Rossini: L'equivoco stravagante (Complete opera)

"In L'Equivoco Stravagante, his first evening-length opera buffa, Rossini emerges full-grown, like Athena from the head of Zeus. The opera is unmistakably the work of the composer of II Barbiere di Siviglia.

Naxos's recording makes an excellent case for the opera. The live-performance provenance is a definite plus: for once the applause at the end of numbers seems less like an intrusion than like an intrinsic component of the work itself. Veteran Rossini conductor and scholar Alberto Zedda leads a buoyant performance, in which the warm, intimate acoustic flatters his excellent Czech players. The cast is accomplished...with incisive diction and alert musicality. The one standout is the recording's Ernestina, the young Bulgarian mezzo Petia Petrova. She's a lively, vivid vocal presence, with the technique to sail through the virtuoso passagework."
- Fred Cohn, Opera News, December 2002

"Rossini specialist Alberto Zedda leads a buoyant performance. He summons superb playing and singing from the Czech Chamber Chorus and Czech Chamber Soloists. Petia Petrova and Dario Schmunck make an appealing pair of lovers. They shine in their solos and join the rest of the cast in an exhilarating account of the quintet that caps the second act."
- Robert Baxter, Courier-Post, October 4, 2002

It is not certain when the Rossini family settled definitively in Bologna. Already in the spring of 1805, in any case, we find the thirteen-year-old Gioachino registered for the courses in cello, piano and counterpoint at the newly established Liceo Filarmonico; in the autumn came his stage début as a singer, a treble, in an opera by Paër; the following year he has the title of Philharmonic Academician and is starting busy activity as a harpsichordist in various institutions in the city. In 1810 came his unexpected début in Venice as a composer of opera, the one-act farsa La cambiale di matrimonio ('The Bill of Marriage'), the success of which opened the final doors for him in Bologna; he was entrusted with the following season at the Teatro del Corso, where he would perform two operas by others and a third new work of his own composition. On 26th October 1811 L'equivoco stravagante was born, the first of the seven great opere buffe that were to ornament his twenty-year operatic career.

Notwithstanding the favourable reception of the work by the public, the opera was the victim of a series of problems with the censors: the librettist Gaetano Gasbarri had overdone the use of suggestive situations and many double entendres were too obvious; the diligent state official had then imposed not a few cuts and modifications, yet without taking account of certain allusions that might be passed over in reading but became clear in Rossini's setting, which underlined rather than concealed them. It so turned out that after three performances the opera was banned, and there are no certain records of later performances throughout the nineteenth century (the opera staged in Trieste in 1825 under the same title was in fact a patchwork of music by Rossini on another subject), so much so that Rossini himself went on to plunder the score extensively, distributing various ideas and even whole pieces in later operas, from La pietra di paragone ('The Touchstone') to Tancredi, from La scala di seta (The Silken Ladder) to Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra (Elisabeth, Queen of England).

The libretto, indeed, was not simply rubbish and had been written more than a century earlier. It is a licentious work, to be sure, but linguistically refined, written by a well-read author, skilled in those plays on words that are its distinctive feature and that make the text much more modern than the date of its original registration would suggest. It is a continuing parody of Metastasio, with the ironic quotation of complete lines; Dal dono imparo il donator qual sia (From the gift the donor learns in a measure), in the recitative after Ernestina and Buralicchio's duet, comes directly from the great librettist's Didone; and Rossini underlines it, as he would, with the particular figuration of the basso continuo throughout the opera; here he satirises his nouveaux riches who, having passed on from the hoe to philosophy, have turned themselves into masters of a learned vocabulary that is ill understood, with consequent verbal exaggerations: 'enti' (beings) or 'mortali' (mortals) rather than simply 'persone', the Arcadian 'pupille tenere' (tender eyes) that becomes 'pupille elastiche' (flexible eyes), and so on, and they reduce rules of etiquette to their own image and likeness with amusing results (to compliment a person the form of salutation becomes the excessive 'The meadow has not such turnips, / the garden has not such pumpkins / as great as my compliments / with which I complimentarily compliment you').

Linguistic subtleties are used to obtain a broadly comic effect, therefore, not least in the denunciation of a social problem very prevalent at the time, yet transformed by the comic element around which the whole action centres, the strange misunderstanding of the title: the arrival of the troops of Napoleon in Italy (and this was still during the period of total occupation) among many innovations had imposed a ban on the castration of boys, a practice carried on for more than a century in the pursuit of a career in opera. Fallen into disgrace as artists, by this time held in derision by public opinion, for such young and no longer young men, who, notwithstanding the mutilation, had not succeeded in finding employment in the field of music, it remained only to lurk on the margins of society, wearing women's clothes. So the leading characters in our opera pretend, in jest, but the apparent joke must refer to a number of actual people. If it is considered that the comic turn of events persuades the female heroine, believed to be a eunuch (or 'musician', as was the euphemistic description of the time), to dress in her turn in men's clothes, the clear result is to drive to an extreme the sexual ambiguity of the text.

The music of Rossini, then barely nineteen, is already fully mature, particularly in ensembles, so that it is in no way inferior to analogous parts of subsequent masterpieces: the capacity to drive the action forward in music, without the music slowing it down, or the action and the necessarily intelligible words affecting adversely the flow of the music, is already the distinctive mark of writing as complex as that of the Quartet (No.6, CD 1 [12]), the Quintet (No.15, CD 2 [8]) and the two act Finales (No.10, CD 1 [20] & [21], and No.19, CD 2 [15]), and greater than might be found in the comic scores of contemporary composers. There is even a certain rhythmic and melodic mechanical skill that will make the fortune of memorable operatic passages to follow already perceptible in ensemble passages such as 'Mi brilla l'anima - Per il contento' in the first Finale.

The whole opera centred on the figure of Marietta Marcolini, revealed as a mainstay of the first part of Rossini's career, playing leading rôles in La pietra del paragone, Ciro in Babilonia, L'italiana in Algeri, and Sigismondo, later replaced, in art and perhaps in his heart, by the still more pervasive presence of Isabella Colbran, the composer's future wife. The more typical opera buffa rôles of the period revolve around the contralto prima donna, the young tenor who aspires to the girl's hand, contrasted with the different plans of two buffo basses (here the father and the future husband). The happy ending is naturally assured.
Marco Beghelli