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Both the composer Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari and 18th Century playwright Carlo Goldoni grew up in Venice but left Italy to live a large part of their lives in exile abroad. Nevertheless, the city of their birth is proud of both artists and it's not surprising that La Fenice should have chosen an opera that binds them together as a celebration of Goldoni's tercentenary in 2007.
Wolf-Ferrari actually wrote five tuneful Puccini-esque operas based on Goldoni plays: as well as La vedova scaltra (1931), there's Le donne curiose (1903), I Quattro Rusteghi (1906), Gli amanti sposi (1916) and Il Campiello (1936).
The one recorded here, La vedova scaltra, after the early commedia dell'Arte-based comedy usually translated as The Artful Widow, is in some ways less successful than the others. This is in large part due to the source material. Goldoni began his career writing for the out-dated commedia troupes and this play is little more than a transcription of a typical commedia scenario.
The other operas are based on his later, more naturalistic, comedies and lend themselves much more comfortably to operatic treatment. In Il Campiello in particular, he succeeded in capturing the airiness and sunny feel of the small Venetian square which witnesses the comings and goings of ordinary folk during a Summer's day.
The quicksilver physical comedy that typifies the earliest plays is less easily accommodated within operatic convention. As a result, the comedy tends to be clunky and static and the halting nature of opera drags everything out. Acts tend to fizzle out and some episodes are painfully slow.
Massimo Gasparon's production exacerbates this problem, not least by setting it in the 19th Century, an era antithetical to the freedom and licentiousness of Goldoni's time. It feels too much like a Lehar opera much of the time, a world apart from that of the Italian playwright (some of this is down to Wolf-Ferrari's music; it is after all his La vedova scaltra and not Goldoni's).
The director tries to inject some of the spirit of the original with the use of stylised movement but this by and large misfires. Spaniards walk strangely with arms in the air, the French suitor Monsieur Le Bleau (Emanuele D'Aguanno) adopts grotesquely effeminate poses and Arlecchino (Alex Esposito) externalises gestures which come nowhere close to the physicality needed for the character.
The story involves four nobles – a Frenchman, Italian, Spaniard and Englishman (Milord Runebif!) – who vie for the attentions of the widow Donna Rosaura. Little more need be said except that she puts each to the test and finds them all wanting. All but the Italian that is, whose offer of marriage she finally accepts (imagine an English opera where all foreigners are proven fickle and only the Englishman is up to scratch!).
The music is generally of a high standard, with more than acceptable singing (except maybe for the Conte of Mark Milhofer, something of a bleater). As Rosaura and her maid, Anne-Lise Sollied and Elena Rossi are both voluptuous of appearance and sound, although the latter also suffers from a tendency to exaggerated gestures.
The staging is traditional and spectacular and in the second half (the interval comes in the middle of Act 2), they revert to 18th Century clothes, presumably under the pretext that they are all attending the costume ball that closes the work.
The biggest problem with the production is a wedding cake approach, with everything too clean and just a bit twee. Goldoni was writing about real people ("His stage is peopled with grocers and fishmongers" jeers Olivier the poet in Strauss' Capriccio) and not marionettes, which is how they're treated here.
However, Wolf-Ferrari's delightful and under-valued operas are seldom heard and seen, even on CD and DVD, so this release is welcome, whatever the shortcomings.
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