1 gen 1733 anni - La serva padrona

Descrizione:

Intermezzo by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi

La Serva Padrona, written expressly to be played between the acts of one of Pergolesi's own serious operas. First performed alongside an opera seria by Pergolesi, it became extraordinarily famous, thanks to peformancesby traveling troupes of buffi who within ten years took it all around Italy and as far away as Munich, Dresden, and Hamburg. By the end of the 1740s, it had been heard in Paris, and within another decade it had conquered London., Madrid, and St. Petersburg. La serva padrona is still performed, the earliest comic opera in the standard repertory.

Its plot and cast of characters are of the usual kind, a contest between squabbling soprano and buffo bass. There are two sung roles, the maid Serpina and her master and guardian, Uberto, plus a mute role (Vespone, another servant) who gets to laugh once. The importance of conventions to this genre is epitomized by the heroine's name: Serpina (from snake) is the sharp-tongued female, a stock figure ultimately derived from the old commedia dell'arte, the traditional theater of masks and clowns. She delivers a great deal of the fast-paced patter that made the comic style so irresistible.

Both parts of the intermezzo contain short arias for each of the characters and a culminating duet. In the first part, the master stews over the maid's disrespectful behavior, finally telling Vesponse to go out and find him a wife. Serpina orders Uberto to marry her; he won't heard of it; she locks the doors to prevent Vespone from leaving, and the two of them erupt in sarcastic bickering. In the second part, Serpina disguised Vespone as "Capitan Tempesta", her threatening bully of a fiance, who is demanding from UBerto an impossible dowry. The only way out of a fight with the captain, she insinuates, is for him to agree to marry her himself. After a lot of coaxing and some agonized reflection. he gives in; Vespone removes his disguise; Uberto's been had, but he's happy. The newly engaged couple sings a duet of reconciliation. Opera of this kind demands comic contrasts. Gone was the "unity of affect" in which the opera seria had found its version of truth, and instead we encounter the psychological, dramatic, and representational roots of the contrast-and-balance technique that became fundamental even to instrumental music by century's end.

Aggiunto al nastro di tempo:

Data: