Karl Böhmer

Federico Cristiano Torelli, born in Dresden in 1743, was the grandnephew of the baroque master Giuseppe Torelli and a major composer of the late Bolognese school whose career developed between Dresden, Bologna and Saint Petersburg. The present paper is the first attempt at a biography of this hitherto almost unknown composer, inspired by his highly original version of Metastasio's Passione, performed at Bologna in 1786 and 1787 with extraordinary success. The autograph score of La Passione, preserved at the Biblioteca Internazionale della Musica, was digitalized for this paper and proves the originality, expressivity and peculiar stylistic position of a composer between three nations.

The letters of the Bavarian electress Maria Anna to her brother Franz Xaver of Saxony are partly preserved in the Archives Départementales de l'Aube in France, partly at the Hauptstaatsarchiv in Dresden. They contain fascinating details about the Munich court opera in the early 1770s, among others about the soprano castrato Domenico Bedini who is mentioned in four letters of the electress. Bedini was first heard by her brother in Siena during the summer fiera of 1770. When he arrived in Munich one year later, Franz Xaver recommended certain arias he had heard with Bedini to his sister. This is the starting point of a fascinating story concerning Bedini's one-year-sojourn in Munich, the operas he performed, the visit of the dowager electress Maria Antonia of Saxony and other episodes from the music life of the Munich court.

In 1791, the new impresario Prospero Franceschetti organized an extraordinary carnival season of three serious operas in the Teatro di Cittadella at Reggio Emilia. Bianchi's La morte di Cesare, Andreozzi's Virginia and Sarti's Giulio Sabino added to a cycle of classical tragedies all glorifying the revolutionary rising of Roman republicans and rebels against tyranny. Domenico Bedini was the star singer of all three operas, Francesco Fontanesi the genius of their stage sets. The season was organized by self-confident citizens from Reggio on the edge of their own revolutionary rising against the despotic rule of duke Ercole III d'Este from Modena. Since the correspondence of the impresario Franceschetti is preserved in the state archive at Reggio, his dealings with the authorities, with the dancers and the singers and with Bedini as the master-mind behind La morte di Cesare can be reconstructed in detail. The original Italian texts of the letters will be contained in a seperate appendix.

Music examples to my paper about the Italian career of Adriana Ferrarese del Bene, the prima donna for whom Mozart wrote the part of Fiordiligi in "Così fan tutte": Rondòs and duets by Bertoni, Anfossi, Tarchi, Cherubini and unidentified composers

Adriana Ferrarese del Bene, the soprano for whom Mozart wrote the role of Fiordiligi in "CosÍ fan tutte", started her career as a celebrated prima donna seria in London, Florence, Milan, Trieste and Piacenza (1784-1788) before being hired as prima buffa at the Imperial opera in Vienna. Her undisputed success in the serious genre was counterbalanced by mixed reactions towards her comic talent. Nevertheless, she was one of Italy's most renowned prime Donne, especially when performing two-tempo Rondòs. The present paper tells the story of her Italian career in Rondòs, revealing surprising facts about her early as well as late years: While her early career was restricted by the machinations of her unforgiving father-in-law Consul del Bene, her late years were overshadowed by the conflict between the Italian republicans and the pro-Austrian forces in northern Italy. She imported Mozart's "Come scoglio" to Venice and "Così fan tutte" to Trieste, she was the first prima donna to wear the Italian tricolore in Reggio in January 1797, but finished her career singing pro-Austrian propaganda pieces in Bologna.

"Creso in Media" was Joseph Schuster's second opera for Naples and the most successful opera seria at the Teatro San Carlo in the years around 1780. This paper analyzes the reasons for its extraordinary success: firstly the libretto by Giuseppe Pagliuca, which counted for a turning point in Neapolitan dramma per musica; secondly Schuster's wonderfully rich and contrasting music, which in an almost Mozartian way manages to characterize the protagonists in their complex conflicts, while providing for a second, much lighter level of musical expression in the small arias; thirdly the singers in their impressive variety of musical means, ranging from stunning coloratura to a deeply moving cantabile; and finally the stage designs by the Sicilian architect Francesco Sicuro. The acclaim of Schuster's score was ultimately enhanced by prominent visitors who saw the opera in Naples as well as in Livorno: the "Arciduchi di Milano", Ferdinand of Habsburg and Maria Beatrice d'Este. Ferdinand's musical taste had an immediate impact on the second version of "Creso in Media", performed in Livorno in May 1780.

This article concentrates on two aspects of Bedini's long career as one of the leading "primi uomini" in Italy during Mozart's time. It starts and ends with a reflection on his farewell to the stage, which happened in Verona in 1793 in the role of Giulio Sabino. Bedini's triumphs in that famous role are recounted with special emphasis on the Verona version. The core of the article describes his early years as "parte seria" in opera buffa, as secondo uomo and as a church singer. In the course of my research I was able to verify his birth date 19 May 1747 on the basis of documents from his hometown Fossombrone. Other new documents are published and discussed in detail.

The new version of my paper on two of the most enthralling Venetian operas of the 1780s is based on an additional source: the complete score of Tarchi's "Ifigenia in Tauride" in Paris. The first version of this article had been based only on the incomplete Florentine score. With the help of the Paris score it is now possible to draw a complete picture of that fascinating opera, including several music examples. Luigi Ballarini called Tarchi's "Ifigenia" an opera "in the style of the spectacle of Paris", because it consequently integrated chorus and ballet. Ballarini's letters are analyzed in my paper as a document for the crisis of the Teatro S. Benedetto in 1785/86. The choreography of Tarchi's danced choruses is described on the basis of the authentic annotations by Antonio Muzzarelli, contained in the Florentine score. The extraordinary musical and dramatic tension of Oreste's scenes with the furies is seen as a tribute to the art of Domenico Bedini, the great Soprano castrato, and as a document for Magri's theory of furies' dances. In the second half of the paper, Bianchi's "Alonso e Cora", is analyzed as an opera "in the style of the spectacle of Paris". It was the most authentic Italian opera based on Marmontel's novel "Les Incas" in the 1780s, and it transformed the French "Merveilleux naturel" into scene complexes of fascinating breadth and variety.

The new version of this paper offers musical transcriptions and a detailed analysis of nine insertion arias sung by Maria Marchetti Fantozzi and Domenico Bedini at Genoa's Teatro S. Agostino during the Carnival season of 1789. Marchetti's personal version of Angelo Tarchi's Rondò "Nel lasciar l'amato bene" is analyzed and transcribed, based on the Berlin score Mus. ms. 21263 and the Milan score. The second part of the paper concentrates on short scores from the Fondo Antico in the Conservatorio Niccolò Paganini in Genoa. They contain arias inserted by Marchetti and Bedini into Guglielmi's opera "Enea e Lavinia" and the Pasticcio ´"Attalo re di Bitinia". Both opera productions are reconstructed in detail, and the short scores are described concerning the arrangement practices and the repertoire of the two famous Mozart singers Marchetti and Bedini: their choice of insertion arias, the textual and musical arrangements, the cuts in the ensembles, embellishments and other strategies, last but not least the impact of the insertions on the dramaturgy of Guglielmi's most famous opera seria. Finally, those arias reveal a number of parallels to Mozart's music written for Marchetti and Bedini in "La clemenza di Tito". Especially Tarchi's Rondò "Nel lasciar l'amato bene" and Cimarosa's aria "Teneri dolci affetti" from "Attalo" can be seen as forerunners of Mozart's aria and Rondò for Vitellia.

The present article describes an important episode in the prehistory of Mozart's opera "La clemenza di Tito": the sojourn of Emperor Leopold II at Padua in July 1791. He attended performances of "Ipermestra" by Giovanni Paisiello and of a pasticcio "Didone abbandonata", with the famous soprano Luísa Todi and the acclaimed castrato Domenico Bedini, whom Leopold invited personally to his coronation opera in Prague. My paper reconstructs the details of the Emperor's sojourn in Padua with the help of Girolamo Polcastro's chronicle and of reports in the "Gazzetta urbana veneta". Paisiello's "Ipermestra" is intensively analyzed on the basis of the musical sources, including several scores unknown to Michael Robinson. The paper also reconstructs the content of the "Didone" pasticcio and the extraordinary impact of La Todi in her starring role, which is compared to the tragic flight to Varennes of the French queen Marie-Antoniette. News of the latter event arrived in Padua during the Emperor's "opera vacation" and influenced his decision to choose "La clemenza di Tito" as the subject of his Bohemian coronation opera.

When Domenico Bedini sang “Deh per questo istante solo” in La clemenza di Tito in September 1791, it was the 30th Rondò written for him in the course of 18 years of a steady career as primo uomo at all the major opera houses in Italy. The paper tries to reconstruct his career as a Rondò singer, which started in 1777 and continued through a spectacular series of compositions by Mortellari, Ottani, Myslivecek, Schuster, Alessandri, Rust, Martín y Soler, Sarti, Cherubini, Cimarosa and others right into the early 1790s with its new generation of composers (Nasolini). Bedini preferred to sing in a limited range mostly in A major, using special chromatic motives and melodic turns, which recur in Mozart’s Rondò, as do certain harmonic and formal features of his Rondò arias. He was a favorite of the Florentine court, which explains for his being chosen for Prague in 1791. There are no signs of a decline of his voice or career prior to the Prague coronation. In quoting extensively from Italian newspaper reports on the singer, from poems, from the correspondence of Padre Martini, who was Bedini’s mentor and from other sources the paper tries to convey a vivid picture of the singer and his success. Music examples from 11 of his Rondòs and an analysis of typical examples try to describe the specific features of Bedini’s “Rondò style”.