Arias for a Tenor from Mozart's Vienna

Vincenzo Calvesi (fl. 1777-1811), the tenor-turned-impresario who created the role of Ferrando in Così fan tutte, was, in Dorothea Link's words, "obviously very good" (p. ix). Throughout his career, Calvesi sang predominantly in dramma giocoso, beginning in Rome. After his known debut in 1777, he had engagements in Florence, Lucca, Trieste, Verona, Padua, Treviso, and Venice before arriving in Dresden in 1781, where he stayed until 1784. Before settling in Vienna in 1785, Calvesi sang in Bologna and twice more in Trieste. Of the twenty-four known roles of Calvesi's early career, twenty-two were comedic—dramma giocoso (twenty) and opera buffa (two). Upon arriving in Vienna, Calvesi sang Sandrino in Giovanni Paisiello's Il re Teodoro in Venezia. Calvesi's versatility as a lyric tenor enabled him to create several leading roles, in addition to Ferrando, for Martín y Soler (Una cosa rara and L'arbore di Diana), Antonio Salieri (La grotto di Trofonio and Axur, re d'Ormus), and Stephen Storace (Gli sposi malcontenti and Gli equivoci). Aside from 1788-89 when he sang in Naples (Annibale in Pasquale Anfossi's I matrimoni per fanatismo, Pantaleo in Domenico Cimarosa's I due supposti conti, Leandro in Vincenzo Fabrizi's L'incontro per accidente, and Marchese Astolfo in Pietro Alessandro Guglielmi's La pastorella nobile), Calvesi was a fixture in the Viennese operatic world. He would sing the last of these roles again, in Vienna, in 1791. Calvesi remained in Vienna through 1793, after which he returned to Rome for the 1794 carnival season. His last known singing engagement was on 4 April 1795 in Florence, where he sang the primo mezzo carattere role in Paisiello's I zingari in fiera. Upon retiring from singing, he became one of the foremost impresarios in Rome, working from circa 1796 and continuing at least until 1811. It appears that he was less successful as an impresario than as a singer. While Link offers few details, she highlights the financial difficulties of at least one company with which Calvesi worked.

Link's collection of arias written for Calvesi reveals his strengths as a singer, situates the social role of the primo tenore in late-eighteenth-century Vienna, and places him in the development of the tenor voice. One of the most striking aspects of Link's description of Calvesi is her defense of him as a first-rate singer. Since Così premiered in Calvesi's fifth season in Vienna, Mozart had many prior opportunities to observe him in at least twenty-one roles, and even contributed music for him in Francesco Bianchi's La villanella rapita in 1785. Link astutely postulates that the difficulty of the music for Ferrando reflects the high regard in which Mozart held Calvesi and his singing technique.

Many have cast suspicion on Calvesi's abilities, often claiming that Mozart himself cut the aria, "Ah lo veggio quell'anima bella," from Ferrando's part during the initial production. Link reveals the two assumptions feeding this claim are erroneous. One is that Mozart did eliminate the aria; the other is that its thirteen high B-flats were too much for Calvesi. For the first of these, Link points to Ian Woodfield's recent study (Mozart's Così fan tutte: A Compositional History [Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell, 2008]) that reveals a misreading of Mozart's annotations in the autograph regarding the aria. Link reiterates Woodfield's conclusion that because Mozart did not cross out "segue l'aria di ferrando" (sic, p. ix), the two remarks in the autograph form a single instruction for the court theater's copyist, "Ferrando's aria follows; after this comes scene 7: accompanied recitative for Fiordiligi and rondò" (p. x). Link asserts that while significant cuts occurred within...