Margherita d'Anjou (review)

This recording of Meyerbeer's Margherita d'Anjou marks one of Opera Rara's recent forays into the byways of early nineteenth-century Italian opera. This melodramma semiseria, to a libretto by Romani, had its premiere at La Scala on 14 November 1820. It is the fourth of the seven operas Meyerbeer composed in Italy between 1817 and 1824. Margherita d'Anjou achieved a fair measure of success, totaling nearly forty productions, some in French and German translation as well as in the original Italian, according to the performance history by Tom Kaufman included in the informative booklet that accompanies this set. Its last nineteenth-century production was that of its U.S. premiere in New Orleans in April 1854.

The plot is a gallimaufry of unmotivated actions and improbable encounters, disguises, and unexpected switches of loyalty, the whole very loosely derived from English history. Margherita is the widow of King Henry VI, haplessly involved in battles on the Scottish border to ensure the succession of her son, Prince Edward. The sequence of events is much more concerned with providing the occasion for a series of choruses, solos, duets, and other ensembles than with dramatic logic. Considering the social preoccupations of audiences in undarkened opera houses in the first half of the nineteenth century, the plot of Margherita d'Anjou was for its time appropriately functional, if scarcely engrossing.

Meyerbeer provides an apt background of martial music to Romani's plot, starting with a jaunty sinfonia militare, further sustained in subsequent choral passages. His competence as a composer is always in evidence: independent bass lines, carefully balanced harmonic sequences, fetching contrasts of orchestral color; but what is too often lacking is the melodic impetus that would sweep all before it. In the 1820s there existed in Italy a cliché contrasting German and Italian music; the former too cerebral, the latter all heartfelt spontaneity. In the score of Margherita d'Anjou one can feel Meyerbeer's dogged efforts to reconcile these contrasting tendencies. Sometimes a cabaletta begins with an engaging jauntiness, but that expressive ease is rarely sustained through a complete number. In this way, I have found coming across a complete Margherita d'Anjou—an encounter I never expected to occur—both fascinating and frustrating.

The score covers a wide range of musical styles. Besides the military choruses there is a contrasting one at the beginning of act 2, a pastorale for the Scottish peasantry. Important two-part arias for the three leading characters are strategically placed. There are two trios for baritones and basses, a comic one in act 1 and a sinister one in act 2. Act 1 ends with a massive finale, and in act 2 an ingenious septet precedes a final air with variations. As this last is sung by the mezzo Isaura rather than Margherita herself, Opera Rara has maintained a balance favoring the prima donna by appending as a bonus an authentic revision of Margherita's act 2 aria.

The cast assembled by Opera Rara confronts Meyerbeer's strenuous vocal demands with considerable aplomb. In the title role, soprano Annick Massis has not completely integrated her command of coloratura embellishment into her attractive lyric soprano. In the leading mezzo role of Isaura, Daniela Barcellona gives a highly creditable performance of a role composed for the great Rosa Mariani, who two years later would be the first Arsace. Barcellona's tone is a bit hooded in the lower octave where her lines frequently stray, but she manages scalar passages into her upper register with commendable fleetness.

The important tenor role of Lavarenne, created by Nicola Tacchinardi, the father of Fanny Persiani, is in the capable hands of Bruce Ford. His tone is a bit dry, but vocal challenges he surmounts easily and he possesses a tidy trill. He has a spacious double aria in each of the two acts.

Fabio Previati, in the role of Michele, a French physician who protects Isaura when she is disguised as young Eugenio, proves himself a baritone equally effective in both parlando passages and more lyrical ones. In the role of the turncoat...