Ariens 915067 - 1740 User Manual download pdf (Page 17)

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La ﬁnta giardiniera

Silke Leopold

Ever since opera buffa first appeared around 1740, predetermined types of roles and scenes

had evolved in the genre that promised success in any plot and could be accommodated in

any libretto after the manner of set pieces. Soon opera buffa scarcely lagged behind opera

seria for dramaturgical schematism, and the public was less interested in the novelty of a

story than in how the well-worn, unchanging tale of love and confusion could be told in a

new and surprising way in each individual case. Such plot stereotypes are nothing unusual

in dramatic genres, especially of the non-literary kind; the commedia dell’arte and more

recently also the western and the soap opera all thrive on this basic trust in the outcome

of the story, which also helps the spectator to endure the most surprising events and the

tensest and most perilous situations. In falling back on the role typology of the commedia

dell’arte, Carlo Goldoni ensured the viability of comic opera by placing alongside the comic

roles – the boobies and cranks, the cunning chambermaids and valets – other characters

modelled on the innamorati, the pairs of young lovers, and so-called ‘mezzo carattere’ roles

that were at once serious and comic.

La finta giardiniera, the libretto that served as the basis for Pasquale Anfossi’s successful

setting given in the Roman Carnival season in 1774, fulfilled all these expectations, albeit

by moving from one set piece to the next rather than bothering overmuch with creating a

dramatically coherent plot.

With its seven characters it represented the dramaturgy of the

opera buffa in well-nigh emblematic fashion. At the top of the list of dramatis personae

is Don Anchise, an elderly fool reminiscent of the Pantalone of commedia dell’arte and

countless aging bachelors of comic opera such as Uberto in Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s

La serva padrona or Pimpinone in Tommaso Albinoni’s eponymous intermezzo. The proudly

aristocratic Arminda and the melancholy cavaliere Ramiro constitute the parti serie, the

serious roles, while Count Belfiore and Marchesa Violante represent the mezzo carattere

sphere, and Serpetta and Nardo complete the roster of parti buffe along with Don Anchise.

And with the mad scene, the scene of nocturnal confusion in the garden, the maidservant

with her sights set on her master, the aria imitating the sound of instruments, the tantrums of

Arminda and the despairing outbursts of Sandrina, the libretto contained all the ingredients

that promised to make up a successful opera buffa.

Giuseppe Petrosellini – or whoever wrote the libretto – closely modelled the roles and the

various scenes on the hit opera of the 1760s. With his opera La buona figliola, premiered

in Rome in 1760, to a libretto by Carlo Goldoni based on Samuel Richardson’s epistolary

novel Pamela, Niccolò Piccinni had found a new tone that extended opera buffa’s spectrum

of musical expression to include a sentimental element that lay between caricature and

grotesquery on the one hand and deep seriousness on the other. La buona figliola told the

story of a charming female gardener called Cecchina; a marquis who loves her; the latter’s

haughtily aristocratic sister who attempts to thwart their union because her no less arrogant

fiancé, the cavaliere Armidoro, would refuse to marry her in the event of such a misalliance;

and a country girl by the name of Sandrina who has also set her sights on the marquis. Only

7. On this subject, see Volker Mattern, Das Dramma giocoso ‘La ﬁnta giardinera’: ein Vergleich der Vertonungen von Pasquale Anfossi und Wolfgang

Amadeus Mozart (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1989).

when it turns out that Cecchina is in fact Baroness Mariandel, abducted as a babe in arms,

are the conflicts happily resolved in a double wedding. Given the success of La buona figliola

all over Europe, it is hardly surprising that other librettists emulated this proven model and

created other roles like that of Cecchina, in which natural innocence and nobility of birth

could be given equal expression and music could abolish class barriers. By the side of

Cecchina, both Marchesa Lucinda, with her raging vengeance aria, and her fiancé Armidoro,

who as a castrato role brought the atmosphere of opera seria into opera buffa, seemed like

characters from an antiquated, bygone era.

Mozart, who was here given his first chance in three years to write another opera, threw

himself into the exercise with genuine eagerness. For the first time since childhood he was

once again working on an opera buffa, which set him different compositional tasks from

opera seria. Whereas, in the latter genre, the principal priority was the musical portrayal of

affects, inner emotional states, opera buffa subsisted equally on the depiction of the external

action through the resources of the music. Mozart had to compose two large-scale action

finales, the encounter of the former and current pairs of lovers at the end of the first act and

the chaos in the dark wood at the end of the second, and the musical solutions he found for

these perfectly reflect the contemporary state of the genre; they are extended ‘chain finales’,

in which metre and key, tempo and declamatory style illustrate and structure the course of the

action. The first finale, for instance, depicts the successive entries of the characters in clearly

audible fashion. It begins as Belfiore recognises the unconscious Sandrina as Violante, with

a blend of accompagnato recitative and minuet-like arioso, changes to a lively four-in-a-bar

at the Allegro marking the arrival of Arminda and Ramiro, and then, modulating from E minor

to E flat major in the space of two bars, to a majestic entry for the Podestà marked ‘Adagio

ma non molto’. Finally, the appearance of Serpetta and Nardo on the scene is heralded by a

new formal section, an Allegro in D major and 6/8 time. In this way one section is connected

to another like the links of a chain, following the principle of escalation that Lorenzo Da

Ponte later described as a sequence of ‘l’adagio, l’allegro, l’andante, l’amabile, l’armonioso,

lo strepitoso, l’arcistrepitoso, lo strepitosissimo’.

But in addition to this, within single sections which derive their musical structure from

tempo and time signature, Mozart differentiated the individual utterances of each character

through the type of declamation, the instrumental accompaniment, and the choice of key. For

example, between bars 392 and 431 of the first finale, Arminda abuses Belfiore, Ramiro does

not understand her anger, the Podestà and Serpetta threaten Sandrina, and she bewails her

cruel fate. Within this short passage, marked Allegro and in 3/4 time, Mozart modulates from

D major (Arminda) to B minor/E minor (Ramiro), to A minor (Podestà, Serpetta), and thence

to E minor (Sandrina). Moreover, the aristocratic Arminda sings her verse in the courtly

rhythm of the minuet, the sorrowing Ramiro in the ‘sobbing’ rhythm of the sarabande, the

Podestà and Serpetta in typically buffo chattering quavers, and Sandrina, finally, in wide,

sweeping intervals and once again in sarabande rhythm. Mozart makes it clear that she

is the genuinely suffering character by means of the chromatically descending bass that

accompanies her vocal line like a traditional lamento bass.

However, aside from the ensembles – among them the reconciliation duet for Sandrina and

Belfiore, which in its resemblance to an open-ended chain finale testifies to a new musical

8. Lorenzo Da Ponte, Memorie (New York: Gray and Bunce, 1829), vol.I, no.2, p.51. Da Ponte is referring here to Salieri’s opera Il ricco d’un giorno (1784),

of which he was the librettist. (Translator’s note)

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