“The most resounding fiasco of Donizetti’s career” is Jeremy Commons’s phrase for the reception of this, his 59th opera, at La Fenice, Venice, in 1838. In the canon it comes just before Poliuto, which, adapted as Les martyrs, brought the composer to Paris and so inaugurated a new phase in his life. As Dr Commons remarks: “Maria de Rudenz represents, therefore, the culmination of a long-continuing and long-developing stream of activity that had produced such operas as Anna Bolena, Parisina, Maria Stuarda and Lucia di Lammermoor”.
It would be pleasant if one could now report a resounding vindication. That would be misleading, but at the very least the opera is good enough to be kept, however intermittently, in the public view. It may then grow in estimation, though, comparing notes made on the previous recording, I found my reactions to the work to be much the same as those experienced some 17 years earlier. The outstanding number, now as then, is the finale to Act 1, or more precisely that point in the Quintet at which the tenor enters and the emotion deepens, the melody sweet and sad, the harmonies gaining poignancy as the world moves to that kind of climax (the stage static, leaving the music, and especially the voices, to do the work) in which Italian opera is most essentially and potently itself. There are other numbers, including all three duet-episodes, and incidental moments too, when the score rises, and ‘culmination’ comes within view in a qualitative sense; but (unqualitatively) opera rara it is and so it is likely to remain.
Again, it would be a pleasure to add that if ever a performance could confer a more permanent status this one would do it: but for that to be so there would have to be better casting than we have here for the roles of Rambaldo and Corrado. Robert McFarland has a voice with plenty of body to it and an apparently ample upper range, but the part calls for a different, more vibrant and Italianate timbre and certainly for a subtler response to the lights and shades, the conflicting emotions, of this unusually well-drawn character. Maria too is a character with some reality about her (despite the outlandish circumstances of her history). Nelly Miricioiu gives in some ways a marvellous performance, her voice in fine condition, her technique, style and emotional resources enabling her to impart a genuine tragic grandeur. I wish, though, that she didn’t use quite so often the downward portamento and that chesty (or is it glottal?) attack, favoured also by Caballe, which would be bizarre in music outside Italian opera and of which one can have too much even in Donizetti (its first occurence, for checking, is shortly after her arrival, at the word “traea”, and the kind of portamento I have in mind comes twice just before that, at “appellarmi” and “segreta”). Her performance, fine as it is, remains to my mind within the generalized frame of ‘operatic heroine’. It is Bruce Ford’s Enrico that stands out from the frame, and he achieves this, in a less ‘interesting’ role, by sheer good singing and attention to sense.
With no other version of the opera on the current database, this has the field to itself. If the version of 1981 with Ricciarelli, Cupido and Nucci were to be reissued (CBS, 2/82 – nla), Opera Rara could claim the advantage of their Appendix, consisting of two numbers not included in the original score. As a recording, the new version sounds convincingly ‘live’ without being so (the earlier recording is of a performance at La Fenice, the theatre of the opera’s unhappy premiere). With fine orchestral playing under David Parry and good work by the Geoffrey Mitchell Choir, the issue has also the distinction of a first-rate booklet, with Jeremy Commons’s essay, a performance-listing by Tom Kaufman and an imposing gallery of illustrations.'