L'amante di tutte (review)
- L’amante di tutte
Brave Galuppi! That was music! good alike at grave and gay!
I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play!
Baldassare Galuppi (1706-1786) was long dead when Robert Browning wrote his wonderful poem "A Toccata of Galuppi's," in which he evokes the glittering world of Galuppi's native Venice at carnival time. Elsewhere in the poem, [End Page 752] Browning's imagery was sent wondering about the composer surrounded by the stirring events in Venice "while you sat and played Toccatas, stately at the clavichord."
Keyboard sonatas and toccatas, along with a few chamber works, have long constituted the recorded output of this once highly eminent and influential composer, with a virtual disregard of his operatic output. Galuppi wrote almost a hundred operas, both in the serious and the comic vein, starting with settings of Metastasio and, after 1749, continuing with a large number of widely acclaimed comic operas, largely written to Carlo Goldoni's expert librettos. By then Galuppi was established as maestro di capella at St. Mark's and had been to London, where he made many friends. Charles Burney, who was among them, believed that Galuppi's operas "abounded in fancy, fire, and feeling," and regarded him, next to Niccolò Jommelli (1714-1774), the best among living Italian opera composers.1
For many years contemporary criticism tended to accept the belief that Italian comic operas began with Paisiello and Cimarosa, though properly recognizing the ill-fated Pergolesi's one-acter, La serva padrona (1733), as a masterpiece. More recently there has been welcome interest in the works of Pergolesi's contemporary Niccolò Piccinni (1728-1800), particularly in his La Cecchina, ossia La buona figliuola of 1760. It achieved worldwide success in its day, and two recent recordings affirm the belief that this opera represents a true benchmark in the development of opera buffa.
Galuppi's L'amante di tutte dates from the same year. The librettist was not the remarkable Goldoni but rather the composer's son, Antonio Galuppi, using the pseudonym A. Liteo. This work is not on the level of the earlier (1754) Il filosofo di campagna, reputed to be the composer's best opera, with a Goldoni libretto (Bongiovanni 2256/58), but it is an enjoyable piece nonetheless. The characters are vividly drawn from real life in the Goldoni fashion. They are participants in a domestic drama that unfolds within the traditional opera buffa parameters. Conte Eugenio is wooing the three female leads in the plot at the same time: Lucinda, the wife of the party's host Don Orazio; her servant Dorina; and a guest, Clarice, an ultrasensitive lady who cannot tolerate loud noises or unpleasant smells. Don Orazio suspects his wife of infidelity and, with the half-hearted cooperation of his servant Mingone, pretends to be absent while eavesdropping on the guests' conversations. In the end Conte Eugenio is caught in the trap of his own conflicting amorous entanglements, Don Orazio realizes that his jealousy has been unfounded, and there is general reconciliation. While the story may suggest anticipatory elements of Don Giovanni (nearly three decades in the future), it is really quite a chaste comedy of manners, too artificial to reveal any sexual undertones.
L'amante di tutte is in three short acts, preceded by a brief overture in three contrasting sections. The orchestra, limited to strings and continuo, never obscures the vocal lines yet provides a lively and constantly varied underpinning to the dramatic action. Brevity prevails: the arias are short, in two-part form, usually with some variations in melody or rhythm, and the equally brief recitatives effectively carry the action forward. (The performance credits [End Page 753] V[irgilio] Mortari with a revision that may have contributed to the flowing continuity of the current edition.) Galuppi was one of the early masters who perfected the concertato finales, but this opera reveals only modest examples of an art that was to reach perfection in Mozart. In the first-act finale of L'amante di tutte, Don Orazio emerges from his hiding place and reveals, citing fragments of conversation, all...
