Buxton Festival's revival of the opera pasticcio

Buxton Festival is 40 years old this year, and offering the mix of contrasting operatic experience it has so often in the past.

There’s Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, with the new festival director Adrian Kelly conducting and a gifted young cast. There’s a visit from topsy-turvy comedy specialists Opera della Luna, with their version of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, which I’ve seen before and want to again. There’s also a happy return to Buxton by Adrian Chandler’s baroque specialist ensemble La Serenissima, with the first production in the UK of Lucio Papirio Dittatore, by Caldara, 300 years after its Vienna premiere: Adrian will conduct and Mark Burns directs.

But most intriguing of all is a specially invented new work called Georgiana, about the 18^th century Duchess of Devonshire – that’s the same lady as played by Keira Knightly in the film, The Duchess. If you’ve seen it, you’ll remember her as a fun-loving young innocent who was pretty badly treated by her Duke, having to live in a ménage-a-trois at Chatsworth with his mistress, Bess.

That’s but the half of it, apparently, and Buxton’s re-telling of the tale fills in much more about her life and times.

The thing that’s interesting about this piece is that it’s a revival of the tradition – standard procedure in Georgiana’s own time – of creating an opera pasticcio, in other words a theatre piece with its own story and characters, but borrowing and adapting music from other existing works.

In an age before copyright, it was frequent practice. Today we might call it a jukebox musical.

But Buxton’s pasticcio is itself to be an exercise in authenticity, with the musical numbers taken from composers of Duchess Georgiana’s time and all constructed in a way that could have been the case in the London she knew, with the text in English.

Its musical creator – and conductor for the performances here – is Mark Tatlow, scholar and former artistic director of the Drottningholm Court Theatre in Sweden.

Festival general manager Michael Williams first came up with the idea of creating a new version of an 18^th century pasticcio, Mark Tatlow told me. ‘Michael created the basic shape of the piece and storyline, and he wrote the lyrics for the sung sections, while Janet Plater wrote the dialogue, with Matthew Richardson, the director, advising us,’ he said.

‘My role in bringing it about was to say that I thought it should reflect the music Georgiana herself would have – or could have – heard in the London of the 1780s and 1790s.

‘There are arias, duets, trios, some accompanied recitative, some stage music and some melodrama – and one street scene that’s more in the style of The Beggars’ Opera. The music comes from Thomas Linley the Younger, Stephen Storace (the composer who was the brother of Nancy Storace, Mozart’s first Susanna for The Marriage of Figaro), Martín y Soler, Paisiello – and also Mozart. That consists of three short pieces from La Finta Giardiniera and one major aria.’

Part of the piece’s faithfulness to 18^th century practice is that the audience will not find attributions of the individual numbers’ music to their composers in the printed programme … but there will be an email address enabling us to find the details out after we’ve seen the show.

(The Mozart aria, though, is ‘Bella mia fiamma, addio’, originally written for Josepha Duschek and published as a concert aria but with a text that originally had a stage setting).

Soprano Samantha Clarke will create the enigmatic title role of Georgiana, with tenor Benjamin Hulett as the Duke of Devonshire and Susanna Fairbairn as Bess.

It’s a fascinating prospect – and not entirely without precedent in this part of the world. In 1850 the Manchester Theatre Royal put on a version of Cinderella in which much of the music was from Rossini’s La Cenerentola, but others’ compositions were interpolated, too.

Newspaper accounts tell us that one of those was Mozart’s ‘Là ci darem la mano’ from Don Giovanni – sung by Cinders herself with English words beginning ‘Thou, chid by them, lamb – ah, no!’.[1]

You wonder whether the similar sound to the original was to enable the knowledgeable members of the audience to compliment themselves for spotting it … or perhaps to ensure that even if the singer forgot the new lines she could revert to the ones she knew without anyone noticing the difference.

                                     

Georgiana in rehearsal - picture Genevieve Gurling

---

[1] See https://manchestermusicalheritage.blogspot.com/2018/08/e-j-loder-charles-seymour-and-music-at.html