Il burbero di buon cuore

Il burbero di buon cuore, the first production in a series of successful collaborations between Lorenzo Da Ponte and Vicente Martín y Soler, was the result—we are told—of a suggestion made by Emperor Joseph II himself as patron of the Italian opera in Vienna. The garrulous abbé tells us that, soon after his first operatic libretto turned out to be a failure,

…one day, encountering me by chance on one of his morning walks, he stopped me, and remarked most graciously: “You know, Da Ponte, your opera, after all, isn’t half so bad as they would like to have us think? You must take courage, and give us another one!”Meantime [Stephen] Storace (brother of the diva) and Martini [Vicente Martín y Soler] arrived in Vienna, two young composers who hoped to place operas with the Italian theatre. The former had on his side his sister, a virtuosa of…

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Notas

Nancy Storace, famous soprano whose activity was centered mainly around Vienna and London.

Memoirs of Lorezo Da Ponte, translated by Elisabeth Abbott from the Italian, edited and annotated by Arthur Livingston (Philadelphia and London, J. B. Lippincott, 1929), pp. 140-41, 144-46. Original edition: Memorie di Lorenzo Da Ponte da Ceneda scritte da esso (New York, 1823-27).

Da Ponte himself, in his Extract from the life of Lorenzo Da Ponte ... (New York, 1819), p. 10, quoted in Dorothea Link, “The Da Ponte Operas of Vicente Martín y Soler” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 1991), p. 28, assigns the emperor a less active role in this incident.

“La Storace chanta bien, Benucci joua pairfetement, la Mandini nous fit voir ses beaux cheveux”. Personal diary of Zinzendorf, entry of January 4th, 1786, quoted in Otto Michtner, Das alte Burgtheater als Opernbühne: von den Einführung des deutsches Singspiels (1778) bis zum Tod Kaiser Leopolds II (1792) (Vienna: Hermann Böhlaus Nachf., 1970), p. 399.

O. Michtner, Das alte Burgtheater, pp. 484-502.

“L’arbore di Diana, dandosi con economia, resta sempre un’ opera vantaggiosissima alla cassa”. Lorenzo Da Ponte, “Copia di Memoria presentata da me alla Direzione il mese di Xbre dell’ anno 1790”, reproduced in O. Michtner, Das alte Burgtheater, pp. 441-43.

Between February 1787 and the revival of 1789, with a new cast, there is a single performance in August 1787. Nothing is known about its cast or its circumstances.

“Nach einer dreimaliger Vorstellung war zu schliessen, dass das Stück zwar nicht der ungeteilten Beifall des Publikums erhielt, doch auch im Ganzen nicht missfiel. Die Musik hat viel Neues und einige besondere Schönheiten. Mme Storace hat sie nebst der Vortrefflichkeit ihres Gesangen auch noch überdies durch ihr naives Spiel vorzüglich als Angelica ausgezeichnet”. Wiener Realzeitung, 1786, p. 45, quoted in O. Michtner, Das alte Burgtheater, p. 198.

“Fu molto applaudito lo spettacolo ed ammirata la bravura della Signora Storace”. Gazzetta di Napoli, vol 10. I take the quote from D. Link, “The Da Ponte Operas”, p. 64, who quotes in turn Ulisse Prota-Giurleo, “Del compositore spagnuolo Vicente Martín y Soler, Archivi 27 (1960), pp. 145-56; 151.

W. A. Mozart, 4 vols. (Leipzig, 1856-59), IV: 183, quoted in Michtner, Das alte Burgtheater, p. 399.

“Il m’ennuya un peu”. Zinzendorf, entry for January 11, 1786, quoted in O. Michtner, Das alte Burgtheater, p. 399.

L. Da Ponte, Memorias, p. 88.

L. Da Ponte, Extract, p. 10, quoted in D. Link, “The Da Ponte Operas”, p. 30.

D. Link, “The Da Ponte Operas”, p. 30.

D. Link’s translation, in “The Da Ponte Operas”, p. 32.

D. Link, “The Da Ponte Operas”, pp. 31-33, 81-87.

González Porto-Bompiani, Diccionario Literario, 10 vols (Barcelona: Montaner y Simón, 1959), V: 427.

D. Link, “The Da Ponte Operas”, p. 87.

I use Avancinio Avancini’s edition: Il burbero benefico: commedia in tre atti di Carlo Goldoni, Collana di cultura classica (Milan: Vallardi, 1935).

Term used by Algirdas Julien Greimas in Structural semantics, interpreted from the French by H.S. Gill. (New Delhi: Bahri Publications, 1989).

In the Introductions to Una cosa rara y L’arbore di Diana.

Baltasar Saldoni, Diccionario biográfico-bibliográfico de efemérides de músicos españoles (Madrid: Imprenta Antonio Pérez Dubrull, 1868-81). Facsimile edition by Jacinto Torres (Madrid: Centro de Documentación Musical, 1986).

The reader may find a summary of available data (with new documentary findings) about Martín y Soler’s youth in Rainer Leonhard Kleinertz, “Zwischen Neapel und Madrid: Vicente Martín y Soler und das Spanische Königshaus”, Anuario Musical 51 (1996): 165-75. Previously Ulisse Prota-Giurleo had gathered important information about the Neapolitan years of the composer: “Del compositore spagnuolo Vincente Martín y Soler”, Archivi 27 (1960): 145-56. For a panoramic view of the composer’s life, the best source is Dorothea Link, “The Da Ponte Operas of Vicente Martín y Soler”, University of Toronto, 1991. (Chap. 1: Martin’s career). There are some additional data in the recent Vicente Martín y Soler by Giuseppe de Matteis and Gianni Marata (Valencia: Institució Alfons el Magnànim y Diputació de Valencia, 2001).

Modern edition by Juan Bautista Otero, Isidro Olmo Castillo, Manuel Forcano and Óscar Gil (Barcelona: Real Compañía Ópera de Cámara, 1999).

It has been preserved there both in the original version and in an arrangement as a zarzuela with spoken dialogue, under the name of La madrileña.

Mary Hunter, “Bourgeois Values and Opera Buffa in 1780s Vienna”, in Opera buffa in Mozart’s Vienna, ed. Mary Hunter and James Webster (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 165-96 and Christine Martin, Vicente Martín y Solers Oper Una cosa rara: Geschichte eines Opererfolg im 18. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim:Georg Olms, 2001), pp. 88 ff, dispute the validity of the concept of “pastoral” in this context, proposing as a more adequate substitution that of “naive”.

An adequate description of these styles, as well as of “song style” may be read in D. Link, “The Da Ponte Operas”, Chapter 5.

D. Link, “The Da Ponte Operas”, pp. 135-53, discusses some small irregularities that lend interest to the style.

Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, transl. J. Bardford Robinson, California Studies in 19th Century Music, 5 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 8-14. Original German edition, Wiesbaden 1980. I take the liberty of projecting into the past a phenomenon that Dahlhaus discusses from Rossini and Beethoven onward.

“Avendo a Pasqua queste sei opere, per non parlare del Figaro, che pur non dispiace, della Cosa rara, e dell’ Axur, senza pruove e fatiche, ci resterà commodo e tempo bastante di sceglierne, e di comporne (e sarà questo preciso impegno dell’ onestà mia) per le nuove virtuose, e di adattare le parti alle loro capacità, e generi”. L. Da Ponte, “Memoria alla Direzione”, p. 442.

D. Link, “The Da Ponte Operas”, p. 153.

Cf. D. Link’s analysis of Ferramondo’s aria examined earlier: not finding “a succession of harmonic goals” such as she discerns in Mozart or Paisiello, and ignoring the dramatic acceleration we have described, she concludes that “Ferramondo’s aria lacks a degree of forward drive and formal clarity that makes the aria seem long”(p. 132).

This is usually called “sonatina form”.

See for example a non-sonata scheme in Angelica’s aria, I / 8.