Giulia e Sesto Pompeo (review)

Here's a pleasant surprise. Carlo Soliva (1791–1853) is truly a forgotten composer; when was the last time one of his operas was revived in a staged performance? Not unlike Mascagni, Soliva enjoyed an early success that he was unable to duplicate. His La testa di bronzo (first performed at La Scala in 1816) earned the praise of Stendhal and was performed in Naples, Venice, and Dresden. None of Soliva's subsequent operas created quite as much initial excitement or displayed any real staying power in the repertory. The conventional wisdom about Soliva is that he found the competition of Rossini overwhelming. But this explanation is probably too facile; other composers of the era, faced with the success of Rossini's operas, kept right on working. Although Soliva lived until 1853, he abandoned opera in the mid-1820s—ironically, only a few years before Rossini himself retired from the operatic stage, after Guillaume Tell (1829).

It was enterprising of Radio Svizzera to revive not La testa di bronzo, which would have been the obvious choice, but Giulia e Sesto Pompeo (1818). Here is a full-fledged opera seria, competing directly with similar works by Rossini, that exudes mature confidence.

The performance makes use of a new critical edition of the score. CPO admits (booklet, p. 4) that a brief scene for the chorus in act 1, beginning with the words "Tacciano i venti," is missing: "The original scene is no longer extant. Here it has been recorded in 'symbolic form' with a declaimed chorus based on Daniel Steibelt's (1765–1823) piano piece 'L'orage.'" What CPO means by the phrase "recorded in 'symbolic form'" is anybody's guess. Nor is it at all clear why music by Steibelt was adapted to fill the gap, rather than some piece chosen from one of Soliva's other operas. What is heard on the recording is an orchestral prelude with a prominent fortepiano part, depicting the storm, followed by the chorus—which is definitely sung, not "declaimed." (CPO does not tell us who was responsible for the adaptation, including the orchestration.) The entire sequence lasts two and a half minutes and is quite effective. If we hadn't been told, we might never have suspected that we were not listening to anything but pure Soliva. Nothing is said about cuts. Act 1 runs for seventy-five minutes in this performance, which is entirely plausible; but act 2, at a mere forty-seven minutes, seems a bit short for an opera seria of this vintage. Certainly some of the recitatives throughout the performance are concise to the point of terseness.

Soliva is known to have admired Mozart's La clemenza di Tito, and Giulia e Sesto Pompeo almost seems to have been modeled upon the Mozart work. Both operas feature a decidedly inept conspirator named Sesto, who is ultimately pardoned by his intended victim. There are musical similarities as well. Soliva's Fulvia, who is one angry woman, reminds the listener of Mozart's Vitellia more than once. And compare Mozart's "Ah, grazie si rendano al sommo fattor" (in act 2 of Tito) with Soliva's "Dalle cimmerie grotte uscì cupa la notte" (the number that begins act 2 of Giulia e Sesto Pompeo): the resemblance in musical layout and mood is surely too close to be entirely coincidental.

The libretto, by Benedetto Perotti, is a bit of a mess, but at least it is messy in an interesting way. Four of the characters are based on historical figures: Octavian, Mark Antony, Sextus Pompeius, and Mark Antony's wife, Fulvia. Octavian and Mark Antony, together with Lepidus, formed the Second Triumvirate (the libretto refers to them as "i Triumviri," even though—since Lepidus is not mentioned—there seem to be only two of them). Sextus Pompeius, the son of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (also known as Pompey the Great), was their enemy. (This is the same Sextus who appears as a character in Handel's Giulio Cesare and in Lucan's epic Pharsalia or The Civil War.) The libretto mentions other historical characters (Julius...