By Ralph P. Locke

A renowned 18th-century master struts his stuff, helped by a skillful young Italian tenor, in an opera first performed in Russia.

PAISIELLO: La finta amante, opera in 2 acts (1780).

Elena Tsetkova (Camilletta), Daniele De Prosperi (Gelino), Antoine Bernheim (Don Girone).

Estrin Orch, cond. Stefano Parisse.

Naxos 660563-64 [2 CDs] 114 minutes.

Opera lovers have heard about Giovanni Paisiello (1740-1816): that he was an enormously successful opera composer who also knew how to endear himself to people in positions of power, serving Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg, Joseph II in Vienna, and, in later years, Napoleon in Paris. He often gave voice, harpsichord, and composition lessons to members of the aristocracy, as has been explained in detail by Nicoleta Paraschivescu in her recent fascinating book The Partimenti of Giovanni Paisiello: Pedagogy and Practice (University of Rochester Press). His dozens of operas included one based on Beaumarchais’s play The Barber of Seville (1780); it held Europe’s stages until Rossini’s energetic and witty version came along.

His other operas are gradually getting revived, mainly in Europe. I welcomed recordings of La grotta di Trofonio, based on a libretto that may have influenced da Ponte’s for Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Zenobia in Palmira, Le gare generose (set in colonial Boston!), and, most recently, L’Amor vendicato, though I found the three comic operas more engagingly performed than the one serious opera (Zenobia).

The booklet-essay suggests that Paisiello ramped up the characterization and dramatic thrust of his music when he started composing operas for courts and cities outside of Italy, to help people follow the plot and stay engaged. Whether the claim is accurate or not, this world-premiere recording of La finta amante shows a composer and a librettist working with a skilled hand to enact an amusing and touching story on stage. The work may even have been familiar to Mozart, since it was performed in Vienna in 1784, the year in which he returned from Russia to Naples and spent some productive months at the court in Vienna.

The libretto, which the booklet claims (on what evidence?) is possibly by the renowned poet and satirist Giovanni Battista Casti, has parallels to the plot of one of the most famous operas of the 18th century, Pergolesi’s La serva padrona, and also to that of the Barber of Seville play and operas. It is in two acts, and therefore might be considered an example of an “intermezzo” or “farsa,” though it lasts more than twice as long as the best-known intermezzo, namely Pergolesi’s aforementioned La serva padrona. Musicologist John A. Rice has kindly informed me that it reworks substantial chunks of an earlier libretto, Don Falcone (which can be consulted on GoogleBooks).

Typically for an intermezzo or farsa, there are only three characters and no chorus. As the excellent synopsis (with helpful track numbers) explains, these are a wealthy, “socially awkward” man named Girone; a young woman, Camilletta, who makes her living by weaving lace; and her boyfriend Gelino, who has recently been hired as a servant by Don Girone. The two lovers “decide to stage an innocent deception to make fun of him and fund their wedding.” Camilletta “pretends to reciprocate Girone’s ardent love,” and Gelino returns in disguise as Camilletta’s supposed brother who has come to protect her from Girone’s advances. Act 1 ends with a rather astonishing scene in which the young woman and her “brother” threaten Don Girone with, respectively, a gun and a sword.

In Act 2, Camilletta pretends to be ill, Gelino (as the “brother”) demands that Girone kill Camilletta, and, a bit later, enters in a second disguise, as a captain of the guards, and makes to arrest the two. Girone bribes the man, and the couple seem headed for a life of wedded bliss and financial comfort. But someone (offstage) reveals the deception to Girone, who then rips Gelino’s fake mustache off. The young couple beg for forgiveness, and Girone agrees to let them marry and to be servants together in his house.

All this action and interaction is skillfully handled in the libretto and in the music, which moves largely in short arias and duets separated by passages of harpsichord-accompanied recitative. (The conductor is also here the efficient, somewhat bland harpsichordist; in a third role, he produced the rather dry, unresonant recording.) Occasionally an aria is longer and dramatic, notably the one (“Ferma, tiranno e barbaro!”: CD 2, track 9) by means of which Camilletta persuades Girone not to accede to the demand of her “brother” that she be killed for trying to have a life of her own.

As that moment in the work suggests, there are real issues here about the rights of people who have less power in society. The work could be very effective today in a savvily staged production much like Paisiello’s other comic operas mentioned above.

Alas, the performance rarely rises to the challenge. The most satisfying of the three singers is the tenor, Daniele De Prosperi, from Italy. He conveys the text with the understanding of a native speaker, and vocalizes smoothly throughout his range, aside from some moments of bleating that seem to derive from a technical shortcoming (not from an attempt at characterization). Some online photos and videos also suggest that he has a savvy sense for how to use facial expressions and bodily posture to put a character and situation across. I look forward to hearing more from him, and perhaps seeing him in a full-length opera video.

The bass-baritone Antoine Bernheim, who was born in Lausanne (Switzerland), gets into the spirit of his role, nicely alternating between gruffness, befuddlement, and rage. But his pitch is often somewhat approximate, and he punches out individual syllables instead of making long phrases. He doesn’t seem to be related to the renowned young tenor Benjamin Bernheim, though the latter, who is much younger, did attend conservatory in Lausanne and probably kept hearing about Antoine.

Opera composer Giovanni Paisiello, who also knew how to endear himself to people in positions of power, serving Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg, Joseph II in Vienna, and, in later years, Napoleon in Paris.

The soprano, Elena Tsvetkova, has a Russian name. If she is the same singer as a mezzo-soprano with that name, she comes from the city of Magadan, in Siberia. (There’s also a well-known pianist who has the same name.) She has a well-produced voice, except from some vagueness of pitch on a few quick notes. But she intones the text blankly, as if not knowing, much of the time, what the specific words and phrases mean.

Still, the music, together with the words and situations, manages to make an effect. It helps that Paisiello puts a lot of lively bustling into the string-orchestra writing. (The handful of wind players are largely given harmony-supporting lines, not characterful solos.) As a result, the orchestra conveys much excitement and, when necessary, intensity, and this allows the composer to give the cast members longer note-values, which free them to sustain tone instead of spitting out syllables in a way that might tire the listener’s ear and turn the main musical numbers into near-Sprechstimme. (Don Girone here is sometimes an exception, when given humorously sputtering repetition of syllables.)

Paisiello’s good sense of dramatic pacing is, alas, undermined by the amateurish way in which the recording has been edited, with a little too much silence at the beginning of most of the tracks. Naxos should have done more to tighten up the sound-files provided by the Italian conductor-harpsichordist-producer and his Russian engineer. The recording was made in St. Petersburg, using a small ensemble from the St. Petersburg Philharmonic that calls itself the Estrin Orchestra.

I would encourage college and university music schools to consider staging this amusing and insightful work, which speaks to issues of class prejudice and individual autonomy as vividly today as it ever did. A good singing translation would help — and/or supertitles. As for the present recording, it would have been much easier to “get into” the work if the online libretto had included an English translation. Naxos, please urge organizations that provide recordings to you to provide translations!

Ralph P. Locke is emeritus professor of musicology at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. Six of his articles have won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music. His most recent two books are Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections and Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart (both Cambridge University Press). Both are now available in paperback; the second, also as an e-book. Ralph Locke also contributes to American Record Guide and to the online arts-magazines New York Arts, Opera Today, and The Boston Musical Intelligencer. His articles have appeared in major scholarly journals, in Oxford Music Online (Grove Dictionary), and in the program books of major opera houses, e.g., Santa Fe (New Mexico), Wexford (Ireland), Glyndebourne, Covent Garden, and the Bavarian State Opera (Munich). The present review first appeared in American Record Guide and is included here by kind permission.