A born opera composer
June 2024 in Articles
Cori Ellison on the rediscovery of Carolina Uccelli
What do these European composers—Hildegard von Bingen, Vittoria Aleotti, Francesca Caccini, Barbara Strozzi, Isabella Leonarda, Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, Marianna Martines, Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Wieck Schumann, Pauline Viardot, Josephine Lang—have in common, besides a pair of X chromosomes? Like most pre-contemporary female composers, they were either nuns or the scions of well-connected musical families.
Carolina Uccelli (1810-58), whose opera Anna di Resburgo will be given its first modern performances by New York’s Teatro Nuovo on July 20 and 24, belongs to neither category. Though precious little is known about her, she seems to have gamely gatecrashed the virtually impenetrable old boys’ club of bel canto opera through exceptional talent and sheer force of will.
Speaking of force of Will: This opera’s long-overdue revival (the first since its premiere run) comes courtesy of Will Crutchfield, the indefatigable American conductor, musicologist and educator who in 2018 founded the New York-based Teatro Nuovo, with an annual summer season devoted to historically informed concert performances of 19th-century Italian operas, both forgotten and canonical. (Teatro Nuovo will present Bellini’s popular I Capuleti e i Montecchi in alternate performances.)
Crutchfield has a long history of musical archaeology. While helming the widely admired ‘Bel Canto at Caramoor’ summer programme (Teatro Nuovo’s precursor) from 1997 to 2017, he prepared the first performing edition of Donizetti’s Élisabeth, ou La Fille de l’exilé and conducted its 2003 performances at Caramoor, as well as leading the 2014 premiere of his Ricordi critical edition of Rossini’s Aureliano in Palmira at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, the subsequent recording of which won the 2015 prize for best rediscovered work at the International Opera Awards.
Seven years ago, during one of Crutchfield’s regular Italian expeditions to ‘see what’s there’, he stumbled upon a listing of Anna di Resburgo while systematically trawling through the 19th-century music historian Francesco Florimo’s four-volume La scuola musicale di Napoli e i suoi conservatorii, with its somewhat rough chronology of Neapolitan opera seasons.
‘I first noticed the feminine name, and I distinctly recall thinking, she must have been really something to get that far at a time when women just weren’t in the picture,’ Crutchfield says. ‘I had no idea that any woman of that period had achieved this and as far as I can tell she seems to be the only one. It’s a good enough reason to look with curiosity into the opera she produced, but not a sufficient one for reproducing it in the 21st century. For that, the opera itself has to earn belief and inspire advocacy.’
Luckily, the Conservatorio di San Pietro a Majella in Naples had a score. ‘Sometimes you read through an old opera, and you just say, OK, here’s the cavatina of the soprano. Here’s the first-act finale. It hits its points. But sometimes you start to imagine a performance. You have a feeling that you might like to show this to an audience, and that’s the feeling I had going through this piece.’
The score proved more satisfying than the scant and inconsistent biographical information on Carolina Uccelli. Born in 1810 into a family of well-off minor aristocrats in or near Florence, Carolina Pazzini was something of a musical prodigy and garnered recognition for her singing, piano improvisations and chamber compositions while still a teenager. For an aristocratic young woman to enjoy solid musical training wasn’t so unusual. Quite a few women wrote music, but usually they penned little salon romances, which was how she began.
Around 1827 she married Filippo Uccelli of Pisa, a famous doctor and professor whose anatomy books can still be found in the antiquarian corners of eBay. That same year, 1827, brought her first publication, a Ricordi collection of ariettas and cavatinas. It is possible that her husband paid its costs, as a noble or wealthy patron often did for a fledgling composer, male or female, in effect indemnifying the publisher or impresario against financial risk.
The most extraordinary chapter of her short life began after Filippo died in 1832. Still in her early 20s, she briefly but brilliantly aspired to smash convention by pursuing a public career as a theatre composer, which was not only unprecedented for women but unseemly for aristocrats. Undaunted, Uccelli set about gathering letters of support from important composers. There survive letters from both Rossini and Giovanni Simone Mayr, the eminent composer who was Donizetti’s teacher, attesting to Uccelli’s talents as an opera composer, in which they both cited the quality of her orchestral writing.
Rossini, who had attended the premiere of Uccelli’s first opera, Saul, at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence in 1830, lauded its ‘richness of ideas’ and ‘expressiveness and elegance in declamation and melody’. Though he predicted that Saul was ‘apt to achieve a happy success’, it is not known to have been performed subsequently and its score is lost.
Mayr, referring to Uccelli’s third, never-performed opera Eufemio di Messina, praised her counterpoint, especially the bass lines. He also offered some advice: to include wind instruments in her recitatives, in accordance with modern practice, rather than just strings; this she subsequently did in Anna di Resburgo. It is unknown whether Uccelli even completed Eufemio di Messina, as no score survives and only its overture was ever performed, in a concert in Milan.
Uccelli also obtained letters from Meyerbeer and purportedly from Donizetti. ‘She basically would show up at performances with a letter of introduction and introduce herself to famous people,’ says Crutchfield. ‘She had to be a self-promoter. She just really, really wanted it.’
The score of Anna di Resburgo seems to substantiate the kudos that Rossini and Mayr had given her earlier works. The two-act melodrama was composed by Uccelli most likely during the years 1833-5. The original text was by the respected Veronese librettist Gaetano Rossi (1774-1855), whose ultra-Romantic stories, often based on foreign sources, were set to music by Rossini, Donizetti, Mercadante, Mayr, Pacini, Vaccai, the Ricci brothers and Zingarelli, among many other noted composers.
Emma di Resburgo, as it was originally titled, was a ‘used’ libretto which had first been set by the 27-year-old Giacomo Meyerbeer in 1819, and by several other composers in the following decade. Set in Lanarkshire in the Central Lowlands of Scotland, it is a product of the Scottish craze unleashed by the recent Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott that swept the Romantic imagination of early-19th-century Italian opera. Scotland’s history of internal strife, colonial rebellion and blighted romance supplied a superb dramatic backdrop for personal and political operatic showdowns.
In a letter from the vast correspondence between Uccelli and Alessandro Lanari, the impresario of the Teatro San Carlo in Naples and many other Italian opera houses, she mentions that she has substantially rewritten Rossi’s original libretto with the help of one Professor Nicoletti, a Florentine literary historian and writer of tragedies. Besides changing the heroine’s name from Emma to Anna, they changed the male hero from a contralto role to a tenor, cut some set pieces that impeded the drama, and altered other old-fashioned opera seria conventions to yield a more fluid, modern high-Romantic dramaturgy à la Bellini and Donizetti.
The most striking libretto revision, however, is an entirely new final scene that is far more dramatic than the one in Rossi’s original libretto. The remorseful villain Norcesto, Lord of Lanark, arrives at the gravesite of both his father Duncalmo and his neighbour and friend Roggero, murdered by Duncalmo. Norcesto hallucinates Roggero’s ghost calling for vengeance. He then hides behind his father’s tomb when Roggero’s son Edemondo, falsely accused of murdering his own father, arrives to face execution but spills the long-withheld truth of Roggero’s murder by Duncalmo. The guilt-ridden Norcesto then emerges to confess his treachery and his father’s deathbed wish to make amends.
Crutchfield credits this scene wholly to Uccelli. As proof, he cites the fact that the printed libretto features extensive revisions to the old text throughout the opera which were probably done by Uccelli and Nicoletti in tandem. But the new final scene that appears only in the manuscript score is likely Uccelli’s own work. ‘What impresses me is here she was 23 or 24 years old,’ marvels Crutchfield. ‘She totally saw where to go and fix the old libretto to bring it up to modern dramaturgical form.’
Anna di Resburgo received four performances during the autumn 1835 season of the Teatro del Fondo in Naples, as well as a fifth performance, possibly early the next year, at the same city’s jointly managed Teatro San Carlo. Its leading singers were among the era’s top stars, including the soprano Fanny Tacchinardi-Persiani, the tenor Napoleone Moriani (a favourite of Donizetti and Verdi) and the baritone Giorgio Ronconi (the first Nabucco). Uccelli’s skilful vocal writing seems to have been a magnet for A-list singers; she also worked with Giulia Grisi, Carolina Ungher, Giambattista Rubini, Gilbert-Louis Duprez, Antonio Tamburini and Maria Malibran, in whose memory she wrote Cantata in morte di Maria Malibran, performed in Florence in 1836.
During the same autumn 1835 season, Tacchinardi-Persiani starred again at the Teatro San Carlo in another premiere, which shared the same plot trope of feuding noble clans, the same Scottish setting (OK, about 60 miles west), and a final tomb scene to boot. Does any of that ring a bell?
‘Here she is, doing this very improbable thing, composing operas and going up against Donizetti and Bellini,’ observes Crutchfield, ‘and she pushes through, gets the first one on the stage, which had a medium success, and then gets this second one. And then it just gets steamrollered by Lucia di Lammermoor. If Uccelli had been older and wiser, less hungry, perhaps she might have withheld Anna until a later season.’
Though Anna di Resburgo was hardly a flop, its underwhelming reception may have quelled Uccelli’s theatrical aspirations. She returned to her aristocratic social circle, composing small-scale pieces and vocal chamber music in Italian and French, published mostly in Paris, where she spent a good deal of time. She gave concerts both privately and publicly, still writing for and often accompanying famous singers as well as her daughter Emma (born in the late 1820s), a soprano. Between about 1846 and 1852, the mother and daughter performed in London, Amsterdam, Milan and Munich. In 1852 they were featured at one of the legendary Parisian salon recitals hosted by Rossini, her supporter of yore. Uccelli died in Florence in 1858, just 48 years old, of causes unknown.
These performances of Anna di Resburgo may give us ample cause to regret Uccelli’s renunciation of the opera stage. Crutchfield considers her a born opera composer, with a cohesive, distinctive voice. He cites her opera’s ‘freshness of invention, clarity of characterization and sureness of theatrical pacing’ and points out some strikingly bold musico-dramatic choices and structural audacity. ‘The piece sings, and it plays. There is no padding there, nothing extra. There’s not a single piece in the opera that I would be tempted to leave out.’
Crutchfield’s admiration for Uccelli has only grown from his first discovery to his final edits on the score. ‘In the note currently on the website, I say something like “I wouldn’t call it a masterpiece, but I can well believe her next opera might have been one”. Well, now I would put it more strongly: Act 2 truly is a masterpiece. Act 1 is good, full of promise, maybe still a thing or two to learn, but once Anna gets to the baritone’s castle at the start of the second act, it is red-hot straight through to the finish.’
For every Carolina Uccelli who, by means not entirely known, managed, if only for an instant, to pry her light out from under a bushel before disappearing again, for reasons not fully fathomed, how many brilliant female talents are entirely lost to history? Thanks to Will Crutchfield and Teatro Nuovo, there will now be one fewer.
Teatro Nuovo performs ‘Anna di Resburgo’ on July 20 at Montclair State University, New Jersey, and on July 24 at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater in New York City. The season also features ‘I Capuleti e i Montecchi’ (July 21 and 25). www.teatronuovo.org
Feature by Cori Ellison – Opera with Opera News July 2024
