My abiding memory of this historic revival of Rossini's Bianca e Falliero, semi-staged in the Auditorium Pedrotti at the 1986 Pesaro Festival, is of Marilyn Horne responding to tumultuous applause after her Act 2 scena, ''Qual funebre apparato''. Having ended this with her back to the audience, she proceeded over the next five—or was it ten?—minutes to execute a 180-degree turn back towards the footlights. To record it on film, you would have needed one of those special cameras that allows you to watch the grass grow.
I offer this anecdote, not in rebuke, but in admiration of Horne. It was, after all, a thoroughly deserved ovation. Whatever its dramatic merits (and there are several) Bianca e Falliero is very much a vocal showcase of an opera, a terrifyingly elaborate exploration in music of one of the world's oldest dramatic subjects, young love blighted by parental hate. To have it performed at all is a privilege; to have it performed with this degree of dash, surety and allure borders on the miraculous. None of the principals, apart perhaps from Horne, emerges wholly unscathed. Merritt begins uncomfortably, and Ricciarelli has one or two blustery moments in the Act 2 finale (a revision of the Act 2 finale of La donna del lago). But much of the singing is exceptional. Ricciarelli makes a wonderfully alluring Bianca, and Chris Merritt has never sounded so well on record as he does here in his various set-piece scenes and duets.
Rossini wrote Bianca e Falliero for La Scala, Milan in the autumn of 1819. Working away from the San Carlo in Naples, his private artistic laboratory at the time, and with memories of his last Milanese triumph La gazza ladra still fresh in the public's mind, he clearly decided on consolidation rather than experiment. Set in seventeenth-century Venice, the story charts the machinations of a brutal father (Contareno, Merritt's role) who would rather have the brilliant young general Falliero (Horne en travesti) compromised, arraigned and executed than see him marry his daughter. In the French melodrama from which Felice Romani took his libretto, Falliero comes to a grim end, much as Cavaradossi will do in Tosca; but Rossini and Romani, politically prudent, opted for a happier ending to the tale.
The opera was a success with the Milanese and with the Italian public in the decade that followed. Soon, though, it was adapted, dismembered and forgotten. Everything apart from the glorious (and dramatically pivotal) Act 2 Quartet was banished into ill-deserved obscurity.
The problems the opera presents to our own times are obvious; yet in a performance as compelling as this, they tend to wither away. The massiveness of the piece and the close gearing of the bel canto style to musical and psychological ends is awe-inspiring. Amid a welter of vocal display, one is struck both by the sheer ferocity of much of the music and by its moments (rare in Rossini) of real erotic allure. The opera has its static set pieces (that big scena for Falliero in Act 2), but even here one senses its preoccupation with the idea of dangerous emotional excess. Musically and dramatically, it is something of a roller-coaster; the love music is often heart-easing in its beauty yet Contareno is given some of the nastiest music ever penned for the tenor voice, the writing by turns vindictive, suave and wilful.
Donato Renzetti conducts with this very much in mind. The Prague chorus is fallible but the London Sinfonietta Opera Orchestra backs him to the hilt with playing of searing immediacy. The recording treats them well. Unfortunately the RAI engineers have been casual about vocal balances during the live transmission. The chorus movements don't seem to have been adequately plotted in advance and the soloists occasionally drive the peak programme meters way into the red.
Full marks, however, to Fonitcetra for the accompanying booklet which reproduces most of the material originally issued in Pesaro's careful and scholarly programme book, plus an English translation of the Italian text.'