Queen
of dissent: Mary Stuart
and the opera in her honour
by Carlo Coccia
by
Alexander
Weatherson
The mystery of the sudden banning of Donizetti's Maria
Stuarda in Naples in 1834 should
not be quite as mysterious as it has always been made out to be. Politics were
the cause. Though the "Carbonari" was the name given to
anti-governmental rebels in pre-Risorgimento Italy
few realise that this romantic term was derived from the legends surrounding
Mary Queen of Scots, when a "chain of seditious charcoal-burners" was
supposed to have been organised to carry out a secret struggle against the
throne of Queen Elizabeth I. Sedition of this kind made the decapitated
monarch unpopular in Bourbon Naples of course, and not only in Naples, the
claim that the banning of the opera was just because the King and Queen of
Naples were extremely remote descendants of Mary Stuart (like almost every
other Catholic monarch in Europe) was very wide of the mark.
The article below was presented in 2001 at the request of
the Teatro Donizetti of Bergamo to
mark the revival of Donizetti's Maria Stuarda of that year.
Introduction
Political Mayhem - Carlini's Maria Stuarda of 1818
Breaking the ice - Coccia's Mary Stuart of 1827
Grasping
the nettle - Donizetti's Maria Stuarda of 1834/5
Footnotes
That the sprightly Neapolitan, Carlo Coccia, came to see
Mary Stuart through English eyes goes without saying. A highly professional
operatic refugee from the Rossinian torrent in his beloved native city of
Naples, he had first paused in Lisbon (writing four operas and a National
Anthem) before coming on to London in 1823;
here as musical director of the largest and most glamorous opera house
in the city, the King's Theatre in the Haymarket (Covent Garden at that time
was merely a teatro di prosa), he
became a sort-of figurehead endearing himself as no visiting Italian had ever
done before, not even the brilliant succession of Italian composers in the
eighteenth century. Urbane, imperturbable and greeting the great pesarese
himself with admirable sangfroid when he too arrived in London (later
conducting Zelmira between
clenched-teeth) as he alighted from his coach with Isabella Colbran on one arm
and a large green parrot on the other, all three white-faced after a frightful
channel crossing. Soon this pupil of
Paisiello was professor of singing at the brand-new Royal Academy of Music in London with a stream of eminent
pupils. Indeed, it was the friendly,
gregarious Coccia (1782-1873) who restored the high-profile of Italian song in
that proud and stubborn island, Italian Opera once again re-emerging from the
mists with honour and acclaim.
Scotland too re-emerged from the mists - as
far as the English were concerned - at
much the same time. The last of the exiled Stuarts was dead, the pathetically
threadbare Henry Stuart, Cardinal “York” (1725-1807), cadet brother of the
Young Pretender Charles Edward Stuart had breathed his last in Rome,
his tomb in St Peters had been paid-for by King George III, but it was the latter’s more
imaginative son King George IV who snatched-up the torch and brought all things
Caledonian back to life. He was painted
wearing a kilt; he ennobled Sir Walter
Scott; the Scottish regalia was bundled
out of an old chest in Edinburgh Castle;
shortbread (a kind of Highland biscuit) and porridge (a stodgy oatmeal
soup), appeared on genteel tables in the Home Counties and everything Hebridian was coated with a thick layer of
well-meaning sentimentality. After 1820,
and George IV’s Coronation in Westminster Abbey, the Scottish capital moved an
inch or two closer to London.
As a kind-of bonus, Mary Stuart came
out of the woodwork into which she had been confined ever since her
decapitation in 1587.
Poetically-inclined melancholy ladies sighed over her sad fate, a veil
was drawn over many of the details of her vexatious career. As a result, and in
1827, Carlo Coccia wrote the one opera of his four-year stay in England, the opera seria in tre atti Maria Stuart, regina di Scozia for the
great soprano Giuditta Pasta, a work that would represent a complete change of style.
No one could complain that Italy had ever abandoned Mary Stuart.
Theatrically speaking she had shown a marked resilience but not really on
account of her spiritual perfection. It was as a political symbol that
she had captured the imagination of Italian radicals and their kith and kin.
In the earliest years of the nineteenth century performances of Alfieri’s
(1780) and Schiller’s (1801) far-fetched historical plays staged in her
honour rubbed shoulders with a lesser political layer. Thus a dim “Maria
Stuarda restituita dai Carbonari”, for example, a rag-bag of fact and fiction
that somehow managed to bridge the gap between fervent Catholicism and Jacobin
wishful-thinking[1] , found a place among a host of similar popularist
plays that included August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue’s “ Edoardo Stuart
in Scozia” [2] and the screaming tabloids ”Il principe Eugenio all’assedio di
Tamisvar” and “Il trionfo di Napoleone il Grande” aimed directly at a credulous
public. They shared the footlights with an even more imaginative “Matilde ossia
I Carbonari” in 1809 - which presented the unhappy queen with a
fictitious daughter (who too would figure, rather later, in Rossini’s
Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra but shorn of any disloyal aspects) -
as well as a cut-price “I carbonari di Dombar” (ie Dunbar) of similar construction.
All these ephemeral plays had
something in common, and were favoured by a dissident public. Needless to say,
it was not long before this “Jacobin” Queen of Scotland was given a musical
setting: Pietro Casella’s Maria Stuarda (Firenze 4.1812) was prudent enough, but
Pasquale Sogner’s Maria Stuarda ossia I carbonari di Scozia (Venezia
26.12.1814) - omitting to name the poet - sparked-off a political row, which
was soon stamped-out by the newly-installed Austrians in Venice who put a stop to all such provocation, as they saw it to be. When the Neapolitan Michele Carafa staged his
Elisabetta in Derbyshire ossia Il castello di Fotheringhay with a libretto by Antonio Peracchi at La
Fenice on 26.12.1818 (based upon
Schiller), the maestro took care not to upset anyone with either its title or
its text (only with some of its spelling), while Saverio Mercadante, whose Maria Stuarda, regina di Scozia
with a text by the Venice-based Gaetano Rossi (Bologna 29.5.1821), though not
more than obliquely dependent upon these sources, took care accordingly to
stage it as far away from Naples as possible.
There was a good
reason. A far more testing opera had preceded both, and this was to play havoc with the
reputation of the incautious former monarch as viewed by the Bourbon dynasty of
Naples
Luigi Carlini’s sadly foolhardy Maria Stuarda, regina di Scozia
was his very first opera. He wrote the libretto himself it seems, but
based it, as its preface makes clear, upon a drama by Camillo Federici, pseudonym of Giovanni Battista
Viassolo, entitled IL TRIONFO DEI CARBONARI (printed in capitals, as here, in
the libretto), a play published in Padua in 1802, which itself was the
unattributed source for most of the plays listed above. Federici (1749-1802)
was a former actor, a piemontese and the author of pulp dramas whose
subject-matter encroached upon those of Schiller and Kotzebue, but far more
politically charged. He complained, and
with justice, that many of these had been pirated by anonymous opportunists. Carlini’s ill-fated and ill-timed opera made
its first and only appearance at the Real Teatro Carolino of Palermo as the
eighth opera of the stagione of 1818 and was dedicated, indeed not very
prudently, to none other than SUA ALTEZZA REALE IL DUCA DI CALABRIA (also in
capitals). The cast was optimum with Girolama Dardanelli (niece of the maestro)
in the title role, Giovanni David as Ormondo, Luigi Sirletti as Lenox, and
Luigi Lablache as Duglas (sic) - which roster of stars would nowadays fill La Scala three times
over. It is unnecessary to report that
poor Carlini’s melodramma with such a boldly proclaimed source and with such a
dedicatee promptly vanished without a
trace, deleted from all record with wonderful efficiency[3].
This was a shame. Though
Carlini’s dramma serio was certainly
viewed with dismay by the Royal Palace in Naples (and by its dedicatee,
naturally) it was in fact a fairly innocuous effort with some attempts at
historical accuracy; the villain “Ormondo”
may have been nothing but a bland personification of Mary’s hooligan of
a third husband, Bothwell, and the Congiurati, who figure
prominently, merely release the Queen
from the durance vile of the “Castello di Dombar”. But the theme had
become political dynamite, of course. 1818, in its own way, was a watershed for
dissent. Naturally the dangerous political acquaintances of the incautious
Queen of Scots had not escaped eagle eyes in Naples. The legends had been grimly noted.
During her English seclusion all sorts of plots and plans to release the
imprisoned queen had flown back and forth - or so the stories go. Arising from
a convoluted version of the Babington plot of 1586 (referred to in Bardari’s
libretto for Donizetti) in which Elizabeth’s assassination was fully envisaged,
a whole host of conspiratorial myths,
fantasies and inventions had been put forward by continental sympathisers. That
they were absurd was no impediment to their dissemination. Indeed, the most
fantastic of all supplied the most potent impetus for political change, that an
undercover chain of seditious charcoal-burners secretly deployed throughout the
forests of England could have been a cover for a band
of sworn conspirators intent upon the destitution of the “usurped” throne.
The Romantic Era was always ready to
adopt extravagant metaphors for its most serious projects. Dreams, visions and technicoloured
improbabilities were the currency of the day.
But none of this was good news for Mary Stuart, and certainly not in
1818. She, like Carlini’s opera, was
fatally compromised by association. As
far as the Bourbons were concerned she went back into the woodwork for
good. That the Neapolitan branch was
descended from Mary Stuart was no excuse
(they were equally descended from the Tudors), nor was her decapitation any kind of
mitigation (there were far more bloody
examples in recent times), it was conspiracy that undid her. Even 30
years later Verdi could write (to Piave): “They allowed Ernani, so they
might allow this too, as there is no conspiracy” [4]. Conspiracy
was the ultimate unforgivable sin,
indeed pathologically-so as far
as the Bourbons of Naples were
concerned. A TRIUMPH OF THE CARBONARI
was not to be contemplated, not even in the cause of any martyred Catholic
queen - ancestral or otherwise. It
needed no spelling-out ...“ sarebbe inutile un più minuto dettaglio” as
it says so cogently in the libretto.
In London, free from the shadow of the
Bourbons, Coccia turned his attention to this unhappy tale. Possibly it was a declaration of independence, perhaps exile had made him bold - there is no
way of telling. Maybe Pasta herself made
the choice, certainly she favoured regal
models for her art and went to Westminster Abbey to view the tomb of the
martyr. We know nothing more than
this. Pietro Giannone, his modenese
expatriate librettist, was certainly
aware of the explosive nature of this theme at home but he too played
his cards close to his chest. The title page of the opera reads as follows:
MARIA STUART,
REGINA DI SCOZIA,
OPERA SERIA,
In Tre Atti.
POESIA DEL SIGNOR GIANNONE,
MUSICA DEL SIGNOR COCCIA.
RAPPRESENTATA PER LA PRIMA VOLTA
NEL TEATRO DEL RE
HAYMARKET, 7 GIUGNO, 1827[5]
For Coccia, the project was full of
novelty. In a London resounding to the portentous accents
of Weber and Beethoven his orchestration took wings, a darker mood began to infiltrate the
Rossinian certainties that had for some time been his anchor. In the city where Shakespearean tragedy was a
yardstick for dramatic integrity something more than facile diversion was
mandatory, especially if his hard-won operatic sobriety was not be
crucified unmercifully by the critics.
And then too he had the great star at his disposal. Music and text would be obliged to bridge a
credibility gap between the perception of Italian Opera as mere vocal
entertainment and a relatively sophisticated audience. Only with Pasta’s name at his disposal could he have dared tackle such a theme.
Through English eyes - through those now of Coccia - Mary
Stuart needed very careful
handling, her unprecedented
oleographic aura made demands that would have nonplussed even a native
composer. Above all else there must have
been a fear of inadvertently offending the susceptibilities of those very same people to whom she had lost her head so many years
before; his own head, he may have felt,
could well be poised above the very same block.
That discretion was paramount is obvious
by the text. Giannone bends over
nearly backwards to do some kind of factual justice to his heroine and
her all-powerful rival. Indeed,
comparing Giannone’s Maria Stuart with the Maria Stuarda
of Bardari for Donizetti reveals the latter to be not just concise but a
miracle of temerity. Coccia’s opera was
one of the most wordy ever performed it would seem, there are sub-plots galore. His
cast is much longer and differs
significantly: Maria, Elisabetta,
Leicester, Cecil (called Burleigh here -
his real-life title) and Anna, are more
or less the same in both operas but the role of Talbot (arch-loyal to
Elizabeth in history, and whose noble descendents would certainly have gone to
law had he been portrayed otherwise) is
split between Melvil, a Scottish rather
than English sympathiser, who takes on
some of Talbot’s role as well as part of
that of Leicester, while new is Paoletto
(i.e. Sir Amyas Paulet - Mary Stuart’s chilling jailor at Fotheringhay
Castle) and a certain Mortimero [6] , or Sir Mortimero -
his nephew (or son-in-law, it is not clear at all) - a stripling at once
in love with the Scottish Queen, a romantic bungler and a Babington figure of
sorts as well as an outright amorous rival to the two-timing Leicester.
Giannone’s lack of focus is
disconcerting. Three scenes only can be
found in exact parallel with that of
Donizetti: Maria’s outdoor excursion
into the park of the castle (Act 1 Sc.10);
the infamous “dialogo delle due regine” as Donizetti wryly calls
it (Act I Sc.12); and the final scene of the scaffold (Act 3 Sc.4), all the rest differ greatly. In no case are the verses quite the same, but
they are similar. Elisabetta is
as antagonistic in Coccia as in Donizetti but less ironic and has more
scruples; Maria is more arrogant (which
makes her execution more logical), indeed she is superbly boastful but less
vulgar; Leicester’s double-dealing is
more overt (but this may have been nothing but the truth); important differences include an unconcealed
duplicity on the part of every character on the stage - which may
have been a current view of the Tudors in London in 1827, plus one major and significant
difference: an assassination attempt
upon Elisabetta during the angry squall between the two queens, which is the
actual trigger for the execution of the
hated rival. It was not a gratuitous insult addressed to Anne Boleyn (who too had been given a recent
whitewashing) which led her distant cousin to the axe - the “fishwife”
slanging-match of Donizetti’s libretto would never have been permitted in London,
no more than in Milan.#
The most obvious difference of all,
however, especially to Italian eyes, is the absence of religion: Maria is not a Catholic heroine in
Coccia’s opera. No one (and certainly not
the English Catholics) took her religious credentials very seriously -
after all she had married two protestants -
except in that they precluded her from claiming to be heir to the
throne. The conflict is one of
statecraft, not of reformed religion. There is no confession scene, no absolution, no concealed vestments, no
crucifix (in its place is a love scene
between Maria and Leicester!). The irony
of course, is that the King of Naples could have found little to
complain-of on this particular account [7] . Coccia may
even have hoped to be able to revive the opera
one day at home - pace
the misadventure of poor Carlini.
In this he was doomed to disappointment, his opera was performed four
times and never again, not anywhere in
the world. It was not the parting
triumph he might have hoped for. All
sorts of clumsy hitches seem to have afflicted the staging in London.
It was badly rehearsed it appears, the singers took great liberties with
their music improvising boldly and inserting cadenzas without warning. It was
poorly dressed (according to some accounts) and
the orchestra did not know its music
- no wonder it puzzled many listeners.
All of which catalogue of defects
is perfectly astonishing when, after all, Coccia was musical director of the
theatre in question. It was far too long.
Due to its length, it was
shortened even before the prima and then successively over the four evenings so
that one third of its music at least was missing at the final curtain. But these cuts have a certain relevance: Maria Stuart, regina di Scozia
in the form it was performed on
its last days resembles very
closely that of Maria Stuarda as written by Donizetti
in Naples in 1834. Its structure, sequence, content and dramatic
flow are very much the same. This may be
one of the first of the many
compelling reasons for claiming that it was the genial
Neapolitan Carlo Coccia who supplied a model to his Bergamasc friend when
he got back to his native city. Coccia
took the score with him under his arm when he left London for Italy a few months later. It was still in his possession at his death
in 1873.
Coccia’s roster of singers was not
the least interesting aspect of his staging. Apart from Giuditta Pasta in the
title-role there was an unconventional Elisabetta - a role scarcely less
important. This was a newcomer, a
soprano who would later assume the same role at La Scala at the official prima
of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda in
1835. As such, she too would be a potent link between the two maestri. Giacinta
Toso, the piemontese wife of the celebrated horn player Giovanni Puzzi, was
something of an enigma [8] , she had been taking lessons from Coccia
in London, or so it would seem, and had
established herself there. Together with her part-time impresario of a husband
they had rented a large house in Piccadilly where they gave fashionable
concerts for almost a half century, only shaking off the London murk after his death in 1876 when
she also returned home. Among the famous
singers whose concerts the Puzzi couple hosted and which brought them a
considerable fortune were Pasta herself, Giulia Grisi, Rubini, Mario, Lablache,
Tamburini, Duprez, Jenny Lind, Fraschini, and significantly - the charismatic
Maria Malibran, and later her sister Pauline Viardot.
The subsequent equation Coccia + Giacinta Puzzi-Toso +
Malibran = Donizetti throws some light upon the otherwise rather
puzzling choice of Elisabetta to sing in
the true prima of Donizetti’s opera in 1835. She was not an inconsiderable
actress according to the reviews but being scarcely twenty-years-old, and very
tall, she had difficulty in portraying the middle-aged Virgin Queen
who, in real life was not much taller than her modern counterpart. This
notwithstanding, she had a mini-triumph
and sang with distinction. The tenor
Alberico Curioni sang the role of Roberto Dudley; the profondo Filippo
Galli that of Cecil; another tenor Giuseppe Torri that of Mortimero and the
basso Arturo Giubilei that of Melvil,
with the small roles of Paoletto, Seymour and Anna sung by De Angeli,
Deville and Nina Cornega respectively. All these artists (with the exception of
the three last) had substantial music to sing, Coccia was as generous with his
music as Giannone with his text. Each had a show-piece of sorts - that is, before everything began to slip
away over the four eventful days at the King’s Theatre.
In the Maria Stuarda
of Donizetti, a fictional
confrontation of the two queens -
Schiller’s brainchild- is made theatrically irresistible by their
invective, thus elevating popular romanticism to an artform vividly dependant
upon a feeling for historical justice,
however nonsensical. In Coccia’s Maria
Stuart there is nothing of the kind, despite a vicious encounter worthy of
the German fantasist. This was not only through an immediate threat of indignant departure of the audience -
vulgarity was scorned in the royal
theatres - but because both queens were
embedded in an immutable charisma they had acquired over the years: Queen Elizabeth I was an icon,
“Gloriana”, impassive, high-nosed
bejewelled and superb; Mary
Queen of Scots (as she was always called) was douce, “unfortunate”, perpetually young, a domestic print of sweet
sentiment in adversity. Both queens
indeed (probably justifiably) would have
been thought incapable of such behaviour, indeed Donizetti’s opinion that
“those two queens were whores” (“ma p... erano quelle due”) would not
have gone down well at all. The two operas took their point of departure from
differing stage conventions: Coccia’s opera was a (moderately) decorous historical tapestry; Donizetti’s opera was a love-story in which
neither woman wins (despite a veneer of religiosity): “ due illustri rivali” in fact - an important libretto theme of
the day. It was a case of two operas with
a common recipe, but a different audience in mind.
The music, however, of Maria Stuart, regina di Scozia, would have astonished Coccia’s admirers in Italy and pleased Donizetti. Nothing remained of Paisiello’s
tutelage, nothing of the Rossinian
bucolic charm which had invested his Clotilde [9] still going the rounds.
From the beginning he offered an unsettling sombre score, arrestingly
coloured and full of urgent pulsation, bouncing rhythms, dotted-note patterns
and a vocalism abounding in florid ascending and descending scale passages
which set-off its extraordinary length
and variety. Coccia now unveiled the remarkable operatic
continuity, the ostinati
and mastery of ground-bass that would distinguish all his later
stageworks. This was new. The orchestra - moulded by Coccia over four long
years -
was replete with wildly dramatic
and extended obbligati, intermezzi and mini-concerti for favoured wind-players
(one of them Giovanni Puzzi) so that its perception as an Italian opera -
Pasta, Curioni et al, notwithstanding, was viewed with some
scepticism by its audience. There were
those who considered he had surrendered too much to romantic ardour. Ambitious, fascinating, full of energy, its
best features did not quite dispel the impression that the composer was yet
only half-way to something new.
Nine pieces were published in vocal score in London, but nothing in full score. They are as follows:
Act
1
In
quella torre infausta cavatina (Leicester) Act 1 Sc.2
Quale
audacia! in te credei duetto (Maria/Mortimero) Act 1 Sc.7
Scende
al core cavatina (Maria) Act 1 Sc.10
Ecco
l’indegna (finale primo) Act 1 Sc.12
Act
II
Come
mi palpita duetto (Maria/Leicester con pertichini) Act
II Sc.4
Tremante
atterito quartettino (Burleigh/Mortimero/Maria/Leicester) do.
A
que’ detti, a qual sembiante duetto(Elisabetta/Leicester)
Act II Sc.5
Act
III
Tu,
cui fanno al ciel diletto duetto (Maria/Melvil) Act III
Sc.3
Sposo!
ah teco or tu mi vuoi aria finale (Maria) Act III Sc.4
That
these were the most immediately attractive pieces in the score will be clear,
but nearly half of them were brutally dropped during the bloodbath of
performance. Leicester’s cavatina‘In quella torre infausta’ was cut with its
recitative; Maria’s brilliant duet with Mortimero ‘Quale audacia! in te
credei’ also was cut revealing that
even his most vivid music was not spared;
the touching encounter between Maria and Melvil which forms part of the
final dénouement ‘Tu, cui fanno al ciel diletto’ (whose parallel in Donizetti’s opera would
have to be the valedictory duet ‘Or che morente è il raggio’ between
Maria and Talbot) lost its two opening quatrains. Of the unpublished music most
of the Act 1 Introduzione was cut;
Paoletto’s recitative in Act 1 Sc.5 was dropped; as was Maria’s recitative in Sc.6; in Act II all of the opening music -
Scenes 1 and 2 and half of Sc.3 were cut; so was all of Sc.6 thus removing Burleigh’s
aria con coro; all of Sc.8 and two-thirds of Sc.9 also vanished depriving Elisabetta
of most of the aria that ends the act.
Act III - the shortest in the opera - lost only the part of the duet mentioned above. Of the portions that survived we can make
several important comparisons with Donizetti’s later score. Though
Coccia’s Maria makes an early appearance in the unfolding of
the argument - unlike in Maria Stuarda - it is her “freedom” aria in the
park of Fotheringhay that
first invites an immediate comparison:
Coccia Act 1 Sc.10 Parco del Castello di Fotheringay
Maria
Ebben,
si goda.
D’un momento di gioia-Oh mira! dove’
Sorgon que’bigi monti, ivi è la dolce
Mia Scozia; è queste nubi
Che discendon di là, fors’han veduta
De’ miei padri la reggia!
E ver la Francia or vanno!-Oh, salutate
Quelle al mio cor sì grate
Soavi sponde, o nuvole leggiere!
Siate voi di Maria la messaggiere.
Donizetti Act 1 Sc.4 Parco di Forteringa
Maria
Guarda:
Su’ prati appare
Odorosetta e bella
La famiglia de’fiori...e a me sorride,
E il zeffiro che torna
Da’bei lidi di Francia,
Ch’io gioisca mi dice
Come alla prima gioventù felice.
Oh, nube! che lieve per l’aria t‘aggiri,
Tu reca il mio affetto, to reca i sospiri
Al suolo beato che un dì mi nudri,
Deh, scendi cortese, mi accogli sui vanni,
Mi rendi alla Francia
There
are many striking similarities above of course. Coccia’s aria
for Maria “Scende al
core, inebbria l’alma”
follows the same ecstatic vein as the above, but his cabaletta has
a totally different mood:
O suon, che ricordi
I giorni ridenti
Di puri contenti,
D’innocui piacer.
Tu scacci dal petto
Le
cure segrete,
D’immagini liete
Tu m’empj il
pensier
Sung
by Pasta con coro upon hearing the hunting horns, which announce
the imminent arrival of Elisabetta, it could scarcely be in greater
contrast with Donizetti’s violent equivalent:
Nella pace del mesto riposo
Vuol colpirmi di nuovo spavento
Io la chiesi..e vederla non oso...
Tal coraggio nell’alma mi sento!
From the outset the later composer has elected to stress
a far more telling
portrayal of the two queens, Maria’s ‘innocui piacer’ is never in evidence. Their actual confrontation in the finale primo of Maria
Stuart, regina di Scozia - which ends Act 1 (as is the case with the modern (critical
edition) of Maria
Stuarda) - contains
many further moments in common. Coccia’s “Dialogo delle due regine” is a very much more
protracted affair, some thirty minutes of music in all
and is divided
into marked blocks of concertati. It lacks the focus as well as
the vehemence of the later version, but its pacing, pregnant pauses and menace are anything but
ineffective. Here again the sequence of events is closely parallelled
in Maria
Stuarda. The ladies
view each other from afar with disdain opening with their mutual
-
Elisabetta/Maria
Ecco
l’indegna
Maria, in due course, conceals her repugnance and kneels
before her rival; her humiliation is not received gracefully:
Coccia
Act 1 finale primo
Maria
O Sorella! Il ciel
decise
A mio danno, a tuo favore;
Or pietà ti schiuda il core
Per chi tanto, oh dio! soffri....
(.......)
Elis.
Questo loco a te
conviene.
Donizetti Act
1 finale primo
Maria
Ah! Sorella ormai
ti basti
quanto oltraggio a me recasti
Deh! Solleva un’infelice
che riposa sul tuo cor.
Elis.
No, quel loco a
te si addice
Her crucial response, however, is less pungent, if equally
forthright:
Coccia
Maria
Non già
da’tuoi natali,
Retaggio hai tu d’onore:
Si sa per quale errore
La madre tua perì.
Elis.
Indegna!
Donizetti
Maria
No. Figlia impura
di Bolena
Parli tu di disonore?
Meretrice indegna oscena,
in te cada il mio rossore.
Profanato è il suolo Inglese:
vil bastarda dal tuo piè.
Elis.
Guardie! Olà
At this precise
point in Coccia’s score Maria claims to be Queen of England:
Oh! nella polvere
Discendi omai dal
trono:
La tue regina io
sono:
Tu dei cadermì
al piè
which bold assertion is
immediately followed by the assassination attempt upon the furious
monarch in question, and as a result of which Maria is led back to her
prison in a flurry of quasi-canonic choral imprecations. There is no sense of
triumph for Mary Stuart in Coccia’s opera.
Musically, this finale primo of
Coccia is fascinating and its not-at-all coincidental relationship with that of
Donizetti distinctly tantalising. The
whole encounter pulsates, from the
cheerful hunting horns of the opening to the fighting-cock glares and postures of the rivals which are set-off
by a gaily tripping figure, curling and twisting like a sardonic commentary; the actual insult to the angry Tudor having a
prefatory ostinato that goes even further - a figuration that resembles nothing
so much as a bouncing rubber ball happily pointing her wounding remarks. In general, this tripping arabesque is set for strings - in Coccia sometimes
underpinned by woodwind - as is
Donizetti’s mocking equivalent with precisely the same lightness and in
precisely the same malicious context. If
Coccia takes more time than Donizetti to come to the point, he is at once more
faithful to Schiller’s original (where an assassination attempt also features)
and supplies an admirable model.
Donizetti’s Act II too could find
earlier parallels in Coccia (his ‘Quella vita a me funesta’ for
Elisabetta, for instance, is parallelled by Coccia’s ‘Pretesto agl’infidi!’ [10]
with the same bitter accusations and at which time too she signs Maria’s
Sentence of death). The scene at the
scaffold, above all, contains many moments which have become familiar in the
later opera: Burleigh announces
Elisabetta’s willingness to accede to Maria’s final wishes; as Leicester is present throughout (or perhaps because he is present
throughout) Maria addresses her final
thoughts to Darnley (very oddly, perhaps, historically speaking)
‘Sposo!
ah teco or tu mi vuoi’ in an ethereal cantabile to be sung softly -
which Pasta did to huge effect; there is no preghiera of course.
She is half-fainting, Leicester supports her, thus her cabaletta ultima as an
uncanny resemblance to that of the opera to be written seven years later:
Coccia Act III
cabaletta ultima
Maria
Tardi ahi troppo!
a un infelice
La
promessa, o conte, attieni!
Cosi
a reggermi tu vieni
Del
mio carcere ad uscir!
Donizetti Act
II cabaletta ultima
Maria
Ah! Se un giorno
da queste ritorte
Il tuo braccio
involarmi dovea,
or mi guidi a morire
da forte
per estremo conforto
d’amor.
The apocalyptic canon shot which announces the end of Maria
Stuarda, and the ‘flagello punitor’ supplied so movingly by the great
Bergamesc, have no equivalent, alas, in
the opera of his predecessor.
It will be asked: what music from
Coccia’s Maria Stuart, regina di Scozia was available for Donizetti to see
in Naples in 1834? Girard published six pieces in vocal score
[11] ; from Act 1 the duetto ‘Quale audacia! in te credei’ and
Maria’s cavatina ‘Scende al core’;
from Act II ‘Come mi palpita’ and ‘A que’detti, a qual
sembiante’; from Act III ‘Tu,
cui fanno al ciel’ and the affecting aria finale for the heroine ‘Sposo! ah teco or tu mi vuoi’. As one of these pieces at least had been
discarded in London it seems improbable that they played
any part in the engendering of his score. More probably, Carlo Coccia - who was
Musical Director of the San Carlo in that very year of 1834 - allowed Donizetti
to examine the full-score in his
possession and a copy of Giannone’s libretto. In addition - to whet his appetite
- Pasta could have shown him some of the music from the earlier opera either at
the time of Anna Bolena or more recently at the time of the revision of Fausta.
More urgently, it will be asked if
Donizetti knew that the topic of Mary Stuart was taboo with the
Bourbons? That Coccia was unaware is
frankly unbelievable, he made no attempt to revive his opera in Naples, despite its partial
publication. And Donizetti? I suggest that the use of a near-adolescent
poet to supply the verses for Maria Stuarda is sufficiently improbable
as to postulate a tactical cover to defuse royal displeasure. Indeed the
offended innocence of the celebrated maestro at the banning of his opera has
always been a trifle disingenuous. We know that Giovanna Gray was
immediately put forward as an alternative subject. She had been kept in
reserve, so to speak. But, it will be asked, was this not yet another royal
martyr? Another bloody victim from whom
one could claim descent? Another “sad
subject” unsuitable for gala occasions?
Would not the King/Queen/censura have objected equally to any such
decapitated substitute?
Il nostro,
however, I would respectfully suggest, was fully aware that the
ill-treated Jane Grey was not under unsolicited escort from a coven of
carbonari! Ferdinando II was not to be
trifled-with, she was brushed aside and the Queen of Dissent had to wait for
her nemesis at La Scala the following year.
Donizetti’s deportment, in this
respect, I dare say, could be described as
artless. His art, however
- as we all know - is all in
his music
[1] At the Teatro Comunitativo in Ravenna,
for example,
the Comica
Compagnia Alessandro
Riva and others succeeded in performing most of
these plays between
1804 and 1810.
[2] Also set to music by Carlo Coccia: Edoardo in Iscozia (lib.Gilardoni), Naples S.Carlo 8.5.1831
[3] It features neither in Schmidl,
Caselli, Sesini, Melisi, Dassori, Regli or Stieger. Ottavio Tiby Il
Real Teatro Carolino e L’Ottocento musicale palermitano (Firenze 1957), 384) names the opera, but “Maria Stuarda...L.Carlini” is the sum total of his entry and it can only be concluded
that he saw
neither a note of the music nor a word
of the text.
A manuscript full score is preserved, however, in the Biblioteca
del Infante Don Francisco de Paula of Madrid.
[4] Letter
of 28 April 1850, upon Rigoletto (cf Budden Le
Opere di Verdi, Vol.1 (Torino 1985), 521
[5] The autograph
score
of Coccia’s Maria Stuart,
regina di Scozia
is preserved in the Istituto Civico
Musicale Brera di Novara; its text has the appearance
of being
an earlier version of that which was performed
in London in 1827.
[6] This name, Mortimer or Mortimero, is a standby of the opera of the day,
sometimes spelled “Wortimer”. It has never been quite clear which
nobleman precisely is intended by generations of librettists.
[7] But the King of Naples in 1827 was Francesco I -
SUA ALTEZZA REALE IL DUCA DI CALABRIA
- of the Carlini débâcle of 1818.
[8] Giacinta
Puzzi-Toso (1807-1889). Curiously enough, among the
handful of roles she sang in London, was Matilde in Rossini’s Elisabetta,regina d’Inghilterra,
with Adelaide Tosi in the title-role, which she sang at the King’s
Theatre the following year. The “modest vocal means” thus attributed
to her recently in the “Edizione Critica” of Maria
Stuarda are quite unfounded.
[9] Clotilde melodramma semiserio in due atti, libretto by Gaetano
Rossi
(Venice 1815), had been an enduring
popular
success and was performed into the sixth decade of the nineteenth century.
[10] Puzzi-Toso
was very highly praised for her singing of this bipartite aria even
if it was heavily cut.
[11] These can be ascribed to 1831.
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