You can soon hear Matilde in Albuquerque, courtesy of Opera Southwest, in a unique type of world premiere. It’s not a bio-opera about Harry Belafonte and his famous calypso song from the 1950s but an 80-minute piece by little-known Italian composer Carlo Coccia receiving what Artistic Director and Principal Conductor Anthony Barrese describes as its “New World” premiere.
“Nobody alive has heard this music,” he says, “which makes it very exciting to perform.”
An indefatigable sleuth of less-famous bel canto operas, Barrese discovered Matilde during a pandemic-induced online search of Venice’s musical archives. He describes the music as a hybrid of Mozart and Rossini, “with lots of Rossini’s rhythmic infectiousness. There’s also a beautiful quartet that ends the first part. It starts with just the singers and the winds in the orchestra, which is a very rare thing.”
While the opera has the time-honored plot of soprano Matilde and tenor Federico overcoming obstacles to their union, Barrese points out, this production is “an opera semi-seria, a serious situation with a happy ending.”
It’s more serious than most, in fact, since their relationship might just be incestuous. Dolibano, Matilde’s bass-baritone father, believes that his wife may have had an affair, and that Federico might be Matilde’s half-brother.
“There’s a massive misunderstanding and then a clarification, in which two letters play important roles,” says Barrese. No happy ending in an Italian comic opera can happen without the aid of comic servants, and Matilde has two: mezzo-soprano Fiammetta and bass-baritone Pantarotto.
Soprano Alexandra Wiebe
Matilde stage director Martha Collins
Bass-baritone Joshua Hughes
Baritone Will Kellerman
Composer Coccia was born in Naples in 1782 and studied with then-famous composer Giovanni Paisiello, who helped launch his career. His first success was with The Lucky Poet (Il Poeta Fortunato), performed in Florence in 1808.
Matilde premiered in Venice in 1811 at Venice’s Teatro San Moisè, one of the city’s smaller theaters that specialized in the production of one-act operas. Also known as Love or Duty, Matilde was one of Coccia’s most successful operas, with at least five subsequent stagings in other cities across Italy, including Naples, Rome, and Milan.
“The opera has a rich textual history, with different versions of the tenor aria found in various manuscripts,” says Barrese. “Which aria is better? Attend multiple performances and you might just find out!”
The Opera Southwest production, which is accompanied by orchestra, takes place outdoors at the Albuquerque Museum amphitheater. Matilde is one in a series of such early-fall stagings and represents the company’s uncommon approach to young singer training.
“My ideal is always to have a fully staged, complete piece with an orchestra,” Barrese says. “You don’t learn how to perform opera by doing scenes with just a piano. I didn’t want to have an apprentice program that’s primarily cheap chorus labor. They’re predatory and unseemly, as they exist now.”
(Most such programs across the country offer some combination of chorus work, an understudy assignment, performing in a program of opera scenes, and, perhaps, performing a smaller role in a production.)
Barrese hopes the next step in the program’s development will be extending the length of the apprentices’ contracts so they can also perform in the company’s fall mainstage production. Meanwhile, he says he’s grateful to the Sarasota Opera in Florida and New Hampshire’s Opera North for the opportunities they afforded him as a young conductor.
He’s also hoping to find an angel or two to underwrite the program. “I have to fight for this all the time, because it’s the first thing on the chopping block,” Barrese says. “It’s an opportunity for someone to underwrite a total production for young singers at a much more modest price, and it’s the activity I’m most proud of.”
Matilde opens on Friday the 13th of September, but Barrese hopes the date will bring good luck to the five apprentices in the cast. And its history might help make it lucky: The Teatro San Moisè, where it premiered, functioned as an apprentice program for composers, producing a very large number of one-act operas by young composers, with casts of five or six singers and no chorus. Its best-known alumnus is Gioachino Rossini, who had five short operas staged there between 1810 and 1813, helping to launch his career.
Matilde and Federico, the opera’s coo-some twosome, will be performed by soprano Alexandra Wiebe and tenor Eric Botto, respectively. Wiebe just earned a master’s degree in opera studies from the New England Conservatory of Music, where she performed Rosalinda in Die Fledermaus and Giunone in Francesco Cavalli’s La Calisto.
Botto has a bachelor’s degree in music from Colorado State University, a master’s degree in music from Alabama’s University of Mobile, where he performed Roméo in Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, and an artist’s diploma from the University of Colorado.
Dolibano, Matilde’s justifiably concerned father, will be played by baritone Wil Kellerman. He has an undergraduate degree in voice from James Madison University and a master’s degree, also in voice, from New York’s Mannes School of Music, where he performed Nick Shadow in The Rake’s Progress and Figaro in The Barber of Seville.
Mezzo-soprano Kim Stanish and bass-baritone Joshua Hughes are the essential comic servants, Fiammetta and Pantarotto. Stanish has dual undergraduate degrees from Western Washington University in voice and in environmental policy; her master’s degree in voice is from the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music.
Hughes has a bachelor’s degree in music education from Oklahoma City University and a master’s in voice from the Peabody Conservatory of Music at Johns Hopkins University. His recent credits include Masetto and the Commendatore in Don Giovanni for West Bay Opera in Palo Alto, California.
Matilde will be conducted by Barrese and staged by frequent collaborator Martha Collins. Her directorial work includes extensive credits with the Sarasota Opera, Tri-Cities Opera, New York University, and the New England Conservatory of Music.
You’ve probably seen Collins without realizing it. She launched her career as a soprano and her performing credits include starring as Mimì in the pivotal opera sequence from La Bohème in the film Moonstruck. ◀
Contributor Mark Tiarks writes frequently about opera for Pasatiempo.
