Growing up, Carolina Uccelli knew as well as anyone that composing for the theater was no occupation for an aristocrat, let alone a member of the female sex. Yet at the age of 20, presumably with the backing of her husband, she mounted Saul, her first opera. The score, unfortunately, is lost, but not the testimonial from Gioachino Rossini, who attended the triumphant premiere.
Five years later, by then a widow, Uccelli struck again in cosmopolitan Naples with Anna di Resburgo, a Scottish-themed saga of treachery, bloodshed, and long-deferred justice. Too bad for Uccelli that Gaetano Donizetti had come out with the erotically charged romance Lucia di Lammermoor in the same city that same season—likewise Scottish-themed, likewise starring Fanny Tacchinardi Persiani, a diva very much on the rise. In Uccelli’s novelty, what drives the action is a mother’s sacred love for the infant son she and her exiled husband dare not acknowledge—gripping but not as sexy by a long shot. No flop but no hit, Anna di Resburgo chalked up a respectable half-dozen performances. Young as Uccelli was, this sophomore effort proved her operatic swan song.
Flash forward to the late 2010s, when Will Crutchfield, the artistic and general director of the bel canto academy Teatro Nuovo and inveterate truffle hound, turned up a low-res scan of the score online and set about preparing a performing edition for this summer’s semi-staged second premiere. Can the announcement of a full-dress production by the on-the-ball impresario of a full-service opera company be far behind?
Matthew Gurewitsch: Maestro, art history is full of jaw-dropping forgeries, and Carolina Uccelli’s story speaks so exactly to our cultural political moment. Are you quite sure you haven’t created her and her opera from whole cloth?
Will Crutchfield: If I could do that, I would have some premieres coming up! But, no, this manuscript was actually posted online well before I noticed it.
M.G.: You’ve written that the “hard-core biographical research delving into baptismal records, marriage contracts, census data, and all the rest” has yet to be attempted. What would it take—skill, time, treasure—to fill the gaps in Uccelli’s history?
W.C.: Searching official records comes in the category “simple, but not easy.” Documents like that are preserved for most Italian cities. Some were lost in wartime, some have gaps, some have misspellings, and illegitimate births were often obscured, etc. But in most cases, with enough patience and time, you can just go where the records are housed, register with their guardians, and pore over the raw documents.
M.G.: Evidently, there was lots of editorial work to do—for one thing, collating the extant manuscript pages of the score with the sometimes quite different printed libretto. Did you also have to write music, fill in orchestration?
W.C.: Luckily, I didn’t have to write. I’ve done that in other cases, where there were serious gaps or where something needed to be reconstructed from a mere sketch. But this manuscript, though full of errors, is complete.
M.G.: I love the moment in the synopsis when all hell breaks loose because the villain recognizes a family resemblance between his deadly enemy and an unknown little boy. Is that a musical high point, too?
W.C.: It’s the moment where everything stops for an ensemble of surprise and anxiety, and the previously bright mood turns dark. But Uccelli treats this more as a “tension builder” than as a musical climax. That comes later when Anna steps forward to reveal herself as the boy’s hidden mother.
M.G.: You’ve mentioned Uccelli’s use of a typical comic “patter” style in a tragic context, which seems a stroke of genius. Are there other such surprises up Uccelli’s sleeve?
W.C.: There are! An actual dialogue for flute and timpani, for instance. Uccelli was an improviser as a pianist, and she wanted to be experimental as a writer. But quirkiness isn’t enough, and neither is the “female composer” tag. That’s good reason for curiosity but not for revival. We’re reviving because this is the kind of opera we want to see.
Teatro Nuovo will perform Anna di Resburgo at the Alexander Kasser Theater, in Montclair, New Jersey, on July 20, and at Jazz at Lincoln Center, in New York, on July 24
Matthew Gurewitsch writes about opera and classical music for AIR MAIL. He lives in Hawaii
