Le nozze in villa

Comic opera in two acts by Bartolomeo Merelli
Music by Gaetano Donizetti, with additional material by Elio and Rocco Tanica

Cast

Conductor and fortepiano Stefano Montanari
Director Davide Marranchelli
Set designer Anna Bonomelli
Costume designer Linda Riccardi
Lighting designer Alessandro Carletti
Assistant director Caterina Denti
Lighting assistant Ludovico Gobbi

Orchestra Gli Originali
Coro Donizetti Opera
Choirmaster Fabio Tartari

Sabina Gaia Petrone
Don Petronio Omar Montanari
Trifoglio Fabio Capitanucci
Claudio Giorgio Misseri
Anastasia Manuela Custer
Rosaura Claudia Urru
Anselmo Daniele Lettieri

Figuranti Ester Bonato, Marco Continanza, Federica Cottini, Riccardo Dal Toso, Andreyna de la Soledad, Leonardo Larini, Simone Severgnini, Daniele Tessaro 

Nuovo allestimento della Fondazione Teatro Donizetti

Synopsis

At the beginning of 1819, Gaetano Donizetti was a 22yearold composer who had just made his debut the previous year . He was linked to the wandering company of the impresario Paolo Zancla and was strongly bound to Bortolomeo Merelli, from Bergamo like him and at the time a librettist, before he became one of the most important and successful Italian impresarios of the nineteenth century. During the Carnival season of 1818-19, Zancla’s company was in Mantua to stage Clotilde by Coccia, which however had a disastrous outcome: the prima donna was thrown on stage not only cooked pears, but even an incendiary piece that luckily only burnt the edge of her costume instead of setting the entire theatre on fire. As a response, Zancla staged Ross ini’s L’italiana in Algeri and summoned to Mantua the young creative couple MerelliDonizetti, who pro duced Le nozze in villa, a typical opera buffa of the time, based on a comedy by Kotzebue translated into Italian as I provinciali. Little is known about the outcome of the opera; it was probably a fiasco, al though it was revived in Treviso in the spring of 1820 and then in Genoa two years later . The work also presents numerous textual problems, starting with the fact that there is no autograph copy, that the musical sources are dispersed and that the quintet of the second act, “Aura gentil, che mormori”, is com pletely missing . As part of the #Donizetti200 pro ject, the Festival will present the first modern perfor mance of this title, which has remained, until today, quite “mysterious” (very few sources speak about it). The quintet is no longer missing, because it was newly by Elio and Rocco Tanica with the collabora tion of Enrico Melozzi. The production is inspired by philological criteria for the musical part, with the use of the tuning fork of the time and “historically informed” instrumentalists, and by references to current events for the scenic part. The aim is to retrieve the satiric and funny work that Donizetti tried to offer to the difficult Mantuan audience, always remaining in the wake of the most illustrious com poser of his time, Rossini, who is the obvious model for the Nozze in Villa. This is a further step in the re discovery of Donizetti’s works, as we are aware that the more Donizetti is known the bettr.