La Cenerentola, ossia, La bonta in Trionfo: Dramma giocoso in due atti (review)

Gioachino Rossini. La Cenerentola, ossia La bontà in trionfo. Dramma giocoso in due atti di Jacopo Ferretti. Prima rappresentazione: Roma--Teatro Valle, 25 gennaio 1817. A cura di Alberto Zedda. (Edizione critica delle opere. Sez. 1: Opere teatrali, vol. 20.) Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, c1998. [Vol. 1: Atto primo. Introd., p. v; indice, p. vii; abbrevs., p. viii; tavola delle fonti principali, ix-x; premessa, p. xi; criteri dell'edizione, p. xiii-xx; pref., p. xxi-li; organico, p. liii; personaggi, p. lv; indice dei pezzi, p. lvii-lix; score, p. 1-685. Vol. 2: Atto secondo; appendici. Score, p. 687-1066; appendici, p. 1067-1115. Cloth. Commento critico. 216 p. L 350,000 (set).]

Stendhal complained that only a short way into the introduzione of Gioachino Rossini's La Cenerentola, he was "[afflicted] with a faint feeling of nausea," that the feeling "never entirely dissipated, [recurred] periodically throughout the opera, and with increasing violence" (Life of Rossini, trans. and annotated by Richard N. Coe, rev. ed. [London: Calder & Boyars, 1970], 244). He blamed his malaise on the absence of "idealism" in the music, a "banality" that failed to transport his imagination. It may be that such uneasiness about the opera was also provoked by its semiseria characteristics, a tendency to confuse the listener at times by the mix of light and dark, essential components of a genre that called for at least one basso buffo and a semitragic heroine. As much as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart balanced these elements with the utmost care in Don Giovanni, one could complain that in La Cenerentola Rossini carried them to extreme by making too stark juxtapositions rather than seamless transitions. Thus when Stendhal says the introduzione is problematic, it may well be that even the average listener may also react with surprise and some discomfort to Angelina's (La Cenerentola's) canzona, prophetic D-minor verses planted lament-like and sung in tuono flemmatico in the midst of a G-major Allegro con brio.

This moment is something of an epiphany, for it projects several things about the opera in both its music and its text. First, this Cinderella is really having a bad time of it, perhaps in too realistic a way, even to the horrible extent that her stepfather is willing to say she's dead rather than admit that a third daughter lives in the house. She is a Cinderella that is truly ashen--there is no fairy godmother, no Disneyesque pumpkins or mice, and, worst of all, no glass slipper. Magic has been exchanged for morality, projected at once in a simple plaint. Of course, both composer and librettist were keenly aware of this, having borrowed the story line from at least two previous Cinderella librettos and being forced to defer to the staging limitations of the Teatro Valle.

There are musical implications as well, however, and these are rather startling, because in so many ways La Cenerentola has got to be one of Rossini's most quicksilver and nearly breathlessly-paced works. Thus Angelina's canzona arrives nearly first on the scene, and, somewhat like a lump of coal in a Christmas stocking, seems to spoil the fun, a misplaced organism in an ecology that otherwise shimmers for its speed and wit. But this could very well be a misreading, since these darker aspects of the opera could be viewed just as easily as enriching, a humanization on both dramatic and musical grounds of a tale too long trapped in an inaccessible dream world. Moreover, the sensitive and transparent profile of the canzona reflects upon other details of the score, most especially in individual musical settings of such important words as bontà or perdono, where a simple syllabic musical rendering stands out in an environment that is otherwise characteristically frenetic and at times even wildly ornamental.

Rossini composed La Cenerentola for the Teatro Valle in Rome in just over three weeks in January 1817, almost as quickly as...