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Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Paisiello: Le Gare Generose
Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:
The Wuorinen opera was a lot of fun for the kiddos last Sunday. Now for an opera that's amusing for adults. At Christmastime, adults are supposed to be as generous in gift giving as Santa Claus. With that cliché in mind, listen to a comic opera called in Italian, Le Gare generose, which translates something like "The Rivals in Generosity" by Giovanni Paisiello (1740-1816).
Paisiello composed some eighty operas in his long career--way more than his younger contemporary Mozart. Most of Paisiello's operas fall within the genre of the Italian opera buffa, and they sound very much like the famous comic works of Mozart. Paisiello even wrote a "Barber of Seville" opera, first produced in 1782, that was enormously popular until Rossini's "Barber" came along in 1816. Le Gare generose, first staged in Naples in 1786, was also very popular right up to the beginning of the 19th century, and was produced all over Europe. Mozart himself saw a production of it in Prague in 1787.
"The Rivals in Generosity" is a middle-class comedy, with no characters of noble rank, and is set not somewhere in Europe, but in America--Boston, to be exact! The story centers upon a not-so-pious Quaker gentleman's household and his servants. There are serious elements in this lyric comedy, like slavery, which--remember--was still quite legal back then in America. This work therefore borders on the genre of opera semiseria.
Le Gare generose was recorded live in performance in 2018 at Taranto, with Giovanni di Stafano directing the Giovanni Paisiello Festival Orchestra and a cast of six singers. This was the first staging of the opera in modern times for the sixteenth annual Paisiello Festival. The Italian Bongiovanni label released the presumed world premiere recording on two compact discs in 2019. Over the years I have broadcast several of Paisiello's recorded works, especially his "Barber," and a couple of his serious or semi-serious operas, too.