It is possible that Antonio Salieri (1750-1825) is the composer whose posthumous reputation has suffered most as a result of Western musical culture’s preoccupation with the idea of compositional genius.  Salieri, though born in the north Italian town of Legnago, near Verona, spent virtually his whole career at the imperial court in Vienna.  From the mid-1770s to the close of the century, Salieri was a towering figure in Viennese musical life.  In 1774, he succeeded his mentor, Florian Leopold Gassman, as court composer and director of the court’s Italian opera; ‘thus’, as the musicologist Rudolph Angermüller writes, ‘at the age of 24 he held one of the most important musical positions in Europe.’  As well as managing consistently to delight his patron, Emperor Joseph II, Salieri’s operas were successful not only in Vienna but throughout the important operatic centres of Europe (dominating, in particular, the Parisian stage in the 1780s).  His prestige and skill as a composition teacher is clear from a roll call of his star pupils, who included Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert and Franz Liszt.  Yet during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Salieri’s music was, for a figure of such stature, strikingly neglected: almost never performed, and largely ignored or dismissed in writing on music.  The mismatch between his place in his contemporaries’ estimations and those of subsequent generations is largely due those later performers’ and writers’ attitude towards Salieri’s most famous contemporary, W. A. Mozart (1756-1791; six years Salieri’s junior, but predeceasing him by more than three decades).  Not long after Mozart’s death, new aesthetic frameworks of Romanticism allowed many to begin to regard Mozart’s compositional achievement as verging on superhuman, as the work of one of Romanticism’s prized inventions: the category of the artistic genius.  Later thinkers inherited this Romantic idea, regarding Mozart’s works as ‘not of an age, but for all time’: utterly transcending the circumstances of their composition and speaking universal human truths.  The reputation of Mozart’s contemporaries, who did not possess the divine spark of genius, necessarily suffered as a result of such attitudes: their works became the dross Mozart so effortlessly transcended.  Indeed, the phenomenal popularity of Salieri’s works during his own lifetime – evidence of the high esteem in which he was held in the eighteenth century – would become, for later performers and writers convinced of Mozart’s genius, an index of its current irrelevance: it was ‘of an age’, not ‘for all time’, and therefore not worth bothering with.  Mozart’s perceived professional and financial woes, for the same thinkers, constituted evidence of his being misunderstood by his contemporaries, proof that his works were designed to speak across years and generations.

As well as neglect of Salieri’s works in performance, criticism and scholarship, this intellectual climate also produced the myths about Mozart and Salieri which remain, even today, the only context in which many music lovers have heard his name.  The story of Salieri having conspired to bring about Mozart’s ruination and death – treated, most notably, in Pushkin’s play Mozart and Salieri (1830), its 1897 operatic adaptation by Rimsky-Korsakov, Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus (1979) and its popular 1984 film version – while lacking any basis in historical fact (as far as we can tell), together make up a locus classicus of Romantic and post-Romantic thinking about Mozart as a genius.  The title of Shaffer’s play foregrounds the notion that Mozart was divinely inspired (‘God’s beloved’ is one way of translating the Latin name Amadeus).  Salieri functions, in these myths, as a representative of the pedestrian, workaday artistic culture in which the miracle of Mozart occurred.  ‘I gave craft / Its place as the foundation stone of art’, Pushkin’s Salieri soliloquizes: ‘I made myself a craftsman; my fingers / acquired obedient, cold dexterity / and my ear, accuracy. I killed sounds, / dissected music like a corpse’.  Salieri’s inveterate scheming against Mozart (so the story goes) is a result of his, alone among his contemporaries, recognising the younger composer’s transcendent genius, and being consumed by jealousy as a result.  Where is justice, Pushkin’s Salieri wonders, ‘when the sacred gift, / immortal genius, comes not as reward / for […] / labour, zeal, diligence, and prayers - / but bestows its radiant halo on a madman / who idly strolls through life?’

The bicentenary of Salieri’s death offers us an opportunity to reassess his achievement, and benefit from the work of music historians in recent years to increase our understanding of both Salieri and Mozart.  Scholarship has historicized the idea of musical genius as a product of Romanticism, and interrogated the way the canon of composers whose works are regularly performed and studied today was constructed during the nineteenth century, partly under the influence of those Romantic notions of genius.  Among the results of this work have been both a growing understanding of Mozart’s (undoubtedly remarkable) compositional achievement as a thoroughly eighteenth-century one – his works, rather than standing serenely apart from the circumstances of their composition, revealed as thoroughly embedded in their contemporary institutional, political and social contexts – and a growing understanding and appreciation of composers such as Salieri.  The older Italian’s music has been shown not only to have exerted a profound influence on Mozart, but also, as it has begun to emerge from the shadow of the younger composer’s genius into the light of performance and scholarly analysis, has proved itself quite compelling in its own right.  Salieri’s operas, excitingly, have shown themselves to be susceptible to the same kinds of analysis scholars have relished applying to Mozart’s works.  Much ink has been spilled, for example, in scholarly debates over the apparently ‘revolutionary’ politics of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (which premiered in 1786, a few short years before the upheavals of the French Revolution began in 1789), in which servants comprehensively outwit and humiliate their masters, and women overturn another ingrained hierarchy by doing the same thing to the opera’s male characters.  The fact that the production took place in Vienna’s Burgtheater, one of the city’s two court theatres, whose productions were overseen by Emperor Joseph himself (the brother of Marie Antoinette) has been a further source of puzzlement and fascination.  The politics of La locandiera are equally fascinating.  It was premiered at the Kärtnertortheater (the other of Vienna’s court theatres) on 8 June 1773 and was one of Salieri’s early theatrical successes: it played thirty four times that year, an obvious index of its popularity with the Kärtnertortheater’s audience (Figaro, by contrast, played just nine times in its premiere run). Yet Salieri’s drama is similarly striking in the way it dramatizes a lower-class figure –  Mirandolina, the ‘Landlady’ of the work’s title – outsmarting a host of buffoonish aristocrats; the fact that she is a woman, and they men, is equally suggestive.  As James Webster has noted, the opera is ‘remarkable for its positive portrayal of the heroine: intelligent and resourceful, yet sufficiently proud and manipulative to be a credible character’.  Just as Mozart’s music seems (to some) to highlight the potentially radical politics of Da Ponte’s libretto in Figaro, Salieri’s music for La locandiera appears to skilfully draw attention to the potentially subversive aspects of the libretto (adapted from the play of the same name by the Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni).  In the opera’s only love duet, ‘Hurry along with you, Fabrizio’, the quick-witted Mirandolina runs rings around her less sharp suitor Fabrizio.  She poses a series of questions (‘Will you be faithful?’; ‘Will you be zealous?’; ‘Will you love me?’), all of which invite the answer ‘yes’; when she goes on to ask, ‘Will you be jealous?’, Fabrizio is tricked into agreeing to that, too.  Salieri has Mirandolina outwit her suitor musically as well as verbally, setting up a repeating musical pattern for those questions and their answers which appears to lure Fabrizio into giving the incorrect response to Mirandolina’s trick question, which takes the same form, both musically and verbally, as all of her previous enquiries.  Her own musical vocabulary in numbers like ‘Have you any idea what you’re saying?’ appropriates the forceful, bellicose style that by rights should be associated with a male, aristocratic, military character such as the Cavaliere (the Baron): her use of aspects of what musicologists have come to term the musical topic associated with warfare – including the characteristic dotted rhythms of the march, and a triadic melodic construction suggesting battlefield trumpet calls – illustrates musically the way Mirandolina usurps the power of the opera’s male, aristocratic characters.  Her success in charming the misogynistic Baron (whom she goes on, once she has won him round, to reject in favour of Fabrizio) is illustrated in the Baron’s scena ‘I am thinking and re-thinking’: the indecision he is thrown into by Mirandolina’s manipulations can be felt in the unusual musical structure, moving from arioso to recitative, then back to arioso, but this time with new musical material – the Baron’s apparently forgetting the A section of a suggested Da Capo (ABA) structure demonstrating the extent of his confusion.

Is this really appropriate fare for an imperial court theatre?  The apparent paradox might partially be explained by the fact that the date of the work’s premiere (8 June) fell in the week between Trinity Sunday and the feast of Corpus Christi, the most opulent festival of the church’s year in eighteenth-century Vienna.  As Mikhail Bakhtin and his followers have shown, rituals of social inversion were associated with pre-modern festivity: rituals which, in seeming paradox, it was in the interests of the elite, such as the patrons and audience members of Vienna’s imperial court theatres, to encourage.  As Bakhtin writes, people celebrated ‘temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order […] the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions’; but, as their rulers recognised, such festivities served to manage subversion by allowing it to be expressed on the terms of those in charge, within clearly defined temporal boundaries – a kind of social safety valve for letting off subversive steam.  Allowing those disruptive opinions to be voiced provided, in C. L. Barber’s phrase, ‘the clarification about limits which comes from going beyond the limit’.  The theatre was a perfect location, rulers like Joseph II recognised, for the ‘Carnivalesque’ inversions of opere buffe such as La locandiera (and Figaro): firm boundaries to the opera’s action were set by the theatre’s proscenium arch and the length of the production.  Endings are happy and reconciliatory; mutual forgiveness is requested and granted.  As productions, like this one, of Salieri’s works continue to increase in frequency, both their fascinating relationship to the eighteenth-century circumstances of their first performances, and their composer’s skill as a musical dramatist will become increasingly evident to music lovers and scholars.  Such productions, including many by Bampton Classical Opera, afford us a more sophisticated view of the remarkable musical culture of late eighteenth-century Vienna, one which allows us to better appreciate and enjoy both the music of Mozart and that of his generally neglected contemporaries. 

This year marks the 150th anniversary of Ravel’s birth, the centenary of Boulez, and the 50th anniversary of Shostakovich’s death. But there has been little to mark the bicentenary of the death of a composer who was mischaracterised as early as 1830 by Pushkin, and more pervasively by the late, great Peter Shaffer in Amadeus.

Bampton Classical Opera – a firm proponent in the revival of 18th-century opera – has decided to mark the bicentenary of Antonio Salieri’s death with a staging of his seldom-performed dramma giocoso, La locandiera (The Landlady). It proved a delightfully astute choice. Set amidst the charm of the Deanery Gardens – Bampton's home for 32 memorable years of operatic revival – the production revealed a lighter-hearted side to Salieri.

Set in a Florentine inn, the spirited landlady Mirandolina deftly navigates the affections and rivalries of her aristocratic guests, manipulating their vanity and pretensions with ease. A proud singleton, the Baron Ripafratta becomes her prime target, and soon finds himself helplessly captivated, his former disdain turning to comic desperation. Meanwhile, Mirandolina’s loyal yet jealous servant Fabrizio struggles to win her affection amid escalating chaos. La locandiera thus unfolds as a classic 18th-century comedy, rich with wit, convenient eavesdropping, romantic entanglements, and delightfully subversive social commentary – much in the way that The Marriage of Figaro caused a bit of a stir for its portrayal of clever servants ridiculing and manipulating their masters. But La locandiera was already doing that more than a decade earlier.

Director and designer Jeremy Gray transported us to a vibrant 1920s Art Deco Florentine inn, an inspired choice that heightened the comedic contrasts of class and romantic intrigue central to the opera. That, alongside the costumes, gave the staging an oddly comforting Agatha Christie feel. Siân Dicker, as the spirited landlady Mirandolina, immediately established herself as the evening's magnetic presence, vocally confident and dramatically persuasive, especially in her aria ‘I’d say she was capricious’. She held her own throughout, bringing infectious energy to this refreshingly modern woman who is firmly in control of her destiny.

Opposite her, Samuel Pantcheff’s Fabrizio was sympathetically portrayed, convincingly torn between affection and jealousy. Pantcheff’s appealing baritone found an ideal vehicle in the humorous Act 1 aria ‘People say that when you marry’. Osian Wyn Bowen, as the initially misogynistic Baron Ripafratta, offered a brilliantly comic portrayal, his tenor rich and clear, particularly amusing in the Act 2 soliloquy ‘I am getting rather grumpy as I try to be expressive’. Aidan Edwards’s Marquis and David Horton’s Count injected further comedic delight, especially in their cricket and croquet-themed rivalries, with Edwards’s charmingly characterful baritone standing out.

Rosalind Dobson’s Lena was a standout supporting performance, vividly bringing depth to a character often relegated to the periphery. Her trio alongside the Count and Marquis – ‘If she sends the rascal packing’, charmingly supported by Caroline and Roger Wilbourn – was one of many highlights. She could convey a thousand words with just a side-eye or a glance of bewilderment toward the audience.

The absolute standout aspect of this production, however, must be the English translation by Gilly French and director Jeremy Gray. Thanks again to the cast’s excellent diction, we heard every word of their delightfully corny and Gilbertian revival of this opera – with rhymes so clever they verged on Cole Porter territory. I’m an advocate for translating into the home language of an audience, and this production shows why. There was a layer of connection that is lost when you’re glancing up to the surtitles every few seconds. And anyone who deplores its silliness in English should realise that the Italian is very much the same.

Tucked away to the side in a gazebo under Andrew Griffiths's precise and lively conducting, the Orchestra of Bampton Classical Opera navigated Salieri’s elegant score with transparency and panache. The score feels very fluent – by which I mean it flows naturally; you always feel in safe hands. But perhaps that’s a downside: it was almost too safe. There were no moments musically that made you sit forward in your seat or take particular notice – it was a very functional vehicle for the text. I don’t believe I’ve ever enjoyed the text of an opera more than the music before!

This was announced as Bampton’s final season at the Deanery Gardens, as the company looks ahead to more semi-staged indoor ventures amongst other things. To which I wish them all the best, and hope they continue to platform the 18th-century gems that have otherwise been forgotten, as well as offering support for newly written operas.

Salieri has long suffered in the shadow of Amadeus – but perhaps there is a silver lining. There are plenty of other Mozart contemporaries in Vienna who have not enjoyed this kind of resurgence, so perhaps the legacy of this so-called ‘mediocrity’ (as he self-proclaims in Shaffer’s play) hasn’t been so unlucky. That said, the work doesn’t sparkle like Mozart’s comedies of the 1780s, but it certainly paved the way and is an enlightening slice of history. And with performances in Westonbirt and Wadhurst before a final go at Smith Square Hall in London – it makes for a thoroughly enjoyable evening.

A balmy night, gorgeous gardens with hundreds of patrons enjoying elaborate picnics is the ultimate country house summer garden opera scenario. This was how it should be and how it was, sadly, for Bampton Classical Opera’s final-ever visit to the Deanery Garden.

Jeremy Gray introduces himself as ‘one of the crazy couple who set up Bampton Classical Opera 32 years ago’. What remarkable success the Bampton Classical Opera has enjoyed since 1993. Antonio Salieri has long been composer of choice; the current production of the dramma giocoso La locandíera fully justifies this choice and is the fifth of his operas to be performed by the company. In the twenty years between 1753 when Carlo Goldoni wrote one of his funniest plays Mistress of the Inn and 1773, Domenico Poggi produced the libretto which Salieri transformed into a very straightforward opera La locandíera. The story goes that Salieri took on the composition without having read the libretto! What confidence by a 23-year-old composer! 2025 is the 200th anniversary of the Salieri’s death.

This production is set in the Art Deco period, probably the 1920s; the Florentine inn set is a simple one, full of colour, a frequently used telephone of the period and with signs which changed from ‘Rooms Available’ to ‘Inn Fully Booked’ as the arriving guests begin their manoeuvres. Gray’s insistence the opera requires singers who can act was fully justified by the performances of all six of them. Household servants, Lena (Rosalind Dobson) and Fabrizio (Samuel Pantcheff) sing a fine duet where early signs of Lena’s keenness to attract the attention of her servant colleague become evident. In tandem they work well to keep the pace zipping along which is achieved throughout.  Innkeeper, Mirandolina (Siân Dicker) maintains a firm hand over the running of her recently inherited business with special attention to the behaviour of privileged guests. Those include a Baron, a Count and a Marquis, of whom, the Baron (Osian Wyn Bowen) is the most irritating as his ‘manners are deplorable’.

Bowen is a very accomplished tenor, excelling in comedy due to his strong acting capabilities. He soon faces the first of several fully justified psychological assaults from Mirandolina. Dicker steals the audience attention whenever she appears. Her singing is powerful, her diction excellent and her interpretation of her role as the conscientious innkeeper/landlady with a strong commitment to quality is superb. The Count of Albafiorita (David Horton) and the Marquis of Forlimpopoli (Aidan Edwards) are both manipulated by their landlady’s charm. Both are in competition with the Baron for her attention. Horton and Edwards make the very most of their comedic roles, becoming involved with cricket, tennis and finally croquet; the last pursuit offering one of the most amusing lines in Gilly French’s clever translation, ‘you’ve broken my weapon’, as the Count faces an aggressive Baron whose affection for Mirandolina is not reciprocated. In addition to the Count facing a challenge, Fabrizio, too, continues his efforts to secure her affection.

Finally, he does secure her attention and they become engaged to which the Baron – as one who is uncomfortable at being attracted to a woman responds – ‘I’ve had a fright’! Throughout this delightful operatic comedy, Lena (Rosalind Dobson) the maid remains faithful to her employer. She sings her aria ‘All I know is that my mistress is a little unrelaxed’ with considerable conviction, in response to quizzing by the Baron. In Act III she appears in the most fetching of cocktail dresses with a headdress to match as she declares ‘there is no more anger’ as her search for a husband continues. Pauline Smith and Anne Baldwin in charge of costumes contribute to this production’s fun with many a clever costume change. Fitting with the Art Deco set, their choice of colours and appropriately aged equipment and sporting attire is excellent.

Conductor Andrew Griffiths deserves special mention for his efforts with members of the Orchestra of Bampton Classical Opera. From a position in a marquee some distance from the action he was in word perfect ensemble with the libretto as he conducted enthusiastically for the two hours of this happy occasion. Fortunately, the two performances were rain free which makes the news about future plans all the more intriguing.

Regrettably, this will be the last year Bampton Classical Opera will appear at the Deanery Gardens. The ‘crazy couple who set up Bampton Classical Opera 32 years ago’ – Gilly French and Jeremy Gray – are to change direction. Increased costs and smaller grants demanded a closer look at what future initiatives are best at this time. Semi-staged productions will be planned, some concert performances and smaller-scale operations. And so, we say ‘au revoir’ to the hosts at Deanery Garden with sincere thanks for hosting some of the most exciting examples of what a country house summer garden opera should resemble.

That Antonio Salieri has achieved one of the greatest revivals since Lazarus is largely due to the ministering efforts of the splendid Bampton Classical Opera. This is the fifth of his works that they have staged, all UK premières, and this characterful and amusing piece is further evidence on the bicentenary of his death for his deserved rehabilitation. I was charmed from start to finish.

La locandiera (The Landlady) was one of the earliest of the 40 operas that he turned out at a remarkable rate for the Emperor Josef II, written 15 years before The Marriage of Figaro, and one of those court entertainments in which the ruling classes liked to amuse themselves with the idea of the lower orders outwitting their masters.

Mirandola owns a Florentine inn patronised by aristocratic guests who unfailingly fall in love with her, all except the misogynistic Baron. She repays his scorn with feigned regard, prompting his sudden devotion and the jealousy of her devoted servant Fabrizio, until she tires of the game, announces her engagement to Fabrizio and rejects her noble suitors, whose gifts and intentions are passed to the grateful maid, Lena.

Salieri introduces each of his singers in a series of appealing and defining arias, the most intriguing of them for Osian Wyn Bowen’s Baron, "I like her forthright manner", with a subtle change midway as he vacillates between disdain and desire for his attractive host.

Bowen sings with a lovely, lilting tone that makes him a worthy member of the line of distinctively Welsh tenors, his performance matched by Siân Dicker, conveying an almost military but tender authority in the title role.

The resonant voice of baritone Aidan Edwards, as the Marquis, filled the open-air arena without strain, even when the sounds of an unfortunately scheduled circus drifted from a neighbouring field, and Samuel Pantcheff as Fabrizio came across as a proto-Figaro, even without the interpolated bit of Mozart.

All the cast, including Rosalind Dobson as a perky maid and David Horton’s Count, whom I could imagine singing lieder, could be complimented on clear diction, particularly expressive recitative and confident delivery without obvious, discernible glances to conductor Andrew Griffiths, positioned to the side of the stage. Even in this challenging arrangement, all maintained a perfect sound balance throughout.

Sadly, this week’s performances will be the last in the Deanery garden. Artistic directors Gilly French and Jeremy Gray, the latter director and designer for La locandiera, emphasised that this had nothing to do with the Deanery owners, whom they thanked for their support over 32 years. Costs had risen while grants had fallen, and in future, the company would change direction with semi-staged indoor performances and possibly occasional, smaller-scale staged shows.
 

Bampton Classical Opera has long specialized in reviving neglected works by Anton Salieri and this production, chosen to mark the 200th anniversary of the composer's death, is one of their most notable achievements.

La locandiera (The Landlady) has the advantage of being based on a sparkling comedy by Goldoni, and it has music that is lively and enjoyable. The excellent small orchestra, conducted by Andrew Griffiths, totally succeeded in persuading me that this score does indeed deserve to be revived and heard.

Siân Dicker performed and sang admirably in the demanding lead rôle of Mirandolina. She is what is known as a spinto soprano, with exceptional power in her middle and lower register. As Mirandolina she was perfect, projecting an independent businesswoman running a hotel, poised, capable, and clever, as well as very attractive.

The rôle of Fabrizio, her factotum, was sung by Samuel Pantcheff, another rising young star who has appeared at Bampton before, and now makes a welcome return. His lean frame and a vigorous, agreeable voice make him an ideal Fabrizio.

As Lena, the hotel maid, coloratura soprano Rosalind Dobson could have stolen the show, had it not been a fairly limited rôle.

Welsh tenor Osian Wyn Bowen had a difficult rôle as the surly, misogynistic Baron, which he carried off admirably. Grudgingly he finally admits that Mirandolina is an excellent woman and a good enough wife for anybody, even him - only to be laughed at when she admits her pampering of him was all a ruse to teach him better manners.

As the sporty Count and the plump, amorous Marquis, David Horton and Aidan Edwards made an effective comic duo, both singing splendidly.

The opera plot transcends its era being based on timeless themes of feminism and class friction. At one point Fabrizio, seeing the posh blokes compete for the favour of Mirandolina, whom he secretly loves, actually sings a snatch of "Si vuol ballare, Signor il Conte", Figaro's aria from Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, interpolated of course by the director. The audience is delighted when at the end she chooses this honest man of toil rather than any of her titled suitors.

This production kept the comedy just within the bounds of farce, letting the music, in the capable hands of Bampton Opera Orchestra, speak for itself and create an atmosphere of buoyant optimism.