By Robert Croan
Thanks to the scholarly research of Florida Atlantic University faculty member Barbara Salani, Amalia e Carlo, an opera by the all-but-unknown Italian composer Pietro Carlo Guglielmi will have a revival — possibly the first since its world premiere in Naples in 1812 — in the University Theater at FAU on Friday at 7 p.m.
The current performance is the United States premiere, following performances last month in Massa, Italy.
Salani, a pianist and musicologist with a Ph. D. from FAU in comparative studies — musicology and Italian — discovered the long-lost manuscript in a Tuscan castle, and worked for four years reassembling the score and creating a performable modern edition. The opera’s libretto, by Andrea Leone Tottola, intertwines a love story with court intrigue and family turmoil, amid the political and cultural landscape of Napoleonic Italy, an unusually contemporary subject for its time, when operas more typically dealt with subjects from history and mythology. It was written under the rule of Queen Caroline Bonaparte and King Joachim Murat, whose French taste is heard in the use of spoken dialogue between musical numbers, again uncommon in Italian operas of this period.
The work was called an opera semiseria, predominantly serious but with a lighter element, as was Vincenzo Bellini’s more familiar La sonnambula, composed two decades later. Its musical style straddles the classical and early Romantic styles. Flashes of Neapolitan comedy include the presence of a basso buffo, who drives the drama toward a happy reconciliation at the end.
Salani describes the music as “unmistakably bel canto, lyrical arches, delicate fioriture, and agile high writing. Carlo is a Rossinian light tenor, while Amalia has two major showpieces that demand both bravura and pathos. The orchestration is classically transparent yet theatrically vivid, with rhythmic drive anticipating propulsive Rossinian crescendos that sweep the ensembles to a brilliant finish.”
The greatest challenge for Salani was reconstructing the complete score.
“I first found only Act 1 in the medieval Castiglione del Terziere,” she says. “After a long search I located the full 1812 score at the Conservatorio San Pietro a Majella in Naples, and tracked down four period librettos in different places, to establish a reliable modern edition.”
The FAU event is part of a collaboration with the Puccini Conservatory in La Spezia, Italy, with symposium events this week from Wednesday through Sunday, featuring music not only by this composer but by his father, Pietro Alessandro Guglielmi, along with two Mozart concertos.
Details: www.fau.edu/artsandletters/llcl/italian/symposium/.
Tickets available through the FAU box office: https://fauevents.universitytickets.com/w/event.aspx?id=6567