Angelica Diabolica
Giulia Semenzato (soprano)
Kammerorchester Basel
rec. 2021
Texts and translations included
ALPHA 830 [52]
This is a mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar: on the one hand, Handel, on the other, Bernardo Sabadini and Carlo Francesco Pollarolo. What unites all the works/extracts recorded here (save for one odd exception, mentioned later) is that they derive from the remarkable romance epic Orlando Furioso, first published in 1516 with the final revision appearing in 1532, by Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533), a diplomat and poet at the court of the d’Este family in Ferrara. Almost 40,000 lines long, Orlando Furioso is one of those works, like, say, the Aeneid, Don Quixote and Hamlet which have generated entire libraries or galleries of imitations, variations and parodies. Composers, first madrigalists and then writers of operas, soon responded to Ariosto’s remarkable poem (too little read these days). On this particular CD, the choice of operatic extracts is designed to “explore the female universe of Orlando furioso” writes Giovanni Andrea Sechi in his booklet essay; Sechi is credited with the “concept” of the disc and with the necessary musicological research.
Given the beauty of much of Ariosto’s poetry, composers of madrigals and frottole were quick to make use of individual stanzas from his great poem. Only a year after the publication of the earliest version, Bartolomeo Tromboncino produced a setting for four voices of stanza 126 of the 23rd canto of Orlando Furioso, beginning Queste non son più lacrime. There is a very useful list of settings in Alfred Einstein’s ‘Orlando Furioso and La Gerusalemme Liberata: As Set to Music during the 16th and 17th Centuries’, Notes, Second Series, Vol.8 (1951), pp. 623-630. La Gerusalemme Liberata, 1581, was another epic poem written in Renaissance Ferrara, by Torquato Tasso (1544-1495). One madrigalist, the Flemish-born, Italian-based Jaquet de Berchem produced a work which conveyed something of Ariosto’s story, as well as his poetry, when he set ninety-one stanzas of the Furioso, with connecting plot summaries, to create a kind of digest of some of the poem’s famous episodes. This was published in his Primo secondo et terzo libro del capriccio di Jachetto Berchem con la musica da lui composta sopra le stanze del Furioso, (Venice,1561).
A new musical possibility arose with the emergence of opera later in the sixteenth century. Orlando Furioso offered both opportunities and problems for any would-be composers and librettists. The sheer abundance of the poem, with its immense cast of characters – several hundred at least – and the complex interweaving of a great many sub-plots and digressions offered innumerable possibilities, but all of them involved a great deal of delicate unstitching of Ariosto’s tightly woven tapestry, with its mingling of the human and the supernatural, the loftily serious and the wholly ironic.
In choosing to plan a programme which concentrates on “the female universe” of Orlando Furioso, Giovanni Andrea Sechi has recognised something central to the character of the poem, something well-expressed by Barbara Reynolds in the Introduction to her translation of the poem (Penguin, 1975): “Women are seen not only as sexual partners or as inspirations to men; they exist also as personages in their own right. This is to be expected in a period when Italian women received essentially the same education as men. The daughters of a noble house shared in the same studies as the sons, the New Learning being regarded as among the noblest of earthly pursuits … Women were expected to strive after complete intellectual and emotional development and were regarded as the equals of men” (Vol. I, 50-51). Ariosto’s women are not, as a class, better or worse than the male inhabitants of his imagined world. The female warrior Bradamante defeats many men in combat, but is also endowed with such traditionally ‘feminine’ virtues as respect for her parents and the man she loves, as well as choosing to retain her virginity until married. The cast of magicians in the poem is both male (e.g. Merlin and Atlante) and female (e.g. Melissa and Alcina). Most of Ariosto’s knights are male (e.g. Orlando and Rinaldo), but several are female (e.g. Bradamante and Marfisa).
The necessary preparation of more or less manageable and ‘dramatic’ works from Orlando Furioso, seems to have begun in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. The first operatic work from Ariosto was Francesca Caccini’s La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina, a comic opera which closed with a balletto a cavallo. It was presented at the Medici Villa Poggio Imperiale in February 1625. The second opera to take its plot from Orlando Furioso – and the earliest to be represented on this disc – was Luigi Rossi’s Il Palazzo incantato (The Enchanted Palace). Operas derived from Ariosto’s poem were still being written in the 1800s, e.g. Simon Mayr’s Ginevra di Scozia (1801) and Ambroise Thomas’s opéra comique, Angélique et Médor (1843).
It is unnecessary and would be wearisome, for the reader and for me, to enumerate all such operas; lists can be found in the entry on
Ariosto’s poem in the Italian version of Wikipedia, and on Ariosto in the New Grove Dictionary of Opera (ed. S. Sadie, 1992). Amongst other publications on Ariosto and music, the late Edward Milton Anderson’s book Ariosto, Opera, and the 17th Century: Evolution of the Poetics of Delight, Firenze/Florence, 2017 can be very warmly recommended, since it contains a wealth of information and ideas.
Giovanni Andrea Sechi has titled this CD Angelica Diabolica. In his booklet essay, he writes that Angelica is “endowed with both disarming beauty and keen intelligence, she is the most ambiguous character in the poem (so much so that she suggested the antiphrasis Angelica diabolica as the title of this disc”. Neither “disarming beauty” nor “acute intelligence has, surely, anything diabolic about it. Her ‘ambiguity’ is not so extreme as to justify the title phrase, either. I can see the attraction of the oxymoronic title, but I can’t find in Angelica an example of a creature who incarnates those two extreme moral and spiritual states. Perhaps Signor Sechi has in mind the idea that the women in Ariosto’s poem, seen as a class, are both ‘angelic’ and ‘diabolic’. But to say that Ariosto’s female characters range from the angelic to the diabolic is only to say what can also be said about his male characters.
That Ariosto cared greatly about the female characters in Orlando Furioso and didn’t in any way regard them as secondary to the male characters is implicit in the opening lines of the poem:
Le donne, i cavellier, l’arme, glia mori,
Le cortesie, l’audaci imprese io canto
Of ladies and knights, of arms and love,
Of courtly chivalry and brave deeds, I sing
(my translation)
It is no accident that the first noun of the poem should be donne (ladies), rather than cavellier (knights).
I can’t, thus, fully accept Sechi’s characterisation of Ariosto’s poem, when he writes “The focal point of Orlando Furioso is a male universe characterised by a powerful sense of honour and the use of physical force and religion as instruments of domination”. Having read Orlando Furioso in the original Italian and in several English translations, I find that Orlando Furioso is equally concerned, with equal empathy, with male and female characters.
The first two pieces on this disc are taken from Luigi Rossi’s Il Palazzo incantato, which was also known as Il Palagio d’Atlante (overo La Guerriera Amante) – ‘The Palace of Atlante, or Warrior Woman in Love’; there is a useful discussion of its premiere in Henry Prunières, ‘Les représentations du Palazzo d’Atlante à Rome (1642)’, in Sammelbände der Internationalen Musikgeselschaft, 14 (1913), pp.218-26. A few years ago, while in Italy, I was fortunately able to purchase a recording of Il Palazzo incantato, directed by Gianmichele D’Errico, which was the ‘free’ CD with the Italian music journal Amadeus. Rossi studied in Naples, but was in Rome by the early 1620s. He seems initially to have worked for the Borghese, but in 1633 he was appointed organist of San Luigi de Francesi and in 1641 he entered the service of Cardinal Antonio Barberini. It was the Cardinal who commissioned Il Palazzo incantato, Rossi’s first opera. It was performed at the Teatro delle Quatre Fontane, near the Palazzo Barbarini in Rome. Its libretto was by Giulio Rospigliosi (1600-1669), then secretary to Cardinal Francesco Barberini and later Pope Clement IX (1667). The ‘enchanted palace’ belongs to Atlante, an African necromancer; the story told in the opera – which involves characters such as Bradamante, Marfisa, Olimpia, Orlando, Angelica, Ruggiero, Sacripante and Astolfo – begins in Canto II of Orlando Furioso and isn’t concluded until Canto XXII; finally, the palace is destroyed and its prisoners are released. The first extract from Rossi’s opera recorded here is sung by Marfisa, a female warrior and sister of Ruggiero, one of the major Saracen knights in the poem. The second extract heard is an aria by Bradamante, perhaps the greatest of all the female warriors, who finally marries Ruggiero.
Listening to these two arias, one rapidly recognises that Giulia Semenzato has an agile and attractive voice. This is particularly evident in the first piece, a lively, insistently rhythmic call to arms; Semenzato does full justice to the hortatory text. This certainly makes a rousing, if not especially subtle, opening to the disc (even if it has almost nothing to do with the Angelica from whom the disc gets its title). Nor, really, does the second extract from Il Palazzo incantata, being sung by Bradamante. Here Semenzato displays her more lyrically expressive side in an aria full of melancholy pain and the hope that she might, even if only briefly, obtain relief from that condition. Semenzato sings it with an attractive gentleness and inwardness – quite unlike Marfisa’s extrovert aria which precedes it.
In both of these arias I found myself enjoying and admiring the work of the Kammerorchester Basel just as much as that of Giulia Semenzato. Their playing on both track is convincingly idiomatic and thoroughly attractive. In ‘Sol per breve momento’ the playing of the orchestra’s string section is both aesthetically pleasing and emotionally expressive, without even the slightest exaggeration or excessive emotion. In his notes Sechi tells us, without any further explanation that “in this recording the upper string parts have been completed by Deniel Perer”.
I generally find, in listening to CDs made up of ‘highlights’ from a number of operas, that when I am not familiar with the work from which a particular extract is taken it tends to leave me cold, isolated as it is from the contexts of character development and narrative. This may be why I responded far more to the extracts from Rossi’s Il Palazzo incantato than I did to the arias from Sabadini’s Angelica nel Catai or Pollarolo’s Ariodante – operas of which I have no knowledge. Or perhaps Sabadini and Pollarolo are just not very interesting or exciting composers? Their music is certainly overshadowed by that of Rossi, Porpora, Steffani and Handel. I shall therefore (I hope not unkindly) ignore Sabadini and Pollarolo in what follows concentrate my discussion on Steffani, Porpora and Handel.
My impressions of Giulia Semenzato’s performances didn’t vary a great deal so, to avoid excessive repetition, I will sum them up here. Throughout, I found her work highly competent (though I would have appreciated a little more variation of colour in some items) and attractive, without ever being either vocally spectacular or revelatory in terms of interpretation. This is Semenzato’s first solo album and I would reserve any fuller judgement of her until such time as I am able to hear/see her in a complete opera. The work of the Kammerorchester Basel I find exemplary throughout.
I first encountered Steffani’s Orlando generoso in the world premiere recording of 2008 (Dabringhaus und Grimm MDG 309 1566-2), conducted by Bernward Lohr, with the instrumental forces of Musica Alta Ripa and a cast which includes the sopranos Roberta Invernizzi and Susanne Ryden along with the bass Wolf Matthias Friedrich. The aria ‘Se t’eclissi ò bella face’ – and the ensuing duet with Ruggiero – come from the early stages of Act II. The passage is both virtuosic and expressive. Steffani was setting a libretto by Ortensio Mauro, then court poet at Hanover (while Steffani was kapellmeister). The work comes to life most vividly when it is concerned with Orlando’s descent into madness, as his long-standing melancholy because Angelica refuses his offered love tips over into madness, when he discovers that she has fallen in love with – and intends to marry – not an aristocratic knight like himself, but a humble African soldier called Medoro. It is Orlando who has most of the memorable music in Steffani’s opera. For all that, Angelica’s aria ‘Se t’eclissi o bella face’ from Orlando Generoso strikes me as one of the most engaging tracks on this disc – convincingly passionate and especially expressive, sung and played in a fashion that holds excitement and accuracy in perfect balance.
Too often Nicolo Porpora is only remembered as Handel’s rival in London’s operatic world of the early 1730s. His life and career embraced far more than those few years in London and his achievements were considerable. He was born – and died – in Naples, but much of his working life was spent elsewhere. After studies at the Conservatorio dei Poveri di Gesù Cristo, his first major commission was Agrippina, an opera written for performance at the city’s Palazzo Reale in November 1708. From 1715 to 1721 Porpora was maestro di cappella at Naples’s Conservatorio di S. Onofrio, where he initially established his reputation as a teacher of singing. It was during these years that his serenata L'Angelica (sometimes referred to as Angelica e Medoro) was written, setting a libretto by Metastasio, for performance at the Palazzo del Principe di Torella in Naples, in celebration of the birthday of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI. Porpora had already written full-length operas for Vienna and Rome. How did he find time for his duties at the Conservatorio in Naples? By the mid-1720s he was in Venice, appointed maestro di cappella at the Incurabili orphanage in 1726. He was in London from 1733-36. By 1739 he was back in Naples, as maestro di cappella at S. Maria di Loreto, staying until 1741. Then he was back in Venice, at the Ospedale della Pietà (1742-3); from 1747-51 he taught singing at the court in Dresden, where he was also kapellmeister from 1748. He was in Vienna for a spell in 1752-3, teaching music at the imperial court, the young Haydn being one of his students. Porpora returned to Naples for the last time around 1759/60.
Returning to L'Angelica/Angelica e Medoro: it is surprising to find Metastasio creating a libretto from Ariosto, given that Metastasio’s artistic principles, especially as regards matters of narrative and structure, were the polar opposite to Ariosto’s and one cannot imagine Metastasio being very fond of Orlando Furioso. A passage (p.92) in Winton Dean’s magisterial Handel’s Operas: 1726-1741 (2006) sums up the differences very neatly. Dean observes that “in [Metastasio’s] librettos moral issues are liable to take precedence over human values. He moves his characters like pieces on a chessboard, subject to predictable gambits, so that they run the risk of declining into abstractions”. He contrasts this with what he calls “the wilder slopes of Ariosto’s world of magic and romance”. While Metastasio presents us with the regularities of a ‘chessboard’ world, Ariosto’s is a world in which the only thing that is reliably predictable is the unpredictable; a world of irony and fantasy, in which a winged horse (a hippogriff) can fly to the moon ridden by Astolfo, an English knight; a poetic world in which stories are wound within and around other stories in a fashion quite alien to the clarities of Metastasio. As a lover of Orlando Furioso, I cannot resist quotation from one of its modern English translators, Barbara Reynolds: “The randomness of the poem’s structure is only apparent; its purpose is to offer a rich diversity, a sense of splendour and plenitude, regaling the mind and senses with vivid awareness of the multifariousness of life. Ariosto is firmly in control of all his stage properties, his magic paraphernalia and his immense cast of characters” (Reynolds, Orlando Furioso, Part One, Penguin 1975, p.25). Unsurprisingly Metastasio, in his libretto for Angelica adopts a strategy that involves simplification and the creation of symmetry. He concentrates on one narrative sub-section of Ariosto’s complicated poem - the mutual love of Angelica and Medoro and the effect of that love on Orlando. He writes (as he often did) for a small cast of characters, who fall neatly into two sets (like the black and white pieces on a chessboard?). The result has been well described by Karen Raizin: “Pietro Metastasio’s Angelica (1720) is a strange composition. A serenata rather than a full-scale operatic production, it consists of two acts and only six characters—three pastoral archetypes (Licori, Titiro, and Tirsi) and three worldly foreigners (Orlando, Angelica, and Medoro). It is a pastoral drama, but one assaulted by outsiders who impose artifice on the natural order. It is the story of Orlando’s love madness, adapted from Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516), but one that relegates Orlando—the titular hero and problematic center of the source text—to the margins, championing instead Angelica and Medoro as the episode’s protagonists.” (K. Raizin, ‘Metastasio’s Angelica Serenata and the Light of Empire’, Modern Language Notes, 114:1, 2019, 119-142. Quotation from p.119).
As befitted a man regarded as one of the finest singing-teachers of his age (his private pupils included, at various times, the castrati Caffarelli and Farinelli and the soprano Benedetta Emilia Ahricola, née Molteni) Porpora always wrote sympathetically for the voice. Certainly, these two arias from L’Angelica sound thoroughly convincing in these performances by Giulia Semenzato and Kammerorchester Basel – so much so as to make me keen to hear more from the work.
Porpora’s brief rivalry with Handel, in London, makes for a natural transition to Handel’s representation on this disc. In a presentation on
YouTube, Semenzato speaks of her delight when the musicologist Giovanni Andrea Sechi proposed “this programme about the heroines of Orlando Furioso”. No such ‘programme’ could possibly omit Handel (what does surprise me is that this one omits Vivaldi). Handel’s trio of Ariosto-derived operas – Orlando, Ariodante and Alcina is the most important contribution to ‘Ariostan’ opera made by any single composer. The alert reader who has looked at the information at the end of this review will have noticed that the disc includes an extract from a fourth opera by Handel, Amadigi di Gaula. This opera is not derived from Orlando Furioso, though it has an odd connection with it. Its libretto essentially adapts the text of a tragédie lyrique, Amadis de Grèce (1699) by Antoine Houda de La Motte, set by André Cardinal Destouches (1672-1749). The ultimate source was the medieval Spanish romance Amadís de Gaula. Apart from some fragmentary manuscripts the earliest surviving source for this romance is a version, Los quatro libros del virtuoso cavallero Amadis de Gaul (1508), by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo. There were many French translations/adaptations of ‘Amadis’ during the Sixteenth Century and La Motte probably made use of one or more of these. My own memories of Amadis de Gaul are somewhat vague (it is exceptionally long and I read it more than fifty years ago) but I recall – I hope correctly – that the hero loves Oriana, heiress to the throne of Britain and when she rejects him, tricked into believing him to be unfaithful, Amadis (like Orlando) goes temporarily mad. The most prominent magician in Amadis de Gaul is called Arcalaus; in La Motte’s libretto he has disappeared, being replaced by a female magician called Melisse. Her name, surely not coincidentally, corresponds with that of Melissa, a magician in Orlando Furioso – the corresponding character in Handel’s Amadigi di Gaula is also called Melissa so, at a pinch, I suppose one could think of her as (in a rather special sense) a ‘character from Ariosto’. What Semenzato sings, ‘Desterò dall’empia Dite’ is an aria sung by Melissa in Act Two of Handel’s opera. It was described by Charles Burney as “a capital aria d’abilità, accompanied by a trumpet and hautbois … very masterly and fine” quoted thus in Edward Blakeman, Handel, Faber and Faber, 2009, p.126). It is certainly a demanding piece for any singer. Semenzato’s performance is accomplished, but she doesn’t quite sustain the twin demands of dramatic expression and vocal agility as consummately as, say, Sandrine Piau on her CD, Handel: ‘Soceresses’ (Alpha 765); the instrumentalists of the Kammerorchester Basel lose little in the comparison with Les Paladins, who accompany Piau. The other three pieces here are from those of Handel’s operas which do have libretti inspired by Orlando Furioso, i.e. Orlando, Ariodante and Alcina.
The libretto of Orlando is an adaptation of one written by Carlo Sigismondo Capeci (1652-1728) and set by Domenico Scarlatti as L’Orlando, ovvere la gelosia pazzia (1711). Who was responsible for the adaptation made for Handel’s use is not known. The most substantial and significant change is the introduction of a character not in Capeci’s libretto or, indeed, in Orlando Furioso. To be pedantic, the name of Zoroastro does appear in Ariosto’s poem. He is mentioned in verse 5 of Canto 31, not as a character in any of the poem’s many stories, but as a figure from the distant past who is the chief source of later magic. In Handel’s opera, however, Zoroastro is a contemporary of Ariosto’s characters and intervenes in their lives. For example, he interprets what the stars foretell for Orlando and later effects the cure of Orlando’s madness. I wonder whether Handel requested this major change, or merely endorsed it? Either way, it effectively marks a break in Handel’s taste in libretti, a movement away from texts which were essentially heroic and/or historical and towards ones which were full of magic and fantasy (for which, of course, Ariosto provided the ideal source material).
Semenzato sings Angelica’s aria ‘Non potrà dirmi ingrata’, from Act II of Orlando. Semenzato’s performance of this aria is altogether competent and assured, but the choice is perhaps a little surprising, as this aria is relatively unexciting by Handel’s very high standards; soon afterwards in the opera Angelica sings another aria ‘Verdi piante, erbette liete’ which, in its exquisite evocation of verdant trees and swaying grass, a beautiful river and a shady cave, has a distinctively Handelian magic absent from ‘Non potrà dirmi ingrata’. I cannot help wishing that Professor Secchi and Miss Semenzato had chosen ‘Verdi piante, erbette liete’ to represent the Angelica of Handel’s Orlando.
Ariodante is represented by the aria ‘Volate amori’, sung by Ginevra in Act I of the opera. In Orlando Furioso, Ginevra is the daughter – and only child – of the king of Scotland. Her love for, and marriage to, Ariodante (along with some plotting against it) is told in cantos IV-VI of the poem. Handel’s libretto adapts the libretto (by Antonio Salvi) used in Jacopo Antonio Perti’s opera Ginevra principessa di Scozia, premiered in 1708 at the Medici Villa of Pratolino. Winton Dean (Handel’s Operas: 1726-1741, p.288) suggests that “Handel may have been in the audience … [and] probably obtained a copy of the libretto at that time”. It may well have been Handel himself who adapted the libretto for his own use. ‘Volate amori’ expresses an excited, slightly puzzled, joy. In 6/8, it is here sung and played with engaging panache, the dynamic variation and control being impressive and the ornamentation judicious
In Alcina, Handel creates, in the eponymous heroine, perhaps the finest of his enchantresses. She is a sorceress who uses her charms – both physical and magical – to attract and seduce lovers on her enchanted island, eventually disposing of them by transforming them into non-human forms, such as animals, trees and streams. Again, Handel uses, in adapted form, an earlier libretto. The authorship of this text is uncertain – one name that has been suggested is that of Antonio Fanzagli (1701-1735); it was set by Riccardo Broschi, as L’isola di Alcina, and premiered during Rome’s carnival season in 1728. Handel was in Italy in the following year and may perhaps have acquired a copy of the libretto then. It seems likely that Handel himself adapted it for his own use. One of the changes made relates to the aria recorded here by Giulia Semenzato. In L’isola di Alcina ‘Mi restano le lagrime’ is the last aria in the opera and is sung by Alcina’s sister, Morgana. Handel moves the aria to a point earlier in Act III (Scene v) and gives it to Alcina herself. It is sung at the point when Alcina recognises that she has been defeated, abandoned by both Orlando and Ruggiero and her troops overcome by those of Ruggiero. She declares, in the aria, that she now possesses only her tears, “mi restano le lagrime”, and that she wishes she could hide herself beneath the waves that surround her island, “sottrarmi ai sole, ai di” (away from the sun and the gods”. Even in the gently insinuating opening of this aria, Semenzato’s Alcina defiantly avoids self-pity. This is some of the most successful characterisation on the disc, and the soloist’s top register is heard at its very best here. It helps that Kammerorchester Basel respond splendidly to Handel’s writing for the strings and that the chosen tempo seems just about perfect. It was above all, in my repeated hearings of this track that I was most convinced that Signorina Semenzato is a soprano of whom much more will be heard.
Semenzato is clearly a fine (but not yet a great) operatic soprano. She is very well supported by the Kammerorchester Basel and there is some rewarding listening here. However, I have some reservations about the concept implicit in the disc’s title.
Glyn Pursglove
Contents
Luigi Rossi (c.1597-1653)
Il Palazzo incantata (1642): Si tocchi temburo
Il Palazzo incantata (1642): Sol per breve momento
Nicola Porpora (1686-1768)
L’Angelica (1720): Mentre rendo a te la vita
L’Angelica (1720): Costanze e fedele
Bernardo Sabadini (c.1650-1718)
Angelica nel Catai (1702): Mi vedrà più
Agostino Steffani (1654-1728)
Orlando Generoso (1691): Se t’eclissi
George Frederick Handel (1685-1759)
Orlando, HW 31 (1733): Non potrà dirmi
Ariodante, HWV 33 (1735): Volate amori
Alcina, HWV 34 (1735): Mi restano le lagrime
Amadigi di Gaula, HWV 11 (1715): Desterò dall’empia Dite
Carlo Francesco Pollarolo (1653-1723)
Ariodante (1716): Quella man che mi condanna
