Great Music, Even if He’d Been an Adult

Finally, a look at what they say is Mozart’s first opera. When the little genius was 12, he came up with this, and he was off and running.

How’d he do?

Quite well, I would say, because this musical composition is objectively more complicated and more enjoyable than what most of us will ever write after decades of study and practice.

He’s still hitting us with the harpsichord, which was normal in 1768, and he’s still loving the somewhat monotonous sounds of the late Baroque, but fair enough. It’s still fun to listen to.

To me, the high points are a couple of beautiful soprano arias, delivered by the central character, Rosina. In contrast to much of the score, which features peppery argumentation and cross-ridicule among the cast, Rosina sings alone at least twice, with lengthy sentimental strains about the nature of love and marriage. These parts are fun to hear, and worth rewinding to hear again.

Silly Story, Even if They’d Been Children

Then you have the libretto, by Carlo Goldoni and modified by Marco Coltellini. This is an opera buffa, so probably very funny at the time, but mostly ridiculous 250 years later.

Essentially, we have two brothers and their sister, and then another brother-sister pair, and some other people, all singing about whether it’s good or bad to get married, whether or not they personally want to get married, and who they are interested in.

This is supposed to be clarified by a speaking narrator, who calls herself the “stage manager”, and explains things in German, while the cast sings in Italian. That might help, except that in the Salzburg Festival (2006) production that I saw on video, all the men were dressed the same, and all the women were dressed almost the same. When the narrator explains who Cassandro is, she describes his appearance and preferred dress, but she is wrong. I needed nametags more than I needed this narrator.

So I quickly lost track of who was who, and how they were related, and which partner they were targeting. Without this information, the story is nonsense. I am considering watching the whole two hours again, taking more careful notes.

La Finta Semplice means “the feigned simpleton”, but in fact I did not recognize any simpleton; they all seemed kind of goofy to me, except the stern narrator/stage manager.

The way it went, I noticed that at 50 minutes, still short of the first intermission, I was quite lost, and if it had not been for the delightful music, I would have hit “pause” forever. With the exaggerated emotional expressions, the non sequiturs, and the extreme amount of movement around the stage, I found it annoying to watch.

More than an hour later, they all get organized into pairs, and off they go to get married. There’s an odd man out, but that’s okay, because the stage manager links up with him.

I couldn’t help noticing that this libretto might not have made much sense to the boy composer. They talk about the ups and downs of marriage, evaluating each other as life partners, and even making love, so you have to wonder how much coordination was going on with little Wolfgang. Maybe discussions of the mature parts were handled by his father, Leopold, who was known to be very much involved in La Finta Semplice.

Save It With a Knockout Production

It’s possible that the Salzburg Festival knew what they were dealing with, because they worked very hard to keep my attention.

First, I saw one of the most unusual stage sets ever, featuring huge triangles, sloped to point at each other, and possibly too angled to walk on. But no! Here they are, singing and climbing, and often sliding back down, or dropping off the upper edge back there, or off the front, down by the pit.

Until the third act, the slope is merely strange, but then they begin to use it to show projected images next to the singers. Here’s a cannon, there goes a cannon ball – things like that – all done in projections onto the floor, and because the floor, or at least parts of it, are sloped so dramatically, these images are easy for the audience to see.

On the sidehill stage, Salzburg had an array of unusually creative features working, to make this a more interesting show. There were shadow dancers behind a curtain, and occasionally body doubles, miming the action or just standing, right behind the singer. One of these was a completely naked woman, which would probably not pass the censors in North America, even though her long dark hair reached to the floor.

The featured soprano soloist, Malin Hartelius as Rosina, sang stridently as she walked up into the audience, handing out cards or tickets, sitting on someone’s lap, and then returning to the stage, missing no syllables.

Then they added in some things that didn’t make any sense, like a pistol that kept getting handed around, a very bright flashlight, a paper note that is handed down to the orchestra’s oboist while he plays, and a lot of finger paint -- mostly applied to members of the cast while they sing.

Fine, but I don’t know what they are talking about, and actually, I don’t know where they are – what does this stage set mean?

Probably would have been best to start with a full understanding of where this story is going, just as was necessary for Mozart’s first big hit, Mitridate, from two years later. It didn’t make much sense to me either, until (a) I read the story, and (b) I gave up on the Berlin production and watched the far superior one in Boston. Boston needs to do Finta Semplice.

Quite Possibly Mozart’s First

Medici.tv has put up, in late 2024, every one of Mozart’s operas, including La Finta Semplice, along with some earlier works:

• Die Schuldigkeit des ersten Gebots (a sacred musical play (singspiel), 1767) also noted at Medici.tv as Mozart’s first opera

• Apollo et Hyacinthus, (either “an opera in three acts”, or “music for a Latin drama”,1767) yet another labeled as Mozart’s first opera

• Bastien und Bastienne (presumably his second opera -- or one of them -- or just a 1-act singspiel, 1768)

Even if you don’t worry about which was the first opera, Medici gives us a lot of opportunities here, to discover operas we have almost never heard of, and that is a worthy plan.

Another useful pointer is this: the story of the original writing and staging of La Finta Semplice is complex and interesting. Not recapped here, but maybe someone should prepare a movie (or an opera) about how this thing came to be. Possibly, it would be a better story than the one in this Goldoni / Coltellini libretto.