Le pescatrici (The Fishergirls)

Dramma giocoso in three acts
Completed by H.C. Robbins Landon
Libretto by Carlo Goldoni
English translation by Gilly French and Jeremy Gray

The Deanery garden, Bampton, 17 and 18 July 2009
The Orangery Terrace, Westonbirt, 30 August 2009
St John’s, Smith Square, 17 September 2009

Cast

Synopsis

The beach at Taranto

Act 1
The fishergirls Nerina and Lesbina are each engaged to the other’s brother, Burlotto and Frisellino, but bicker and seek a better life, preferably with a wealthy husband.  Eurilda, the supposed daughter of the old fisherman Mastricco, prefers to stay single.

Lindoro, the Prince of Sorrento, sails in unexpectedly, throwing the community into a state of excitement and the womens’ hearts aflutter.  He announces that the usurper Oronte murdered Prince Casimiro fifteen years ago but the rightful claimant to the throne of Benevento was concealed at birth, and is believed to be living in Taranto.  Lesbina and Nerina are each certain that they must be the heir.

Act 2
Burlotto and Frisellino are angry with their fickle girlfriends, but would like to promote their sisters.  Mastricco knows that Eurilda is the heir and tries to promote her.  Lindoro is confused and tries to judge between the contenders.

Interval of 20 minutes (Bampton and St John’s); 70 minutes (Westonbirt)

Lesbina, and then Nerina, do their best to convince Lindoro.  Eurilda feels hopeless with insecurity.  Lindoro reveals a treasure of untold wealth, which includes the dagger stained with the blood of Casimiro.  Eurilda’s extreme distress at seeing this reveals her as the heir and she is chosen by Lindoro.  Nerina and Lesbina are bitterly disappointed and must now try to reinstate themselves in their boyfriends’ favour.

Act 3
At a shrine, Mastricco swears that he received Eurilda as a baby from Nicandro, who had rescued her from the usurper.  Lindoro believes his honesty and offers his hand to Eurilda.

Burlotto and Frisellino disguise themselves as aristocratic cousins of Lindoro and tempt their gullible girlfriends to sail off with them to fabulous status and wealth.  Having won them round, they embarrass the unfaithful girls by revealing their identity.  The girls are furious, and Mastricco is angry with the men for their insensitive trick, insisting they make amends and marry the girls.  Lindoro and Eurilda, with Mastricco as chaperone, sail away.

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Comedy was created to correct vice and ridicule bad customs
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Blazing creative genius

Many an eighteenth-century European prince dreamed of creating his own Versailles. Haydn’s employer Prince Nicolaus Esterházy was one of the few with the means to turn fantasy into reality. By 1766 he had transformed a modest hunting lodge in the malarial marshland south-east of Lake Neusiedl into a rococo Italianate showpiece to rival the Viennese Habsburg palace of Schönbrunn. Two years later he celebrated the completion of a 400-seat opera house in the grounds of Eszterháza, as he decreed the new palace should be called, with Haydn’s new comic opera Lo speziale, to a libretto by Carlo Goldoni. Nicolaus and his entourage were duly delighted, prompting Haydn to embark on another, more ambitious opera based on a Goldoni comedy, Le pescatrici (The fisher-girls).

The lavishly-spending Prince had hired several new singers in the winter of 1768-9; and the increased forces at his disposal allowed Haydn a cast of seven principals, with five buffo and two serious roles. For the many ensembles – a unique feature of Haydn’s Eszterháza operas – the soloists were probably augmented by choristers bussed in from Eisenstadt. The underlying theme of Haydn’s new dramma giocoso is virtually the obverse of Le nozze di Figaro’s. Whereas Mozart’s revolutionary comedy is an indictment of aristocratic privilege, the moral of Le pescatrici is that those of blue blood have an innate dignity and nobility of spirit, in contrast to the frivolous, fickle peasant girls with ideas far above their station. This affirmation of the social status quo made Le pescatrici a shrewd choice for the opulent wedding celebrations of Prince Nicolaus’s niece, Countess von Lamberg, and Count Pocci on 16 September 1770.  The Wiener Diarium – eighteenth-century Vienna’s equivalent of The Tatler – reported that the opera was performed ‘with all possible skill and art by the princely singers and instrumentalists, to universal and richly deserved applause’, and eulogised Haydn’s ‘blazing creative genius’. True to form, Prince Nicolaus spared no expense, importing three theatrical painters and the tailor from the Vienna Court Opera for the occasion. The Esterházy archives contain a hefty bill by the tailor Paul Eygner for eight ‘fisher costumes for the new opera’.

Around a third of the music from Acts One and Two of Le pescatrici was lost in the disastrous fire that gutted the Eszterháza opera house in November 1779. For the 1965 Holland and Edinburgh festivals – the first known stagings since the composer’s lifetime – the Haydn scholar H.C. Robbins Landon completed the recitatives and arias that survived only as fragments to create a viable performing version. For the overture Landon used a recently discovered Allegro that may have served as the original overture in 1770, while for the arrival of Lindoro’s boat in Act One he plundered a minuet from an early Haydn wind divertimento. Tonight’s performance of this delightful opera follows the Landon edition.

Goldoni sets the action in the fishing village of Taranto on the Ionian coast of southern Italy, an idyllic locale evoked in the many atmospheric stage sets indicated by the playwright. A jolly ‘chorus of fishermen’ introduces the comic lovers, all sporting typical buffo names: Burlotto and Frisellino (sung in 1770 by tenors Leopold Dichtler and Carl Friberth) are paired with each other’s sisters, Nerina and Lesbina (played, doubtless to the Esterházy court’s amusement, by the tenors’ wives, Barbara Dichtler and Magdalena Friberth). Burlotto hymns a fisherman’s endurance of the elements in a vast, mock-heroic aria (‘Through tempest, storm and battering’) designed to showcase Dichtler’s coloratura prowess. Frisellino responds with an aria parading the instruments that will feature at his rustic wedding. Haydn here gives colourful opportunities to the (for 1770) unusually large wind contingent of flute, oboes, bassoon and horns, with the second horn delving into the depths to suggest bucolic drones.

Both girls reveal themselves as knowing minxes. Nerina’s aria, in typical soubrette style, alternates slow and fast tempos, while Lesbina sings an insinuating minuet song, ‘After all I should enjoy myself’, in which oboes are replaced by duskier-toned cors anglais. Haydn’s leisurely preamble also includes a fragment of an aria for Eurilda, presumed daughter of the wily old fisherman Mastricco.

The action proper, a variation on the Cinderella story, is kick-started by the entry of Prince Lindoro, a part written for long-serving Esterházy baritone Christian Specht.  He recounts his perilous voyage in a tumultuous Sturm und Drang D minor aria (‘Far across the sea he wanders’) replete with syncopations, frenzied string writing, and gigantic vocal leaps to display Specht’s phenomenal range. After an aria for Lesbina that switches from pastoral lyricism to extravagant coloratura, and a gravely beautiful ensemble extolling the delights of a shade and calm, Lindoro announces that he is seeking a lost princess brought to the village fifteen years ago to escape her father’s murderer. The girls immediately eye their chance; and in the Act One finale – a typical lively buffo ensemble of mutual recrimination –  Burlotto and Frisellino mock their girlfriends’ absurd pretensions to nobility.  

Act Two opens with the fishermen out for revenge. To get his own back on Lesbina and claim the prince’s promised reward of gold and jewels, Frisellino, in a tripping comic aria, tells Lindoro that his sister Nerina is the princess he seeks; Burlotto makes the same claim for Lesbina. After a song for Mastricco in alternating slow and fast sections, the girls redouble their efforts to impress Lindoro with their aristocratic credentials. Lesbina betrays her true status when her aria (‘Look very closely and you’ll agree’) switches from over-the-top coloratura to buffo patter. In a scene for which no music survives, Eurilda is revealed as the lost princess when she recognises the jewel-studded dagger used to murder her father. The finale is again a quartet for the warring lovers, following the Goldoni tradition that first- and second-act finales should only involve comic characters. The girls, deflated by Eurilda’s revelation, hurriedly beg forgiveness and manage to worm their way back into their boyfriends’ affections. Or so it seems in the bouncy Presto coda.

For the opening of Act Three the location changes to a temple dedicated to Neptune, duly celebrated in a rousing C major ensemble. Eurilda sings of her love for Lindoro in a Cavatina (‘Heart and hand I promise wholly’) whose chaste simplicity of line – shades here of Gluck – contrasts pointedly with the fisher-girls’ extravagances. In a further plot twist, Burlotto and Frisellino now decide to have some fun at the girls’ expense. Disguising themselves as ‘cavaliers’, relatives of Lindoro, they succeed with alarming ease in wooing their own girlfriends. Though Goldoni’s pairings are unchanged (otherwise the men would have been courting their sisters), the parallels with Così fan tutte,composed two decades later,are unmissable. With Burlotto and Frisellino still in disguise, all wish Eurilda and Lindoro a tranquil voyage in a beautiful ensemble evocative of murmuring zephyrs (‘See how the air is still’), in the radiant key of E major. When the ruse is revealed, Mastricco calms the incensed girls and engineers a swift reconciliation. In the finale, culminating in the usual merry 6/8 romp, the lovers reflect on the lesson they have learned and promise to make a fresh start. From what we know of the girls’ temperaments, the marriages should be interesting.

Richard Wigmore

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‘Comedy was created to correct vice and ridicule bad customs’ (Goldoni)

Whilst Haydn’s lasting reputation appears to reside firmly in the realm of instrumental music, the quartets and symphonies especially, his considerable theatrical experience built up over two decades at Eszterháza gave him a facility and confidence in opera which, like many of his contemporaries, he placed at the core of his career.  Haydn’s first instrument was the voice – he was a boy chorister at St Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna, and may have narrowly escaped becoming a castrato – and the very earliest years of his career provided several opportunities to write church vocal and theatrical music.  Even as late as 1776, by which time he had written sixty-odd symphonies, it was his operas Le pescatrici, L’infedeltà delusa and L’incontro improvviso which he proudly designated in his Autobiographical Sketch as the works which had received most praise.  Five years later he longed to have further operas presented beyond the courtly confines of Eszterháza - “I promise you that such a work has not been heard in Paris, nor even perhaps in Vienna.  It’s my misfortune to live in the country”.  Ultimately – and perhaps mindful of Mozart’s success - he came to realise that his operas were too intimately associated with the resources of his aristocratic residency and the tastes of his patron, to be suitable for general export.  He concluded his run of Eszterháza operas with Armida (which set a personal record of 54 performances over five years) and only returned to the genre with his London interpretation of the Orfeo myth, L’anima del filosopho of 1791 (unperformed until 1951).  It was in the late symphonies as well as The Creation that his sense of dramatic development and emotional expression perhaps found its eventual and most accomplished outlet.

In searching for the demise of Haydn’s operatic oeuvre (a fate shared until recently by every other operatic composer of the eighteenth century – even Mozart was long neglected), critics have generally blamed his acceptance of weak libretti – although most were in fact popular works set by many other composers of the period.  Perhaps it is not surprising that in a recent issue of Opera magazine in which fourteen critics were invited to express their thoughts about Haydn’s operas and to make their ‘desert-island’ choice, the most popular was his ‘desert-island’ opera, L’isola disabitata.  Set to a libretto by the doyen of Arcadian opera seria, Pietro Metastasio, the text inspired a highly-integrated score of poetic genius, a work of rare beauty quite unlike anything by Mozart.

Nevertheless Haydn made a secure choice with the libretti of Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) for three of his early comic operas Lo speziale, Le pescatrici, and Il mondo della luna.  Goldoni had reinvested the increasingly atrophied tradition of commedia dell’arte with a new and piquant realism – as in all good comedy we may recognise ourselves in the foibles, petty ambitions and debunking of his characters.  Whilst Goldoni’s sheer facility and output – he once claimed to be able to write a comic libretto in just four days - may have inevitably led to repetition of character, situation and outcome, he nevertheless had a profound impact on the development of comic theatre and opera.  Goldoni’s flair lay in situation and plots, not in literary expression and subtlety, and his varied structures of dialogue, monologues and ensembles were formative on the developments of opera buffa in the mid eighteenth-century.  His works were set by most of the significant composers of the late Baroque and early classical period – Bertoni, Cimarosa, Galuppi, Gassmann, Mozart, Paisiello, Piccinni, Salieri, Traetta and Vivaldi.  Even Lorenzo Da Ponte, whose brilliance often lay more in adaptation than invention, imitated Goldoni in Così fan tutte – a scarcely unbelievable tale of fidelity tested and tempted through disguise, and possibly influenced by Le pescatrici. 

Goldoni’s Le pescatrici was first set as an opera by Ferdinando Bertoni for the Teatro S. Samuele, Venice in 1751, becoming the composer’s most successful comic opera with fourteen separate productions in Europe in the following two decades.  At Eszterháza, as commonly happened, the text was significantly revised, probably by Carl Friberth, the virtuoso tenor who created the role of Frisellino and who later wrote the libretto for L’incontro improvviso.  Amongst the changes were three new arias for Lesbina, who was sung by his wife Maddalena Fribberth – she was clearly the prima donna at Eszterháza, commanding a handsome annual salary of 500 florins, compared to the 100 florins of Barbara Dichtler, who played Nerina.  In this revision, Prince Lindoro’s entrance aria was replaced with a stunningly tempestuous one: Varca il mar (Far across the sea he wanders), borrowed – appropriately for this seria role - from Metastasio.  But curiously for an opera designed to celebrate an aristocratic wedding, the ambivalent pessimism of this aria paints a very different character from that in Goldoni, and suggests that even nobility cannot always control fate.  Indeed, if Lindoro is to inherit the throne of Benevento to which he aspires, he is dependent on the acquiescence of Eurilda, a mere fishergirl in situation if not (as she, and we, discover) by birth.

Haydn designated the opera as dramma giocoso, a term applied to many settings of Goldoni and later used for Mozart’s Don Giovanni.  As the term suggests, the genre combines comic, low-life characters (Lesbina and Frisellino, Nerina and Burlotto) with the serious (Lindoro) and those ‘in mezzo carattere’ (Mastricco and Eurilda), and so enables a varied complexity of status, mood and pace.  These strata are expressed through the nature of their music, with plenty of opportunity for parody.  Nevertheless, the dignity of nobility is upheld, and it is the vice of ambition and self-promotion which is ridiculed.  Social hierarchies are maintained, and we are entertained and – if we choose – educated in  virtue.  As most great comics recognise, their art is most cogent when it is used to effect moral transformation. 

Jeremy Gray

Cast - Synopsis - Blazing creative genius -
Comedy was created to correct vice and ridicule bad customs
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