, Leonardo Leo and Giovanni Battista Lampugnani), and left a lasting impression in the years to come.[19]

The widespread diffusion of Pergolesi's L'Olimpiade is attested by the unusual number of manuscripts (more than twenty) of the score which have survived: this opera, along with La serva padrona and the Stabat Mater, provided the basis for Pergolesi's lasting fame across Europe. A performance of his version of the aria "Se cerca, se dice" had – according to Charles Burney – made an impression "seldom" equalled on the English public. In the second half of the 18th century the aria became "a touchstone for all subsequent composers [...] The success of the aria was such that it was still being parodied decades later, even in slightly vulgar ways", as for example in I due supposti conti by Cimarosa in 1784, where a character who has just swallowed a powerful laxative leaves the stage singing "Se cerca, se dice:/'Il conte dov'è?'/rispondi che il conte/correndo partì" ("If she comes looking, if she comes saying/'Where's the count?'/Answer that the count/Has had to make a quick exit").[20] As late as the 1810s Stendhal dedicated an impassioned analysis to it in his letters on Metastasio, remarking: "the whole of Italy knows [this] aria by heart, and this is probably why L'Olimpiade is not revived. No director would dare run the risk of staging an opera whose main aria was already lodged deep in the memory of every member of the audience."[21]

In the modern era, after a short-lived revival at the Teatro della Fortuna in Fano and the Teatro Pergolesi in Jesi to mark the bicentenary of Pergolesi’s death (scheduled for 1936, but postponed until 1937),[22] and a couple of performances in Germany,[23] L'Olimpiade did not appear again until it was given in concert form in 1992 as part of the IV International Festival of Gerace at the local church of San Francesco. This performance was the basis for the world premiere recording of the opera. A second series of performances took place in 1996 conducted by William Christie at various French venues including the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. The first staged performances in the 21st century took place in 2003, conducted by Ottavio Dantone in a production by Italo Nunziata. The opera has appeared several times since then.[24] Unitel Classics made a video recording of the "magnificent" version presented in 2011 at the Festival Pergolesi Spontini in Jesi, conducted by Alessandro De Marchi with a production again by Italo Nunziata.[25]

Structure

L'Olimpiade consists of the following musical items:

The arias are usually accompanied by strings alone; in six of them the orchestra is expanded by the use of oboes and horns, in three others trumpets are added. This enlarged orchestra also takes part in the sinfonia.[26]

As was the practice in Rome, the setting of Metastasio's libretto is reasonably faithful to the original: apart from the unavoidable suppression of the choruses mentioned above, Pergolesi limited himself to introducing only four additional arias and one substitute aria.[27] These are primarily arias for the two comprimari, not catered for in Metastasio’s text, namely "Talor guerriero invitto” for Aminta in the first act, and "Apportator son io" and "L'infelice in questo stato" for Alcandro in the second and third acts respectively. In the third scene of Act 3 the aria Metastasio wrote for Megacle, "Lo seguitai felice", was replaced by a few lines of recitative and a long bravura aria "Torbido in volto e nero" with a divided orchestra.[28] In the sixth scene, as the action draws to a close, a moving additional aria was also inserted for Licida, "Nella fatal mia sorte".

Self-borrowings

With the exception of the last named aria[29] the music for the other modifications derives from self-borrowings from Adriano in Siria, partly enriched with extra instrumentation: the text is mimicked in the three arias for the comprimari and copied word for word in the substitute piece for Megacle.[30] Pergolesi also used music from Adriano to set the original Metastasian verses in Aminta’s second aria (Act 3), "Son qual per mare ignoto".[31]

Other music is shared with La conversione di San Guglielmo ("The Conversion of Saint William"),[32] the sacred opera the composer had written as a final exercise as part of his studies at the Conservatorio dei Poveri di Gesǜ Cristo. In particular, this applies to the sinfonia and at least two other notable pieces, for which Metastasio's text also remained unchanged: Aristea's aria "Tu di saper procura" (which corresponds to the solo for the angel, "Fremi pur quanto vuoi")[33] and the only duet, placed at the end of the first act, "Ne' giorni tuoi felici", between Megacle and Aristea (which corresponds to the duet "Di pace e di contento" between Saint William and Father Arsenio).[34] Given that the manuscript score of the earlier work by Pergolesi has not survived, it is even possible that it is not a case of L'Olimpiade borrowing from Guglielmo but rather the reverse, with the reuse of music from L'Olimpiade in later Neapolitan revivals of the other piece, attested by the scores of Guglielmo which have come down to us.[35] Whatever the case, the duet was highly celebrated throughout the 18th century[36] and continues to be admired in the modern era. In particular, it has been written that the duet shows that "Pergolesi was a musical dramatist to the finger tips, not merely an effective setter of words". In it:

the tenderly 'speaking' melody that bears the true current of feeling backwards and forwards between Aristea and Megacle, is periodically racked by spasms of angular chromaticism that depict them on the verge of losing self-control, or broken down into dialogue of opera-buffa-like verisimilitude.[37]

Critical appraisal

In spite of the heterogenous character the opera might have assumed as a result of such a composition history, Raffaele Mellace echoes the remarks of the historian of 18th-century musical drama Reinhard Strohm when he writes in his article on L'Olimpiade in the Dizionario del'Opera 2008:

What strikes the listener, beyond any dissimilarity between the various numbers in the score, is the essentially unified character of the musical invention: an atmosphere of warm, joyous freshness breathes from every single page of the opera, reaching as far as the arias for minor characters and even the march in the third act. It offers an interpretation of the text which is completely in harmony with Metastasio's poetry and the exaltation of youth and love particular to this drama. The "pathetic" moments are short and few in number in an opera which resolves even the most emotionally lacerating situations with a grace which perfectly captures the expressive medium of the poet's verse, treated with extraordinary sensitivity in the declamation.

Strohm himself summarised the historical significance of L'Olimpiade in his book on Italian opera of the 18th century:

Pergolesi's L'Olimpiade represents one of the happy moments in the history of opera. The literary masterpiece of a Metastasio at the peak of his art (he was barely 35 when he wrote it) found its first musical flowering at the hands of the young composer from Jesi. Many of those who praised the libretto did so thinking unconsciously of Pergolesi's melodies. In his score, L'Olimpiade is a homage to youth and love of the kind which perhaps can only be completely successful in musical drama.[38]

Roles

Role Voice type[39] Premiere cast[40]
Clistene tenor Giovanni Battista Pinacci
Aristea soprano castrato (travesti role) Mariano Nicolini ("Marianino")
Argene soprano castrato (travesti) Giovanni Tedeschi ("Amadori")
Licida soprano castrato Francesco Bilancioni (o Bilanzoni)
Megacle soprano castrato Domenico Ricci ("Menicuccio")
Aminta tenor Nicola Licchesi
Alcandro contralto castrato Carlo Brunetti

Synopsis

For an outline of the plot see the article on Metastasio's libretto.

Recordings

Audio

Year Cast
(in the following order:
Clistene, Aristea, Argene, Licida, Megacle, Aminta, Alcandro)		 Conductor,
Orchestra,
Note		 Label
complete recordings
1992 Ernesto Palacio,
María Angeles Peters,
Giovanna Manci,
Adelaida Negri,
Lucetta Bizzi
Raimundo Mettre
Irena Zaric 		Marco Armiliato,
Filarmonica de Stat Transilvania di Cluj
(live recording) 		CD:
  • Arkadia «Akademia»
  • Agorá Musica
    Catalog.: 93
  • New Ornamenti
2011 Jeffrey Francis,
Raffaella Milanesi,
Ann-Beth Solvang,
Jennifer Rivera,
Olga Pasishnyk
Marcus Brutscher
Martin Oro 		Alessandro De Marchi,
Academia Montis Regalis
(live recording on period instruments, Innsbruck, 2010)		 CD:
  • Deutsche Harmonia Mundi
    Catalog.: 88697807712

Video

Year Cast
(in the following order:
Clistene, Aristea, Argene, Licida, Megacle, Aminta, Alcandro)		 Conductor,
Orchestra,
Stage director		 Label
2013[41] Raul Gimenez, Lyubov Petrova, Yetzabel Arias Fernandez, Jennifer Rivera, Sofia Soloviy, Antonio Lozano, Milena Storti Alessandro De Marchi,
Academia Montis Regalis (period instruments),
Italo Nunziata 		Arthaus:
  • Catalog.: 108 064 (Blu Ray)
  • Catalog.: 101 650 (DVD)

Notes and references

  1. ↑ Kimbell, p. 257.
  2. ↑ According to Jeffry O. Segrave, over the course of the following century the libretto was set to music more than 50 times by 47 different composers ("The special case of Pietro Metastasio's L'Olimpiade and the story of the Olympic games", in Anthony Bateman and John Bale (editors), Sporting Sounds. Relationship between Sport and Music, Abingdon-on-Thames, Routledge, 2009, p. 116, ISBN 0-203-88797-2). However, according to Claire Genewein, there were "at least a hundred" renderings of Metastasio's libretto in music (Sul completamento della partitura de l'Olimpiade, essay in the booklet accompanying the Dynamic DVD of L'Olimpiade by Baldassare Galuppi conducted by Andrea Marcon). Don Neville in his article on Metastasio in the New Grove Dictionary lists 55 settings, not counting different versions of the opera by the same composer (III, p. 356).
  3. ↑ Donald Jay Grout and Hermine Weigel Williams, A Short History of Opera (4th edition), New York, Columbia University Press, 2003, p. 229, ISBN 978-0-231-11958-0.
  4. ↑ The Kingdom of Naples had become a Viceroyalty belonging to the Austrian Habsburg dynasty in 1707 during the War of the Spanish Succession. In 1734, during the War of the Polish Succession, Charles of Bourbon, the younger son of King Philip V of Spain, chased the Austrians from Naples and made the city the capital of a newly independent kingdom. He was confirmed as King Charles VII of Naples by the Treaty of Vienna which ended the war in 1738 (Luca Salza, Naples entre Baroque et Lumières, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2013, pp. 40-42).
  5. ↑ In 1732 Pergolesi had been appointed maestro di cappella by Prince Ferdinando Colonna di Stigliano, a leading official at the court of the Austrian viceroy, and in 1734 he had assumed the same role for Duke Marzio IV Maddaloni Carafa, a relative of the prince. At the time of the Bourbon conquest both households had taken refuge in Rome and had invited the musician to follow them. There, Pergolesi undertook a commission from the Maddalonis to compose a Mass in F Major in honour of Saint John of Nepomuk, patron saint of Bohemia and thus particularly venerated in the Habsburg Empire. It was performed to enormous acclaim in the basilica of San Lorenzo in Lucina. Although this episode showed Pergolesi in a bad light, he was nevertheless invited to return to Naples by the new Bourbon superintendent of its theatres, the Marquess of Arienzo, Lelio Carafa, who was on close terms with the new king and an uncle of the Duke of Maddaloni. Carafa became one of Pergolesi's patrons and proposed Adriano in Siria to him; it was staged at the end of October. (Toscani).
  6. ↑ Dorsi, pp. 127 and 129.
  7. ↑ Mellace
  8. ↑ Hucke and Monson, p. 953.
  9. ↑ In spite of his considerable height (according to Charles de Brosses, 6 French feet, i.e. about 1.95 metres), Nicolini was regularly employed in Rome up to the Carnival of 1740 in female roles (Dennis Lybby, Nicolini, Mariano [Marianino], in Sadie, III, p. 599). He also sang the part of Licida in the premiere of Leonardo Leo's L'Olimpiade at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples in 1737, as well as that of Megacle in the version by Gaetano Latilla at the Teatro San Cassiano in Venice in 1752.
  10. ↑ Sergio Durante, Ricci [Rizzi, Riccio], Domenico ["Menicuccio"], in Sadie, III, p. 1309.
  11. ↑ Winton Dean, Pinacci, Giovanni Battista, in Sadie, III, p. 1014.
  12. ↑ Dennis Libby (with John Rosselli), Tedeschi [Amadori], Giovanni, in Sadie, IV, p. 674.
  13. ↑ Dorsi, p. 129
  14. ↑ According to Monson, probably on 2 January.
  15. ↑ Toscani
  16. ↑ André Grétry, Mémoires ou Essai sur la Musique, Paris/Liège, Prault/Desoer, 1789, p. 508 (accessible for free online at Google Books). According to Grétry's account, Duni - then a novice composer - went to visit Pergolesi shortly after the failure, calling him "maestro" and consoling him by saying that the opera he himself was soon to stage (Il Nerone, premiered on 21 May) was not worth a single aria from Pergolesi's work which had been so badly received by the public.
  17. ↑ Mellace
  18. ↑ Monson. According to Monson, on the contrary, the pasticcio staged at the Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo in Venice in 1737, albeit widely attributed to Pergolesi (and maybe containing some of his music), was mainly based on Vivaldi's 1734 setting.
  19. ↑ Charles Burney, A General History Of Music: From The Earliest Ages to the Present Period, Volume the 4th, London, Printed for the Author, 1789, p. 448 (accessible for free online at Google Books). The aria "Immagini dolenti", erroneously attributed by Burney to Domenico Scarlatti, is actually drawn from Arminio in Germania by Giuseppe Scarlatti.
  20. ↑ Dorsi, p. 131. In the same year (1784) Cimarosa also staged his own version of L'Olimpiade.
  21. ↑ Stendhal, pp. 286-287.
  22. ↑ Gianni Gualdoni, Le celebrazioni del 1936 avviano la rinascita, "Voce della Vallesina", Year LC, 11, 25 March 2007, p. 5 (accessible for free online at the journal's website). The brochure (Olimpiade, Rome, Proia, 1937), with the cast list, is cited at Italianopera.org. It reveals that, as might be expected, there was no question of a textually accurate version: the roles of the two male protagonists, for example, were probably transposed an octave downwards and were performed by tenors, while the tenor role of Clistene was evidently also transposed and was sung by the bass Luciano Neroni.
  23. ↑ Hanover 1972 and Schloss Augustusburg 1988 (Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, in Andreas Ommer, Verzeichnis aller Operngesamtaufnahmen. Von 1907 bis zur Gegenwart, CD-ROM, Berlin, 2005, ISBN 978-3866407206).
  24. ↑ Page on Pergolesi's L'Olimpiade at Le magazine de l'opéra baroque
  25. ↑ "We are fortunate to have this magnificent performance recorded" (Noel Megahey, The Opera Journal, 20 March 2013).
  26. ↑ Catalucci and Maestri, p. 10.
  27. ↑ Adriano in Siria, for example, was overhauled in a far more profound way given that ultimately only ten arias survived from the 27 originally written by Metastasio (Dale E. Monson, Adriano in Siria (ii), in Sadie, I, p. 28).
  28. ↑ The aria is provided with "an accompaniment entrusted to two orchestral groups which play alternately and then together, a timbrically suggestive solution" (Dorsi, p. 132). The aria was written, in Adriano in Siria, for one of the most famous (and capricious) castrati of the era, Caffarelli.
  29. ↑ Menchelli-Buttini, p. 398.
  30. ↑ Dorsi, p. 129. Aminta's aria derives from Osroa's "Sprezza il furor del vento" (Act 1), while Alcandro's two arias are taken from Aquilio's "Contento forse vivere" (Act 3) and Emirena's "Prigioniera abbandonata" (Act 1).
  31. ↑ Celletti, I, p. 117. The piece is based on Osroa's aria "Leon piagato a morte" (Act 2).
  32. ↑ The full title of this little known work by Pergolesi is as follows: Li prodigj della divina grazia nella conversione, e morte di S. Guglielmo duca di Aquitania. Dramma sacro per musica del sig. Gio: Battista Pergolesi rappresentato nell'anno 1731 (cf. Studi Pergolesi - Università di Milano).
  33. ↑ Celletti, I, p. 117.
  34. ↑ Catalucci and Maestri, p. 9.
  35. ↑ Hucke, Pergolesi: Probleme eines Werkverzeichnisses, op.cit. Regarding the sinfonia, Catalucci and Maestri write: "The chronological problem is an open question still unsolved, namely whether the Guglielmo symphony was reused for the opera or vice versa" (p. 10).
  36. ↑ Mellace. Rousseau made the piece the archetype of the form in the article "Duo" in his Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, Duchesne, 1768, p. 182; accessible online at Internet Archive).
  37. ↑ Kimbell, p. 266.
  38. ↑ Strohm, p. 214
  39. ↑ Following the information given by Mellace.
  40. ↑ According to the original libretto.
  41. ↑ Live recording from the Teatro studio Valeria Moriconi in Jesi (2011).

Sources

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