Name: Ezio
Start: 2016-06-03T00:00:00.000Z
End: 2016-06-05T00:00:00.000Z
Location: BU Theatre

Organization

Countertenor

Randall Scotting

Valentiniano

Mezzo-soprano

Brenda Patterson

Ezio

Soprano

Jennifer Holloway

Fulvia

Tenor

William Hite

Massimo

Conductor

Gil Rose

Stage director

Joshua Major

Set designer

Jian Jung

Costume designer

Rachel Padula Shufelt

Lighting designer

Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew

Erica Petrocelli

Onoria

Singer

Jesse Darden

Varo

Odyssey Opera

Orchestra

italià

Boston

United States

BU Theatre

Lane-Comley Studio 210

Ezio Gluck

Public

anglès

Approved

Randall Scotting…Valentiniano
Brenda Patterson…Ezio
Jennifer Holloway…Fulvia
William Hite…Massimo
Jesse Darden…Varo
Erica Petrocelli…Onoria

Odyssey Opera Orchestra
Conducted by Gil Rose

Production Team
Director: Joshua Major
Costume Designer: Rachel Padula Shufelt
Scenic Designer: Jian Jung
Lighting Designer: Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew

Video by Kathy Wittman | Ball Square Films
Audio by Joel Gordon

Pietro Metastasio (1698-1782) provided twenty-seven opera seria librettos that
were set by over 400 composers during his lifetime and into the beginning of
the 19th century. Although he decried the way ornate musical settings could
so easily render the poetry of the libretto incomprehensible, Metastasio’s texts
often lent themselves to florid musical settings. The formula of opera seria or,
to use the term most common in the 18th century, dramma per musica, centers
on the recitative/aria pair. The plot moves forward with the recitative, which provides new information or background previously unrevealed, and, in an extended multi-part structure known as the da capo aria, emotional states are reflected
through displays of vocal virtuosity.
An opera seria opens with the action already in progress, inviting the audience
to “look in” on a scene rather than formally introducing them to the topic at
hand. Scenes are defined by the exit or entrance of a character, most often
following an (exit) aria. Several scenes are located in the same area, whether
indoors or outside, creating a larger-scale construct defined by a change of
scenery, usually one scenery change per act. The number of characters on stage
remains relatively stable until the end of Act 3, when all characters gather to
celebrate the resolutions to all of the earlier conflicts.
Before Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787) helped to revolutionize dramatic
standards in opera, he first established his career as a composer of traditional
opera seria. Gluck grew up in Bohemia, where he most likely had his first music
instruction, both as a vocalist and instrumentalist. Gluck was known for performing on unusual instruments, particularly musical glasses; while in England, he
gave at least two performances on twenty-six drinking glasses tuned with water.
In 1731, Gluck attended the University of Prague; he did not finish a degree, but
certainly gained experience as an organist in the Týn Church located in the Old
Town Square. This is also when Gluck probably encountered Italian music: opera
at the theater sponsored by Count Spork and oratorio at the Franziskanerkirche.
Six years later, Gluck was in Milan and according to one contemporary source
was studying with Giovanni Battista Sammartini (c.1700–1775), from whom he
learned “practical knowledge of all the instruments.” Sammartini was known
as a symphonic rather than opera composer; nevertheless, Gluck’s studies with
Sammartini, in addition to the opera activities centered around the Teatro Regio
Ducale, would have made for an exciting and well-balanced musical education
that exerted an influence on Gluck’s later compositions.

9
On December 26, 1741, Gluck’s first opera, a setting of Pietro Metastasio’s
Artaserse, opened the 1742 Carnival season at the Teatro Regio Ducale. An account from 1792, the source of which may have been Gluck himself, states that
the opera was accepted because the composer had added an aria in the “local
style.” Whether or not this was the one point that made Gluck’s opera a success,
he was given the honor of composing works for the next three seasons in Milan
as well. That Gluck garnered the support and protection of the nobility may have
been part of the reason for his success in Milan and a subsequent invitation in
1745 to be the house composer at King’s Theatre in London.
The politically charged atmosphere in London had led to the closing of King’s
Theatre for the better part of the year; however, Gluck presented two operas
there in 1746, both of which were adapted from his earlier works. Still, Gluck’s
stay in London would prove fruitful for his continually developing ideas on
opera. One instance was his contact with the English actor David Garrick, who
espoused a more natural acting style and whose student Gaetano Guadagni
sang the title roles in several Gluck operas.
Gluck’s association with Vienna and the Habsburg family was established with
the commission of an opera in 1748. Semiramide riconosciuta to a libretto by
Metastasio celebrated Empress Maria Theresa’s birthday and the re-opening of
the recently renovated Burgtheater (court theater). Despite the success of this
opera—twenty-seven performances—Gluck left Vienna and joined the opera
company of Giovanni Battista Locatelli the following year. Potential reasons for
this decision on the heels of an important success vary from the sway of Metastasio’s opinion—the influential court poet did not like the work—to the fact that
there was no position open at the court.
Gluck composed Ezio for the 1750 Carnival season in Prague. It was premiered
at the Kotzen Opera by Locatelli’s company and given in Leipzig and Munich the
following year; Gluck was not present for these performances and other music
was added to the original score. Ezio was revived in 1751 by Locatelli’s company,
with Gluck hired as maestro di cappella (director). Gluck revised the score for the
Vienna premiere in 1763.
The title character of Gluck’s Ezio is a general who has just returned home to
Rome after defeating Attila. He is loyal to the emperor Valentiniano and will
not disavow that loyalty, even when he discovers that Valentiniano intends to
take his love, Fulvia, as his wife. Fulvia is Massimo’s daughter; Massimo harbors
a hatred for the emperor because Valentiniano tried to seduce Massimo’s wife.
Massimo is blinded by his need for revenge against the emperor and is willing
to use Ezio’s loyalty to both the emperor and his daughter as a means by which
to exact his revenge. After a failed assassination attempt on the emperor’s life,
Massimo frames Ezio, who is then arrested.
Throughout the opera loyalties are overtly questioned: Ezio’s loyalty to the
emperor after he is framed for the assassination attempt, then Fulvia’s loyalty to
Ezio after she promises herself to the emperor in an attempt to safe Ezio’s life.
Unmoved by her loyalty, Valentiniano orders Ezio’s execution. Only at the end
of the opera do all—characters and audience alike—realize that Varo, a guard

10
of the emperor’s who is loyal to Ezio, did not kill him. Through a story related by
his sister Onoria, Valentiniano understands the source of Massimo’s anger and
realizes his actions were at the root of the conflicts. Massimo is not repentant; he
tries now to incite a rebellion against the emperor. Ezio’s loyalty is now proven as
he helps to quell the insurrection. This last act of loyalty enlightens the emperor,
who allows Ezio to marry Fulvia, and forgives Massimo for his treachery.
In revising the work for Vienna, Gluck kept many of the arias and choruses from
the original production. One number dropped from the 1763 version of the
opera is “Se povero il ruscello,” which became “Che puro ciel” in Orfeo, staged
in Vienna the previous year. Similarly, some of the new material for the Vienna
production of Ezio came from other Gluck operas, including Il trionfo di Clelia.
The famous castrato Gaetano Guadagni sang the role of Ezio for the Vienna
premiere; he sang the title role in Orfeo as well. As castrato singers became less
common at the turn of the 19th century, women often sang roles such as Ezio. In
Odyssey Opera’s production, the role of Ezio will be sung by a female mezzosoprano and Valentiniano will be sung by a countertenor, a male singer who can
sing in the alto or mezzo-soprano range. The role of Cecilio in Mozart’s Lucio
Silla will also be sung by a countertenor.
Composed in 1772, when Mozart was sixteen years old, Lucio Silla follows the
conventions of the day, particularly as applied to opera seria. Like Ezio, Lucio
Silla grounds its dramatic formula on a historical figure on which contemporary
values are imposed.
Mozart was born in Salzburg on January 27, 1756. At the age of six, Wolfgang,
and often his sister Maria Anna, began performing to enthusiastic audiences in
Vienna and Munich. Over the next eight years, he traveled to European capitals.
In 1767, he heard the premiere of Gluck’s Alceste in Vienna with his father. Leopold was not impressed with the work. Later, however, he suggested orchestration
inspired by this opera when corresponding with Mozart about Idomeneo.
Mozart traveled to Italy three times between 1769 and 1773. The first, from
1769-1771, was like many of Mozart’s whirlwind tours. He visited some 40 cities,
demonstrating his skills to appreciative audiences. The second and thirds trips
were shorter and for the specific purpose of staging an opera in Milan at the
Teatro Regio Ducale, the same theater for which Gluck staged his opera
Artaserse in 1741. Mozart’s first opera for Milan, Mitridate, rè di Ponto, created
some controversy over whether a fourteen-year-old could write an opera. After
the premiere in December 1770, Leopold wrote that the detractors were proved
wrong because the opera “is still winning general applause.”
With the success of Mitridate, Mozart was commissioned for another opera for
Milan. Lucio Silla, to a libretto by Giovanni de Gamerra (1743-1803), opened the
Carnival season, premiering in Milan on December 26, 1772. Still, the compositional process and performance were not without their difficulties.
Mozart began composing the recitatives for Lucio Silla while in Salzburg, where
he and his father had returned after their second trip to Italy. Some of the recita
11
tives had to be rewritten in Milan, however, due to changes made in the libretto.
Mozart also wrote the choruses, overture, and fourteen of the numbers after
arriving in Milan with his father on November 4, 1772. This much work may have
left the sixteen-year-old a little overwhelmed; he wrote in December that “I can
think of nothing but my opera.”
Again, Leopold Mozart declared the premiere a resounding success with the
public and the press, even though things had not gone smoothly. The performance started three hours late and did not end until about two o’clock the
next morning. Leopold also relates a story about some tension between two of
the singers, the castrato Venanzio Rauzzini and the soprano Anna de AmicisBuonsolzzi. Rauzzini apparently told the archduchess that he was nervous and
couldn’t sing well. In order to encourage him, the sympathetic archduchess then
applauded every time Rauzzini came on the stage. This made Anna De Amicis
nervous and she did not sing well. According to Leopold, “This was a castrato’s
trick, for he had arranged that the archduchess be told that he would not be
able to sing because of nervousness, in order that he might thus ensure that the
court would encourage and applaud him.”
The types of characters in Gluck’s Ezio appear in Lucio Silla as well. The title
character is the tyrannical-turned-compassionate ruler. The other characters are
more one-dimensional in their depictions. Cecilio cares only for his bride, Giunia,
and not for political intrigue. Giunia, also caught in the middle of political and
emotional turmoil not of her making, remains staunchly devoted to Cecilio and
continually spurns Lucio Silla’s advances. Celia, Lucio Silla’s sister, has one focus:
Lucio Cinna. Aufidio, perhaps the most rigidly drawn character, never falters
in expressing his desire for vengeance. He is, so to speak, the devil on one
shoulder of Lucio Silla while the loyalty of Cecilio and Giunia stands on the other
shoulder as the example of goodness, constancy, and true love.
Lucio Cinna plays both sides of the political field. He is plotting to kill Lucio Silla
at whatever cost and does not care who he uses to this end, including Cecilio.
When Cecilio bursts into Lucio Silla’s palace with sword drawn and is captured,
Lucio Cinna is just behind. When Cinna sees that the situation has gone against
them, he immediately tries to pretend he was defending Silla.
Silla’s actions in pardoning Cecilio, allowing Giunia to stay with Cecilio, approving the marriage of Celia and Cinna, and abdicating his throne are parallel to
the actions of Valentiniano in Gluck’s Ezio. In Lucio Silla, however, the audience
is allowed glimpses of Lucio Silla’s vulnerabilities. We might be skeptical at first,
but true to the conventions of the day, the compassionate person will win the
internal battle against the tyrannical ruler and the erstwhile despot will see the
error of his ways.
Because Mozart and his music were so well received on each of his three trips
to Italy and on all of his travels, there was mounting hope that he would be offered a court position in Italy or Vienna. This did not happen, so a discontented
Mozart returned to his duties as Konzertmeister in Salzburg in 1775. After Mozart

12
moved to Vienna in 1781, he wrote another opera, Die Entfürhrung aus dem
Serail. Unfortunately, as with Gluck, no court position was offered to Mozart. Unlike Gluck, Mozart chose to stay in Vienna for the remainder of his life.
Like any stock characters, opera seria roles such as those found in Ezio and Lucio
Silla are predictable. Their motivations need no other explanation; they are who
they are and the 18th century audience delighted in them as much as the music
that accompanied them. Metastasio’s librettos and those fashioned after him
were constructed as beautiful poetry and ultimately vehicles for composers,
who found inspiration for new musical guises in the telling of historical stories
that could, in addition to conjuring up the exoticism of ancient times, reflect
more of the values of the composer’s own day than the history on which they
were based.
Gluck’s influence on Mozart may be more easily discerned in the connection
between the former’s Alceste and the latter’s Idomeneo. Comparisons between
the two were not lost on audiences even in the late 18th century. In commenting
on a 1794 performance of Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito (with a libretto based on
Metastasio), Franz Niemetschek wrote “…in short, Gluck’s nobility is united to
Mozart’s original art, his flowing feelings, his totally enchanting harmonies.” Both
men had passed away by this time, yet their musical connection, or perhaps
continuity, was still apparent.

English

Ezio by Gluck, De (2016/2016), Dirigit per Joshua Major,, Director musical Gil Rose, BU Theatre, Boston, United States

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