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Donizetti's first ‘affare di Parigi’: an unknown rondò-finale for Gianni da Calais*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 August 2008
Extract
Donizetti's involvement with Paris has been understood to date from February 1834, when Rossini, acting as the Théâtre Italien's music director, commissioned Marino Faliero for performance the following winter. Though written in Italy, the work was substantially revised in Paris during the two months Donizetti spent there before the première on 12 March 1835, hence William Ashbrook's assertion that Donizetti ‘wrote for the first time for Paris, absorbing the musical tastes of that city, when he presented Marino Faliero at the Théâtre Italien’. While this opera unquestionably remains the one that officially launched the composer's Parisian career, new manuscript and printed musical sources reveal that Donizetti's ties to the city actually date back to 1833, when plans were laid for productions of two of his earlier operas: Gianni di Parigi (1831) and Gianni da Calais (1828). Like Marino Faliero, the first of these works was composed in Italy with a Paris (or a London) première in mind, Donizetti having hoped diat Giovanni Battista Rubini would introduce it at one of his benefit performances soon after rejoining the Italiens (part of the troupe spent spring and summer seasons at the King's Theatre). A close study of the work might shed light on the composer's understanding (or ignorance) of operatic practice in the city at this point in his career; indeed, it was precisely because Gianni di Parigi was so French at least in terms of its libretto (Felice Romani's adaptation of Claude Godard d'Aucour de Saint-Just's libretto for Boieldieu's classic and closely protected Jean de Paris, in the repertory of the Opéra-Comique since 1812) that the comic melodramma was never mounted in Paris. But it was the second work, composed for the Teatro del Fondo in Naples (where it was premièred on 2 August 1828), and performed at the Théâtre Italien twice, on 17 December 1833 and 4 January 1834, that Donizetti actually helped adapt to Parisian taste.
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References
1 Sadie, Stanley, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (London, 1992), s.v. ‘Donizetti’, 1208.Google Scholar
2 Romani's libretto was written in 1818 for Francesco Morlacchi.
3 Donizetti was in Milan for the première of Anna Bolena, which took place at the Carcano five days earlier.
4 Zavadini, Guido, Donizetti: vita, musiche, epistolario (Bergamo, 1948), letter no. 113, p. 330. All Italian and French translations are mine.Google Scholar
5 Allusions to the Parisina project date back to Donizetti's letter of 1 June 1833 to Ricordi (Zavadini, no. 96, p. 311), and are found in the letters of 13 and 15 June (nos. 99 and 101, pp. 313 and 316). The directors' decision is reported in the letters of 2 and 11 July to Ricordi and Lanari, respectively (nos. 103 and 105, pp. 318 and 319–20), and further discussed in the letter of 15 August to Lanari (no. 114, p. 332).
6 Zavadini, letters of 1 and 6 August to Ricordi (nos. 110–11, pp. 324 and 326), the relevant passage in the first of which reads: ‘Io mi esibii a Robert di farci pure un'altr'aria per Rubini, se mai quella non lo persuadeva, egli soggiunse che mi avria pagato, al che io dissi non Signore … che far poteva io di più?’ (I even told Robert I would write another aria for Rubini, in case that didn't convince him; he replied that he would pay me, to which I said no sir … what more could I do?)
7 In reviewing Rubini's performance in a revival of Rossini's Matilde de Shabran, for example, the critic for the Moniteur universel wrote on 6 October 1832 that ‘Quant à Rubini, si, jusqu'à présent, il n'avait pas atteint la perfection de son art, il faudrait avouer aujourd'hui qu'il y est parvenu. Quelle adresse, quel charme, quel prestige, quelle puissance de sons et de poitrine!! C'est admirable, et toujours admirable!’ (As for Rubini, if, up to now, he had not attained artistic perfection, one would have to admit today that he has succeeded. What skill, what charm, what brilliance, what powerful sounds, and support!! It's marvellous, absolutely marvellous!)
8 I have also consulted these further sources: (1) the libretti published for the Parisian and Milanese revivals by Pihan Delaforest (Morinval) and Antonio Fontano, respectively (F-Po Livr. 19 [OB215 and Livr. It. 3634 [19]); (2) the piano-vocal score published by Girard e Cni in Naples (85 pp., plate numbers 817–25): it omits all or part of several numbers given in the Milanese libretto, including the introduzione apart from Metilde's cavatina, the duet for Adelina and Rustano that opens Act II (also missing in the autograph), the tempo di mezzo of the second-act finale, and the duet for Rustano and Rogiero that opens Act III. More notably, parts of some of the ensembles appear to have been adapted for principals only; (3) excerpts published by Antonio Pacini in Paris (plate numbers 2962, 2932 and 2392; Gianni's aria ‘Fasti? pompe? omaggi? onori?’ bears the inscription ‘No. 81 Echo Lyrique’ rather than a plate number); and (4) a manuscript copy of the score prepared by Gaetano Corelli e Ci of Palermo, acquired by the Bibliothéque du Conservatoire from the Florentine publisher Fernando Lorenzi (retiring heir to Guiseppe Lorenzi's copisteria) in 1877 (F-Pn D. 2882'83).
9 In Donizetti's words (letter of 24 August 1841, no. 378, Zavadini [see n. 4], p. 558), ‘tutto ciò che serve alla situazione e lascia campo agli artisti di brillare’.
10 The new cabaletta for Metilde (called ‘Edita’ in Paris) was ‘Teneri moto che in cor vi sento’, given in Ab major in the manuscript score used in Paris (A major in Metilde's manuscript part). The original cabaletta, ‘Se ignori chi sono’ (sung in both Naples and Milan), which its text closely paraphrases, is given in the same key as the cantabile, Db (in the autograph and the manuscript copy from Palermo; D major in the piano-vocal score), suggesting that it was not only too plain for Ungher, who notated many additional ornaments in her part, but also too high. Donizetti had already revised the tessitura of the aria downwards for Adelaide Comelli-Rubini, who created the role: the autograph includes two Db -major versions in his hand, the revised version employing the same cabaletta text and similar melodic figures. Other changes made for the première include the addition of an overture by the theatre's concertatore, Giovanni Tadolini (according to Edouard Fétis's review for the Revue musicale [21 December 1833], 397–8); and the relocation of Gianni's aria ‘Fasti! pompe! omaggi! onori!’ from the second to the first act to accommodate his new aria.
11 Other changes included the revision of the second-act finale, for which the rationale may also have been its tessitura: the original D-major stretta, found inferior and too high for Ungher by the critic for the Journal des débats (19 December 1833), was replaced by one in Bb major (and preceded by an added F-major chorus); and the addition of a four-movement quartet in Eb for soprano, two tenors and baritone as first-act finale. The only evidence for this number in the materials is a contrabass part with some vocal cues bound into the manuscript copy of the score.
12 In the Revue musicale (23 February 1833), 30, which related that the audience had obliged Tamburini to sing it twice, and said of both performances that ‘jamais basse n'a chanté comme Tamburini chante cet air; c'est une merveille de facilité, de goût et de vocalisation’. (Never has a bass sung this air as Tamburini sings it; it's a wonder of facility, of taste and of vocalisation.) The aria, also performed in Chiara di Rosembergh at the beginning of Act II, is ascribed to Montalbano in Rustano's part.
13 Materials for Gianni da Calais, Bellini's Norma and Mercadante's I Normanni a Parigi are among copying expenses for the season 1833–4 paid to a Bolognese agent, Buttazzoni, on 3 September 1833, along with fees for the transport of the materials from Bologna and Milan to Paris (probably during the second half of August, to judge from the letter quoted above; F-Po ‘Registre de l'Opéra Comique [Théâtre Italien]’ 292). Buttazzoni also provided the Théâtre Italien with the materials for its productions of Bellini's La straniera and I Capuleti e i Montecchi and Luigi Ricci's Chiara di Rosembergh (Carlo Severini to Buttazzoni, 21 June 1832, F-Pan AJ13 1161). In later years he identified himself and his business as ‘Gaetano Buttazzoni e Figli, Negozianti di Musica in Bologna nella Piazza del Pavaglione’ in a communication with the Théâtre Italien arranging payments to Ricordi (Buttazzoni to Arcangelo Berrettoni, 15 September 1854, AJ13 1163). Materials for the above-mentioned operas employed for productions at the Théâtre Italien are identified elsewhere in the theatre's archives as emanating from Ricordi, and are linked by their common copyists or watermarks.
14 In Devriès, Anik and Lesure, François, Dictionnaire des éditeurs de musique français, vol.II, De 1820 à 1914 (Genève, 1988), 334. The published price of the nine-page extract is 4f 50c, the plate number is 2970, and Pacini's title and address are given as ‘à Paris, chez PACINI, Editeur de Musique Boulevard des Italiens N.o 11./ au coin de la rue Marivaux’.Google Scholar
15 The repetition is replaced in the published version with four bars of cadential formulas before the final four-bar closing phrase.
16 The role of the King was created by Michele Benedetti.
17 William Ashbrook speaks of this number as an ‘aria-finale’ for Metilde, ‘the rondò in variation form’ (Donizetti and his Operas [Cambridge, 1982], 250 and 309). In the Milanese libretto (for which the incipit reads ‘Di tante pene e tante’) and the manuscript copy from Palermo, the company joins with Metilde and Gianni, but parts for them are not given in the Neapolitan vocal score.Google Scholar
18 ‘Le caractère de la musique de Gianni da Calais est une simplicité qui va souvent jusqu'à la trivialité; les formes en sont mesquines et les proportions peu en rapport avec ce qu'on est accoutumé d'entendre au même théâtre. L'instrumentation si brillante de Donizetti est pâle et terne dans cet opéra; on dirait d'un opéra-comique fait à la manière de il y a quarante ans …. L'administration du Théâtre-Italien a retiré cette pièce de son répertoire, soit définitivement, soit jusqu'à ce qu'elle en ait augmenté la partition de quelques autres morceaux de Donizetti. C'est une preuve de goût dont lui tiendront compte les habitués.’ Revue musicale (21 December 1833), 398.
19 Zavadini, (see n. 4 ), no. 95, p. 310.Google Scholar
20 Zavadini, (see n. 4), no. 103, p. 318.Google Scholar
21 For an explanation of the directors' disappearance, see my article ‘Rossini, Artistic Director of the Théâtre Italien, 1830–1836’, in Fabbri, Paolo, ed., Gioachino Rossini 1792–1992: il testo e la scena. Convegno internaagonale di studi, Pesaro, 25–28 giugno 1992 (Pesaro, 1994), 611;Google Scholar see also Ashbrook, Donizetti and his Operas, 79–80, and Soubies, Albert, Le Théâtre-Italien de 1801 à 1913 (Paris, 1913), 72.Google Scholar
22 The historical figure of Jean de Paris, son of Philippe de Valois, was also the subject of a mélodrame by Benoît-Joseph Marsollier des Vivetières produced in 1807, five years before Saint-Just and Boieldieu's opera, at the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin. But according to Geoffroy's, Cours de littérature dramatique, 2nd edn (Paris, 1825), V, 396, the two works had nothing in common except their title. Similarly, a two-act comédie entitled Jean de Calais by Lurieu, Emile Vanderburch and Etienne Crétu with which Gilardoni's libretto shared only its subject was given at the Théâtre des Variétés on 28 November 1827.Google Scholar
23 On the conventions of the genre, see Brooks, Peter, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New York, 1985), esp. chapters 2 and 3.Google Scholar
24 By Pichat, Raimond, Taylor, Isidore J. S. and Nodier, Charles, with music by Alexandre Piccini, this mélodrame was in turn based on Charles Maturin's Byronic tragedy Bertram of 1816.Google Scholar
25 On the Théâtre Italien's institutionalisation of this substitution, see my forthcoming article ‘What Emma and Béatrix Heard: Rereading “Resistance” in Lucia di Lammermoor’.
26 Maguire, Simon and Forbes, Elizabeth, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, s.v. ‘Il pirata’, 1017.Google Scholar
27 The same title was also temporarily adopted by Berlioz in 1851, the year of Cooper's death, for the concert overture he began in 1844 and was eventually to call Le Corsaire. Le Corsaire was, in turn, a theatrical journal famous for its broadsides ‘à tout pirate’ to which Berlioz contributed between 1823 and 1828.
28 Some pre-Romantic operatic manifestations of interest in this topos (parodied in 1879 in Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta The Pirates of Penzance) are Nicolas-Marie Dalayrac's comédie mêlée d'ariettes, Le Corsaire (1783; revised in 1785 and again in 1793 as Le Corsaire algérien, ou Le Combat naval) and Stephen Storace's dialogue opera The Pirates (1792). In literature, the precedents for the sea romances of Cooper (beginning with The Pilot, of 1823) and his American and English epigones were Tobias Smollett's mid-eighteenth-century nautical novels. Among the more important poetic manifestations of the phenomenon, in the tradition of the ballads paying homage to Captain Kidd (a prototype for Zampa, executed for piracy in 1701), was Victor Hugo's Chanson de pirates (1828), set to music in 1829 by Berlioz; and Humbert Ferrand's Chant du brigand, upon which Berlioz probably based the ‘Chanson de brigands’ in his Lélio (composed in 1831 before the publication of the poem in 1858).
29 Italian Opera (Cambridge, 1991), 466.Google Scholar
30 In connection with Gianni da Calais, Ashbrook (Donizetti and his Operas, 250) cites a letter the composer wrote to Mayr on 2 February 1828, exactly six months before the opera's première (Zavadini (see n. 4), no. 38, p. 257) concerning the success of the trio he had written as the first-act finale in the just-completed L'esule di Roma and his desire to ‘scuotere il giogo dei finale’ (shake off the yoke of the finale) in future operas. It should be remembered, though, that the original finale of Gianni da Calais was not a rondè but a terzettino.
31 See the discussion of this opera in Gossett, Philip, ‘Music at the Théâtre-Italien’, in Bloom, Peter, ed., Music in Paris in the Eighteen-Thirties (Stuyvesant, NY, 1987), 327–64.Google Scholar
32 See my article ‘Rossini in Bologna and Paris during the Early 1830s: New Letters’, La Revue de musicologie 79 (1993), 63–81; and ‘Rossini, Artistic Director of the Théâtre Italien 1830–1836’) (see n. 21), 599–622.Google Scholar
33 Enciclopedia dello Spettacolo IX, col. 1305, cited in Weinstock's, Herbert translation from Rossini: A Biography (New York, 1975), 445, where Traetta's use of the style in la Sofonisba (1762) is documented.Google Scholar
34 ‘Rossini ne l'attendait pas, après avoir détruit et chassé l'urlo francese de l'Opéra de Paris, de le retrouver dans toute sa splendeur à Milan’; ‘le public de Milan l'a tellement poussé à crier qu'elle tombera à Paris si elle ne change pas de méthode’; and ‘peut venir ici, il sera porté en triomphe. Quels barbares!’ Robert, writing from Milan, to Severini, 5 September 1829, F-Po L.A.S. Théâtre Italien 2, 1.
35 Robert, , writing from Rossini's estate outside Bologna (Castenaso), to Severini, 22 September 1829, L.A.S. Théâtre Italien 2, 2.Google Scholar
36 ‘Crier comme un brule’; ‘Des talens délicieux tels que Rubini et Tamburini en ne sont pas écoutés quand ils chantent d'une manière ravissante.’ Robert, writing from Bologna, to Vicomte de La Ferté, 29 September 1829, L.A.S., Théâtre Italien 24, 7.
37 Ibid. F. W. Grimm described French singing as ‘forcing sounds out of the throat and smashing them against the teeth [les fracasser sur les dentes] with a convulsive movement of the chin’, noting that ‘it is what we would call shouting’, in his ‘Lettre sur Omphale’ of 1752, cited in Barbier, Patrick, À L'Opéra au temps de Rossini et de Balzac: Paris 1800–1850 (Paris, 1987), 169.Google Scholar