Salzburg: L’Italiana in Algeri
Зальцбург: Итальянка в Алжире
What happens when a powerful man makes moves on a strong, independent woman who has no intention of accepting his advances? And how are things further complicated if he is Middle Eastern and she is Western and their cultures fundamentally clash? Find the answers in Moshe Leiser’s & Patrice Caurier’s colourful production of "L’Italiana in Algeri" with Cecilia Bartoli in the title role of the spirited Isabella."The role of Isabella is sung to perfection by Cecilia Bartoli – a clever, independent woman with an adventurous streak". (The New York Times)
Actors
Isabella
Mustafà
Taddeo
Crew
Conductor
Jean-Christophe Spinosi
Director
Moshe Leiser
Set designer
Christian Fenouillat
Costume Designer
Agostino Cavalca
Lighting Designer
Christophe Forey
Swaggering machismo does not mix well with emancipated femininity: L’italiana in Algeri (1813) – the first of Rossini’s ‘mature’ buffa operas (the composer was 21) – exhaustively exploits the comic potential of this clash, and in an intercultural context to boot. Like all ‘Turkish operas’, Angelo Anelli’s libretto, originally written for the composer Luigi Mosca, itself of course reflects a judgemental view of the Other. In the adaptation of the libretto for Rossini the character of Mustafà underwent a number of changes, which were reinforced by the music, moving away from a conventional buffo caricature to a man who – rather like Falstaff – despite all his delusion and self-conceit remains authentic and not simply ridiculous in his amorous wants. Nonetheless, he does not come close to the multifacetedness of the female protagonist: Isabella is full of energy and vigour, shrewd and courageous, but also capable of profound love and even patriotic pathos, as when she has to motivate Lindoro, whom she meets again as Mustafà’s slave, and the other Italians to attempt a risky flight from captivity.
The grotesque antithesis to Isabella’s great rondo ‘Pensa alla patria’ is formed by scenes that are rooted in the world of the carnivalesque, above all the crazy ceremony of Mustafà’s induction into the circle of the ‘Pappataci’. In order for Isabella’s escape plan to succeed, Mustafà has to be converted to a state of phlegmatic indifference: as a Pappataci he vows to devote himself to nothing more than eating, drinking and sleeping.
The fact that L’italiana in Algeri is still today capable of provoking the same rapturous enthusiasm in audiences as it did two hundred years ago is due to the way Rossini’s music stages all these events. The musicologist Paolo Gallarati locates the essential wit of the opera in the dialectic alternation between ‘dramma’ and ‘ludus’ (play), between ‘realistic’ passages, in which the singing brings the text alive in a flexible and nuanced way (Mozart is the unmistakable model here) and those mad Rossinian ensembles of amazement, confusion, fright, etc., in which subjects suddenly become objects, and human beings become puppets, having lost control over the situation and their own actions. Here – as at the end of the famous finale to Act I – pure music with its abstract geometrical laws takes over command, at the same time becoming the sonorous image of inner turbulence. In an eloquent phrase, Stendhal called this music ‘organized and complete madness’. Rossini’s surreal ludic ensembles surrender themselves wholly to the ‘physical joy of rhythm and sound’ (Luigi Rognoni). The listener is drawn ineluctably into the music. But the dissolution of the individual that Rossini accomplishes here might give rise to the fearful question of just how certain our certainties actually are…