Historians attempt to be exact, so it’s awkward to confess that I can’t recall precisely after I first seen the existence of an opera by Carolina Uccelli. In some unspecified time in the future, perhaps about six years in the past, the identify jumped out at me from an inventory. I do recall my response. A feminine composer received an opera onto the stage in 1835? With an all-star solid? She will need to have been extraordinary!
That was the beginning of a journey that culminates this month with the fashionable premiere of Uccelli’s “Anna di Resburgo” by the Teatro Nuovo firm, in Montclair, N.J., on July 20 and in New York on the 24. Uccelli was certainly extraordinary, and so is the only surviving opera by which we will assess her skills. Behind it lies a human story, touching and considerably unhappy, to which there’s now an opportunity so as to add a contented postscript.
Italian opera was the only best and economically vital department of music worldwide within the early nineteenth century. No feminine composer ever established herself in it. Success for girls, on the time, meant publishing miniatures for the salon, and Uccelli achieved that whereas nonetheless in her teenagers. However conceiving entire music-dramas and wrangling them by {the marketplace} was a gritty, cutthroat enterprise; no one may think about a lady pursuing it.
The courageous teenager who tried to make herself an exception was born Carolina Pazzini, in 1810, to an upper-class Florentine household. She had thorough musical coaching and gained a precocious native repute for her singing and keyboard improvisations. Round 1827, when Italy’s main writer issued an album of her ariettas, she married the widower Filippo Uccelli, a celebrated and typically controversial doctor who was supportive of her inconceivable ambitions. He handed alongside to journalists a letter from Gioachino Rossini in reward of her first opera, “Saul,” produced in Florence in 1830. He in all probability additionally paid a few of its prices; considered one of Filippo’s college students later wrote disapprovingly that the nice physician had squandered what ought to have been his sons’ inheritance on the “caprices” of their younger stepmother.
The opening evening of “Saul” was by all accounts a triumph, however later in its run got here proof of the unfairness that might greet a lady stepping exterior her anticipated sphere. The Harmonicon in London reported that “the Florentines have been making themselves merry, as properly in verse as in prose, upon this girl’s manufacturing, and the excessive and mighty safety which Rossini is understood to have afforded her.” The German periodical Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung allowed itself a baseless trace that Rossini’s curiosity might need been extra in Uccelli’s magnificence than in her expertise. The Florence journal Il Censore rebuked the theater for giving place to “female vainness.”
Others got here to the debutante’s protection, however it was clear that even after a promising begin, the highway forward wouldn’t be straightforward. It grew to become tougher when Filippo died in 1832, leaving the composer a widow at 22 with a younger youngster to boost. However Alessandro Lanari, the impresario who had managed the “Saul” premiere, believed in her. In 1834 he was contracted to run the royal theaters of Naples, and there — after appreciable problem in persuading the courtroom committee that needed to approve his plans — he introduced “Anna di Resburgo” to the stage the next 12 months.
Just one copy of “Anna” survives right now, housed within the huge assortment of the Naples Conservatory. It takes time to learn an opera from a manuscript orchestral rating. It’s a must to decipher the calligraphy earlier than you can begin imagining the sounds, and this one is a very hasty job, stuffed with errors and none too clear. However as I picked my manner by it, appreciation progressively turned to admiration and ultimately to outright amazement. This was the work of a born opera composer. This was the true factor.
Right here is a method of placing it. Bel canto operas are structured in particular person numbers — cavatina, duet, finale and so forth — and “Anna” is fabricated from 12 such numbers. Not a single one is boring; not one seems like padding, not one fails to embody and advance the story, not one falls within the unsuitable place. The 20-something newbie had a grasp’s grasp of opera as drama.
So why don’t we find out about her? There are in all probability two principal causes. One is that — not like Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann or Alma Mahler — Uccelli didn’t have a well-known musical man within the household to attract consideration. The opposite has to do with the destiny of the work being revived this month.
The story of “Anna di Resburgo” (“Anne of Roxburgh”) is haunted by two feudal lords who’ve died earlier than it begins — one murdered by the opposite in hope of seizing his lands. The killer left the dagger within the wound, then waited for the sufferer’s son to enter the room and be caught with weapon in hand. That son (the tenor of the opera) has fled into exile. His spouse (Anna) has gone into hiding and left her toddler son to be raised as an unknown orphan. The responsible patriarch confessed on his deathbed to his personal son and inheritor (the baritone of the opera), however the latter, stricken with disgrace, has chosen to hide the confession.
The motion of the opera sees all this undone. The exile returns; the usurper acknowledges the orphan and has him seized; the dad and mom reveal themselves prone to loss of life. Anna, in a climactic scene, perceives the baritone’s responsible conscience and confronts him. When the condemned husband is about to be executed beside his father’s grave, the remorseful man reveals his personal father’s crime, and a contented ending is snatched from the jaws of tragedy.
Uccelli was not granted such a contented ending; she had stumbled into the worst luck possible. Her opera was a rousing Scottish story of rival households and stolen lands, concluding with a dramatic scene within the ancestral cemetery. How may she have guessed that the premiere simply earlier than her personal would share precisely these traits? It was known as “Lucia di Lammermoor.” Tracing the chronology in hindsight is like watching the proverbial slow-motion movie of an imminent practice wreck.
The soprano Fanny Tacchinardi Persiani sang the premiere of “Anna” on Oct. 29, 1835, simply 4 days after her seventeenth Lucia. She had been driving the Neapolitan viewers to frenzies of applause with Lucia’s mad scene ever for the reason that opening evening in September. Anna is a superb position, however it doesn’t comprise something fairly like that. And it will have taken a miracle for the very subsequent opera, set in the identical atmosphere (Lammermuir Hills and Roxburgh are solely 30 miles aside) and certain performed on the identical surroundings (particularly the 2 concluding tomb scenes), to be evaluated open-mindedly by a public besotted with Donizetti’s new masterpiece. There was a second efficiency of “Anna” on Nov. 3, after which the administration turned to repetitions of operas from earlier within the season.
Good operas may flop. “La Traviata” and “Madama Butterfly” famously did so at first. However Verdi and Puccini had been established stars; their fiascos had been sure to get a re-evaluation. Uccelli was not solely a newbie, but in addition one who had pushed herself into a spot the place many felt a lady had no enterprise. No person got here to the rescue with a revival of “Anna”; Uccelli by no means obtained one other theatrical contract, and may not even have sought one.
She stayed musically energetic with frequent personal and public performances, revealed songs in Italian and French, and made an impression adequate to win one of many extraordinarily few entries for feminine composers within the “Biographie Universelle des Musiciens” of François-Joseph Fétis. Star singers usually joined in her recitals, reviewed with favor by critics all through Europe, however mixing in with a typical season’s live performance fare quite than standing out as a theatrical hit would have accomplished. In 1852 Uccelli and her soprano daughter Emma had been featured at one of many celebrated Parisian salons hosted by Rossini, who a long time earlier had supported Carolina’s bid for a spot on the males’s desk in opera.
Was she blissful? Did she make peace with the profession out there to her? The one identified portrait dates from someday within the center 1840s, and it’s haunting: a gifted lady gazing into the space at what might need been. I hope the revival of “Anna” will stimulate analysis; after spending a part of every single day for greater than a 12 months enhancing her opera, I lengthy to know extra in regards to the individual behind it.
A brief discover in L’Italia Musicale in March 1858 knowledgeable readers of Uccelli’s loss of life in Florence. By the point her identify got here up within the Gazzetta Musicale di Milano just a few a long time later, its correspondent may write that “if Fétis had not talked about her, we might scarcely know of her existence,” and that state of affairs may simply have been everlasting. Most of her music is misplaced; of “Saul” we’ve no hint. The revealed salon items, whereas elegant and idiomatically pleasing, wouldn’t by themselves have recommended a big theatrical expertise. However in opposition to all chance, the survival of 1 copy of 1 opera provides her an opportunity to talk for herself within the twenty first century.
Higher late than by no means. We will’t know what operas Uccelli might need written if she had been granted the profession she so boldly sought, however the one she did depart behind is a gem. On web page after web page, she exhibits not simply the reassurance and expressiveness Rossini counseled, however a daring capability to experiment. A duet between solo flute and timpani? A spirited Italian cabaletta repeated within the tutorial type of a canon, with dovetailing entries of the tune one bar aside? A rapid-fire patter music that isn’t comedian however lethal severe? Uccelli had these and extra up her sleeve.
A closing query one can’t assist asking: Is there something recognizably feminine about her music? How does, or how would possibly, identification present itself in artwork? We will solely vouch for our personal reactions; others could detect a particularly female high quality, however so far as I can hear, nothing in “Anna” would have carried a unique degree of shock if it had come from an unknown Carlo Uccelli.
However, there’s the story Carolina selected: a mom’s story. Moms are hardly ever distinguished in opera, and when they’re, there’s usually one thing scary about them. Norma comes near killing her personal youngsters; Lucrezia Borgia, Medea and Azucena really do. Far more usually the drama facilities on male want and sexual rivalry, and these characteristic in “Anna di Resburgo” by no means. As an alternative there’s essentially the most maternal theme possible, Anna’s safety of her youngster on the threat of her personal life. I doubt this occurred at random. It’s a stirring, inspiring story, and I’m glad a mom stepped as much as inform it in music.