Violence, Pathos, and Comedy in Salieri's La finta scema

Abstract

September 1775 was not an auspicious time to present a new opera buffa in Vienna. Impresarios had run the two court theaters since 1766; but now Emperor Joseph II, eager to manage the Burgtheater himself, looked for an excuse to invalidate the contract by which the last of the impresarios was operating. "La troupe de l'opera buffa est détestable," he wrote to his brother Leopold on 20 August 1775. On the same day he issued an ultimatum to Count Johann Keglevich, the impresario, threatening to take over the theaters if he did not "immediately make arrangements to put the opera buffa, the ballets, and also the German troupe on a more advantageous footing." Three weeks later, on 9 September, Antonio Salieri presented La finta scema, on a libretto by Giovanni de Gamerra.

    Although De Gamerra did not claim La finta scema as an example of his projected reform of opera buffa, and the title refers openly to Goldoni's La finta semplice, the work departs significantly from Goldonian norms. It presents an unusually large cast, requiring ten singers. De Gamerra inserted in his libretto many detail instructions for singers' gestures and movements. 

    In his spoken dramas De Gamerra helped introduce the comédie larmoyante, the sentimental or pathetic comedy, to Italy. In La finta scema he experimented with the idea of opera buffa as comédie larmoyante. He was not alone. Several of the most successful operas of the mid 1770s followed Goldoni's La buona figliuola in placing a virtuous heroine in a situation in which the audience is asked to pity her; but they intensified her plight, making it much more dangerous and lugubrious than anything experienced by Cecchinia. In Paisiello's La frascatana Violante is locked in a tower; in Anfossi's La vera costanza the mentally unstable Errico, who has secretly married Rosina, actually instructs another character to murder her. De Gamerra contributed to the increasing level of violence and pathos in opera buffa. In La finta scema he emphasized the danger of the situation in which Rosina finds herself almost to the point of tragedy, even bringing her close to being killed by another character.

    This essay investigates Salieri's musical response to the mixture of violence, pathos, and comedy in De Gamerra's libretto through a consideration of several arias—"Questa gamba è all'Ercolina," "Quando ascolto il dolce moto," "Questa è un'aria d'Egiziello," and "Questo fioco urlo dolente"—and the finales of acts 1 and 2.

The essay was published in Music in the Theater, Church, and Villa: Essays in Honor of Robert Lamar Weaver and Norma Wright Weaver, ed. Susan Parisi (Warren, Michigan, 2000), 213–26.   Full text