Joachim RAFF (1822-1882)
Benedetto Marcello, lyrical opera in three acts, WoO 46 (1878)
Detlef Roth (baritone) – Benedetto Marcello
Johannes Kalpers (tenor) – Johann Adolf Hasse
Melba Ramos (soprano) – Faustina Bordoni
Margarete Joswig (mezzo-soprano) – Rosana Scalfi
SWR Rundfunkorchester Kaiserslautern/Grzegorz Nowak
rec. 2002, Metzongen Stadthalle, Bad Urach
Notes and separate libretto in German and English included
STERLING CDO-1123/24-2 [36:28 + 68:34]
Raff’s career as an operatic composer – he wrote six in total - proved to be evanescent. King Alfred, a four-act Grand Opera, was premiered under Liszt in 1851, flourished briefly, and then sank. Other projects, like Samson, failed to make the stage at all whilst others, like Lady Goblin (Dame Kobold) enjoyed at best only modest acclamation. After trying heroic opera and comic opera, in 1875 he embarked on Kunst und Liebe, his penultimate opera that soon came to be called Benedetto Marcello, a somewhat less polemical, and rather catchier, title. Raff wrote his own libretto focusing on two of the greatest composers of the eighteenth-century, Marcello and the German Johann Adolph Hasse. The text was cast in rhyming verses but it’s a notably lyrical work; indeed, he termed it a ‘Lyric Opera’. There are only four singers and there’s little dramatic action; the orchestra is hardly Wagnerian in size, but the structure is convincingly laid out and there’s a pleasing sense of flow and form. Raff isn’t interested in baroque pastiche; a few cadences are really all we get. His musical setting is cast in a direct German line that owes nothing to Wagner; the closest composer is actually someone like Hermann Goetz; if you know his Piano Concerto in B flat major, written just a decade before Raff’s opera, and teeming with lyric invention and good spirits, you’ll not be far away stylistically and musically from Raff’s own musical direction.
Given that this is Raff, melodic distinction is a given. The orchestration is light, but there is plenty of colour and grace and Italianate flavour. Largely through-composed it has its standouts – including a fabulous coloratura scene and a good amount of droll wit. After all the effort over its composition Raff doesn’t seem to have pushed the work, which he completed in 1878. Benedetto Marcello finally received a critical edition shortly before its world premiere, which came in this October 2002 concert performance in Metzingen Stadthalle, Bad Urach and now made available commercially for the first time.
Raff wasn’t a musical magpie, but he was certainly not above appropriating elements of other composers’ works. For his Introduction, for example, he hit on a Rossinian solution – grace, glitter and charm, winds to the fore, athletically deployed, but with music that bears no relation to anything that follows. The meeting between Marcello and Hasse and the two women, Faustina Bordoni and Rosana Scalfa, that motors the plot, is something of a fig-leaf for a series of engaging scenes. Kunst und Liebe is something of an artful title for what remains genial and high-spirited.
The performances are well-drilled and excellent across the board. Melba Ramos as Faustina sings with clarity and directness. Her lightish soprano has real personality, she takes coloratura opportunities without fear and her characterisation is excellent. Mezzo-soprano Margarete Joswig takes the part of Rosana Scalfi and she and Ramos are given, on balance, the most engaging numbers to sing. Joswig’s voice is under perfect control and the two female voices make for a telling contrast. She is a serious and splendid artist. Incidentally I noticed she was married to, but is now divorced from, Jonas Kaufmann. If the two women are favoured with the most engaging music, it’s probably the Hasse character who outdoes Marcello in terms of memorability, but that’s no reflection on baritone Detlef Roth, whose elegant impersonation matches that of tenor Johannes Kalpers as Marcello, every step of the way. Kalpers has a strong, youthful, ringing voice. Presiding over all, Grzegorz Nowak directs the SWR Rundfunkorchester Kaiserslautern with a fluidity and control that compels admiration.
It would be interesting to see if this opera worked on stage. There are moments of drollery, wit, almost meta-opera at one place, virtuoso roulades to satisfy those in the gods and indeed the stalls, a variety of arias, duets, trios and the occasional quartet as well as music that cleaves closer to strophic song than operatic aria as such. There is what amounts to an orchestral intermezzo in the second act, an off-stage Ave Maria – no chorus in this opera, just the four vocal soloists - and plenty of Raffian dreaming and dancing.
At less than two hours this is a compact work; it seldom drags, never bores. It’s performed with love, care, attention to detail and real commitment. There may never be an opportunity to see this on stage, and there may not be another recording for a good long while, if at all. So if Raff’s coltish, compact, and generous-hearted milieu appeals – it very much did as far as I’m concerned - take a chance on this hugely welcome release.
Jonathan Woolf
