Mi Bestia

Tommaso Traetta (1727 - 1779) wrote approximately forty operas in the serious and comic veins though his adaptations of the lyric tragedies were most significant. Traetta studied with Nicola Porpora and Francesco Durante and was influenced by Rameau, Rousseau, Metastasio, Jommelli and Gluck as well as several librettists concurrent at the time. He served as the director of the Ospedaletto in Venice and later became the master of music at the Russian court in St. Petersburg. Before returning to Venice he also spent some time in London. Among his operas were "Ippolito ed Aricia," "Ifigenia in Tauride," "Antigone," "Sonfonisba," and "Armida." Critically Traetta's operas were often scored for too many principle characters. Most of the operas, if not all, were based on classical literature and scored for larger orchestras than had heretofore been conventional. The operas which Traetta composed were both serious and comic.

Paisiello (1740-1816) was the master of Italian opera buffo and a significant influence on Mozart. His orchestral writing and musical characterizations are deft and dramatic, and he was the first to introduce ensemble finales into comic operas. Don Chisciotte is an early work, premiered in Naples (where he spent most of his life) in 1769, and it already shows all the skills that made his work popular throughout Europe. The libretto by Lorenzi is based on a 1719 play that deals with the Don's visit to a noble court and the tricks that are played on him there, drawing in material from elsewhere in Cervantes' novel, including his tilt with the windmills. The characters are reduced from aristocrats to middle-class Neapolitans familiar to the opera's audiences, and they are treated with parodistic irony.

The Overture gives the clue: this is the Barber of the nudge and the wink, of the Neapolitan siesta rubato and the rumbustious business. Silvio Varviso, who works his willing orchestra hard enough, tends to operate by exaggerated contrasts of tempo rather than by pointing within the phrasing itself: the cast, similarly, work the comic value of the words rather than the wit of their underlay or inflection.