Orchestra
IL SOGNO & LA DORA FESTEGGIANTE
Vicent Martin i Soler (Valencia 1754-Saint Petersbourg 1806)
Vicent Martín i Soler
ProgramIL SOGNO & LA DORA FESTEGGIANTE
Vicent Martin i Soler (Valencia 1754-Saint Petersbourg 1806)
Il Sogno, Viena 1789. Libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte.
La Dora Festeggiante, Turín 1783. Libretto by Cesare Olivieri
Juan Bautista Otero, Director
Sunhae Im, Soprano
Raffaella Milanesi, Soprano Magnus Staveland, Tenor
Orchestra -RCOC- Royal Chamber Opera Company Barcelona: 3 soloists and 28 musicians.
CONCERT TIMING: 1'30'' without pause.
CONCERT ENGAGEMENT CONTACT:
concerts@rcoc-orquesta.com
Tel.0034.609.84.98.82
Prologue of celebration for his operas Il Vologeso and In amor ci vuol destrezza, and first performed at the Teatro Regio, La Dora festeggiante was written to celebrate the arrival in Turin, on the river Dora, of the archduke Fernando -brother of the Austrian emperor Joseph II- and his wife the archduchess Beatrice d’Este. Martín i Soler and Da Ponte’s Il Sogno was dedicated in Vienna to the anniversary of queen Maria Carolina of Naples, sister of Joseph II. Il Sogno and La Dora festeggiante are sublime examples in the transition of Martín y Soler towards the dramma giocoso, genre with which he acquired his prestige throughout Europe; they are a small fresco of this period of transformation in his style: Martín i Soler presents in a synthetic way a subtle fusion of elements of orchestration and melodic exquisiteness typical of his operas serias alternated with the fragility and musical freedom that will characterize his brilliant drammi giocosi
In the Vienna of José II, where for the first time there was freedom of speech and the abolition of censorship. Da Ponte was allowed to make public works such as Le nozze di Figaro (1786), L'Arbore di Diana (1787), or Don Giovanni (1787), it surprises at first sight that the véneto librettist chose for the composition of Il Sogno, as a model the most appealing source of inspiration of the previous century and part of the one they lived: the Arcadia. However under this apparent opacity and simplicity of the action and the characters, of this almost topical naivety of the libretto, is hidden in reality a small text that treasures the spirit of free thought.
A first approach to the libretto convulses us with the nakedness of dramatic tension: the action happens in a forest of Arcadia where the nymph Egle searches desperately for her sister Nice, who she finally finds sleeping in a part of the same forest. Egle observes the placidity of her sleep and, jealous, she decides to awaken her...In Il Sogno by Martín and Da Ponte Nice, the nymph whose rejection of so many pretenders, whose beauty and arrogance -typical of the god Diana-, inspired a multitude of poems and compositions, she pursues her lover and for her desire unleashes the wrath of the gods. The roles have been reversed and consequently, the ideals: dreamed before, the nymph, dreams about a human being, about somebody carnal and perishable, the shepherd Fileno.
The consequence of this uncertainty is the doubt transformed into hope that constitutes the end of the cantata that significantly doesn't conclude with the categorical tremendous final choir of praise that would be typical of this genre. The possibility of an ending to the related events appears expressed through a canon that individualizes these hopes in three well differentiated parallel worlds: Egle or the negation of the change, Nice or the doubt in the transformation and Fileno or the insecurity of the future. They give sense to an opera in which the Arcadia is questioned, where Martín and Da Ponte put the enigmas but they don't impose answers to this idyllic transgression.
The dream... how much had been written about this world, this state between life and death? However, here the oneiric is the carnal. The three main points delineated by the three characters, the negation of the change, the doubt of the transformation and the insecurity of the future seems to represent three main points of the same person, still without answers, to a new conception of man, so close to the 19th century.
© Juan Bautista Otero
Barcelona 2010
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