If the shennanigans at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden had happened 200 years ago we might even now be delighting in a scabrous one-act farsa featuring the principal players. True, discretion might have got the better part of valour, obliging composer and librettist to treat ‘types’ rather than individuals (‘You want employment, Signor Mayr?‘) but what ‘types’ were here assembled! A bemused baron, a belligerent impresario, a clutch of warring women, a sinister fixer, an apoplectic chain-smoking editor, and an off-stage chorus of ‘arts experts’ and management consultants.
By the late eighteenth century, the sending up of the musical - and, more especially, the operatic - profession by the profession itself had become a fashionable diversion. The tantrums of prima donnas and the longueurs of Metastasian opera seria were the most obvious targets. (Gnecco’s La prova d’un opera seria, 1805, one of Malibran’s favourite operas, held the stage for the best part of 50 years.) Cimarosa, a pioneering subversive, took a preliminary pot-shot at the ‘maestro’ figure in Il maestro di cappella in the late 1780s and here, in this first-ever complete recording of Mayr’s Che originali! (1798) , we see Mayr and his librettist, Gaetano Rossi, exploiting the bourgeois gentilhomme idea in their pillorying of the amateur melomane, Don Febeo.
The plot is uncomplicated. Don Febeo has two daughters, Aristea, who is besotted with the works of Metastasio and in love with the musically inept Don Carolino, and the hypochondriac Rosina (very much a seconda donna role). Carolino’s expulsion from Febeo’s house on account of his musical ignorance causes him to return there, suitably disguised, first as Febeo’s musical amanuensis, a role in which, unsurprisingly, he is quickly unmasked, then as the famous maestro di cappella, Signor Semiminima. Conductors being less easy to rumble than amanuenses, the ruse works: long enough, at least, for Carolino to stage a bogus audition of Aristea and claim her hand in marriage.
Che originali! was a smash-hit in its day. Along with the not dissimilar I virtuosi (1801) , it helped cement Mayr’s relationship with an Italian public that had yet to encounter the genius of Rossini. Musically and theatrically, Che originali! is bound to strike modern ears as being less than the sum of its parts. Bar by bar, the writing is robust and energetic, with some amusingly outre writing for the winds, but, taken as a whole, the piece lacks shape, and never quite strips for action in the way that even second-rank Rossini does. The glory of the entertainment is its set-pieces, in particular the set-piece ensembles. Don Febeo instructing Aristea (disc 1, track 10) in the art of singing A-E-I-O-U (shades of a similar scene in Moliere’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme) is masterly, as is the ‘dictation’ quintet (disc 2, track 3) in which Carolino tries and fails to take down from Febeo the new-fangled tonic sol-fa. The comedy is broader, the satirical intent plainer, in the operatic scene (disc 2, track 1) which Don Febeo himself has composed: a bizarre ‘Rondo’ on the theme of Don Quixote’s hopeless love for his Dulcinea. And there is the finale (disc 2, track 7) , the whole of the Maestro Semiminima episode treated in one seamless, 20-minute ensemble.
Aristea was one of the favourite roles of Angelica Catalani; her farewell to the London stage in 1824 was Che originali!. On the new Guild recording, the young soprano, Stefanie Fruh (a Reri Grist pupil) , comes through with flying colours. Though the opera is sung in generally idiomatic Italian, the cast is mainly made up of young alumni from Munich’s various music schools. Particularly fine is the young baritone, Robert Merwald, in the comprimario role of the servant, Biscroma. His biography lists an even smaller comprimario role, that of the gardener in Mozart’s Figaro, but here surely is a first-rate Figaro in the making? Thomas Gropper is a plausible Don Febeo, Stephen Caira a patchy Carolino. So well does he sing the later scenes that I was left wondering whether the strained quality of his singing in Carolino’s first encounter with his future father-in-law was a deliberate ploy. If so, it was a mistake.
Franz Hauk’s conducting is incisive, the playing of the Georgian Chamber Orchestra accomplished, the studio recording clear and well balanced. The accompanying booklet is a ramshackle affair editorially but it provides the text of this particular version, along with translations and sufficient background notes to be going on with. Like the opera, the booklet works - more or less - where it needs to work.'