L’intermezzo romano. The history of a genre from Italy to Bohemia

Katalin Tamás-Csikós (University of West Hungary, Szombathely) [Bio]
Email: tamás.katalin@mnsk.nyme.hu

In the 18th century the intermezzo was a comic operatic interlude inserted between acts or scenes of an opera seria or spoken plays. These intermezzi could be substantial and complete works themselves, though they were shorter than the opera seria which enclosed them. They typically provided comic relief and dramatic contrast to the tone of the bigger opera around them, and often they used one or more of the stock characters from the opera or from commedia dell’arte. A closer look at the intermezzos written in Italy in the 18^th century reveals at least three different sub-genres, varying not only in the place of performance, but in structure too. This study focuses on the history of the Roman intermezzo, which was the most influential and prevalent among them.

The origin of the Roman intermezzo is strongly intertwined with the Teatro della Valle, one of the six theaters in Rome that presented intermezzos during the intermissions of operas or spoken plays. The Theatro Valle was built in 1727 by the Capranica family after the plans of Tommaso Morelli and shortly became an important place of social entertainment. Although mostly spoken plays were performed in the Teatro della Valle, it played a very important rule in the history of opera, as it has ordered and performed numerous intermezzi from the mid-1730s.

The Roman intermezzo has a unique and characteristic structure, that differentiates it from the other types of intermezzo: the number of characters is 4 or 5 (contrasting the 2-3 characters in Neapolitan intermezzo and the 8-10 characters in Venetian opera buffa written by Goldoni) and its two acts are divided into scenes, like the larger opera buffa. The influence of comic opera is also apparent in the orchestral ouvertures heading each act, and in the long finales; not to mention the plots and basic character types.

The intermezzo repertoire of the Teatro della Valle included the works of Benedetto Micheli, Niccolo Piccinni, Antonio Sacchini, Carlo de Franchi, Giovanni Paisiello, Domenico Cimarosa and others. These pieces were performed during Carnival, generally two operas in a season, for example in 1763 Piccinni’s Le donne vendicate and Il cavaliere per amore. After the premiére, the intermezzos were often performed in other cities outside Italy, as the travelling troupes and composers took the manuscripts and librettos with them, offering the pieces for other theaters in Europe. The Roman intermezzo became extremely popular in Vienna, where – among performing the original intermezzos – composers wrote gladly new compositions for an existing libretto, or poets wrote new librettos resembling the Roman predecessors. Table 1 shows four examples to the variety of re-composition of a roman intermezzo-libretto in various towns and composers.

Table 1

Il finto pazzo per amore

Libr. ? T. Mariani

1. G. Selitti 1735. Napoli

2. A. Sacchini 1768. Roma, Teatro della Valle

3. N. Piccinni 1771. Wien

4. Dittersdorf 1772. Johannisberg

5. „Il soldato per forza 1774. Pavia

impazzito per amore”

La contadina fedele

Libr. ?

1. C. de Franchi 1769. Roma, Teatro della Valle

2. G. Sarti 1771. Wien

3. Dittersdorf 1776. Johannisberg

Lo sposo burlato

Libr. ? G. B. Casti

1. N. Piccinni 1769. Roma, Teatro della Valle

2. Dittersdorf ?1774. Johannisberg

3. F. Clerico 1783. ?

4. L. Rossi 1793. ?

5. E. Galea 1840. ?

Il barone di Rocca Antica

Libr. A. Petrosellini

1. C. de Franchi 1771. Roma, Teatro della Valle

2. C. de Franchi, Anfossi 1772. Dresden

3. A. Salieri 1772. Wien

4. Dittersdorf 1776. Johannisberg

The Viennese success of Roman intermezzo originated mainly in the fact, that – because of the reduced performing and stage requirements – it could be performed in places, where there was not enough money, place or performers to put on the boards a whole, three-act opera buffa with many characters. The four-character based story in these smaller town or court theaters proved to be sufficient without a larger accompnying drama to entertain the audience; the brevity and the clear story-telling made these intermezzos or comic operas enjoyable for everybody, including the court members who did not speak Italian.

Viennese impresarios and audience were among the first to host the new genreⁱ – although we cannot find the name “intermezzo” in the manuscripts. The librettos and autoghraph scores made in Vienna use generally the term “operetta giocosa” that can present the separateness of the genre. According to Gustav Zechmeisterⁱⁱ, the first intermezzo performed in Vienna was probably by Niccolo Piccinni in 1765ⁱⁱⁱ, followed by the intermezzos of Sacchini, Anfossi, Paisiello and Viennese composers, as Antonio Salieri. The many operetta giocosa written and performed in Vienna no doubt influenced the composers who were employed in smaller aristocratic courts near or far away from the capital city and had to compose dramatic pieces for a relatively small orchestra and maximum 4 singers.

A good example for this situation is Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, who was in the service of Count Schaffgotsch, Prince-Bishop of Breslau (today Wroclaw, Poland) between 1769 and 1799. Count Schaffgotsch had fallen out of favour with Frederick II during the Silesian Wars and he was forced to settle in a remote corner of the Austrian Empire, in Johannisberg. The estate that lies in the northeast of Bohemia, near Javornik by the Polish border, was originally the Prince-Bishop’s summer residence. “The chateau had been built around the 9^th or 10^th century, but the original building was converted in 1509 by the Prince-Bishop of the time” Dittersdorf writes in his Autobiography. Its main feature is its 15.2-metre-diameter oval tower dating from the 16^th century. Originally a gunpowder tower, it was concerted by the composer’s initiative into a theatre. When completed, the Prince-Bishop hired a small opera company with 16 orchestra members and a tenor, a bass and two soprano singers. Dittersdorf wrote nine Italian-language comic operas for this company between 1770 and 1776, four of them are based on intermezzo librettos first set to music in Rome (see Table 1).

Among the four operas the most characteristic is the piece called Il Barone di Rocca antica that has first performed in Johannisberg in 1776. Dittersdorf had probably acquired the libretto in Vienna, when the piece, set to music by Antonio Salieri, was performed in the Kärtnerthortheater in 1772. The librettist was a certain Giuseppe Petrosellini, a Roman poet, who is credited with a number of fashionable stories (L’incognita perseguitata – Piccinni, 1764; Il pittore parigino – Cimarosa, 1781). The two-act piece was originally written for Carlo Franchi and premiéred in the Teatro della Valle in Rome in the Carnival of 1771. There is no evidence that this intermezzo was performed in Vienna or not, but Salieri got the libretto solely a year after the first performance and composed his opera in 1772. According to Charles Burney, the famous English music historian, Salieri’s opera remain in the repertoire for four months, that demonstrates the success and popularity of the piece.

Petrosellini’s libretto, like many others, includes the influence of Goldoni as well as the above mentioned Roman tradition. Each of the two acts starts with an orchestral introduction and ends with a long finale, and the penultimate section of the opera is a love duet – this structure appears frequently in Goldoni’s plays. The plot of the intermezzo involves two lovers. As a young man Barone Arsura (tenor) proposes to the rich and beautiful Beatrice (soprano), but leaves her before the wedding. The girl sets off to find her unfaithful fiancé and make him keep his promise. Lenina (soprani) and Giocondo (bass), a young village couple, have similar problems. Giocondo once promised to marry Lenina, but now he wants to be a soldier and refuses the girl’s approaches. As in any comic opera, it will take much intricacy (chiefly on the part of the ladies) to reach a happy ending.

The manuscript of Il Barone di Rocca antica is kept at the National Széchenyi Library, as part of the Esterházy Music Library. A letter has came down to us explaining that Dittersdorf himself had sent the score of his six Italian-language operas to Duke Nikolaus Esterházy I in the hope that they would be restaged at Eszterháza. His hopes were not in vain; the Duke bought the manuscrips, although not all works were included in the repertoire. Joseph Haydn, the Kapellmeister of the Esterházy family was very rigorous in his selection of music, and the fact that Il Barone di Rocca antica was ultimately performed in the autumn of 1776 and kept in the programme for another two years shows that he must have been pleased with it.

The history of Petrosellini’s libretto clearly shows us, how these operas spreaded over Europe conBsidering no borders, nations or languages. No matter, when or where were they performed, the well-known characters and situations ment the same for the cultured audience of the theaters and court performances.