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3Rossini’s libretti often require one to leave logic at the theatre entrance and embrace the absurd – stock buffa characters, stolen and switched identities, arranged marriages, double nuptials, an inevitable thunderstorm, and so on. But, the lunacies, and sometimes banalities, of the plots are invariably redeemed by exquisite music. It is in the scores that Rossini’s comic genius lies; it is the music, finely sung, that makes the characters both funny and human, not extra-musical ‘comic’ commotion. L’occasione fa il ladro (Opportunity makes the thief) is a perfect example. This one-act burletta per musica was composed (reputedly in just eleven days) at the end of 1812, a year in which the 20-year-old Rossini had seen five of his works receive successful premieres: L’inganno felice (8th January, Venice); Ciro in Babilonia (14th March, Ferrara), La scala di seta (9th May, Venice), Demetrio e Polibio (18th May, Rome); La pietra del paragone (26th September, Milan). L’occasione fa il ladro was first seen at the Teatro San Moisè in Venice on 24th November. Its libretto, which Luigi Privaldi based upon Eugène Scribe’s 1810 play Le Pretendu par Hasard, ou L’Occasion fait le non, mixes Così fan tutte with Weber-Mahler’s Die drei Pintos and throws in a dash of The Importance of Being Earnest – swapped valises, mixed identities and long-lost siblings – for good measure.
British Youth Opera’s busy production of Rossini’s one-act comedy is elevated by the starry vocalism of the cast
Sir John in Love is an odd choice for a youth opera company in 2022. Yes, it’s Ralph Vaughan Williams’s 150th anniversary year and yes, BYO has long made a point of staging less known repertory. But if this opera was ever hilarious rather than twee (emerging from the “cowpat school”, as Elisabeth Lutyens branded the musical pastoralism of RVW and co), its comedy has aged badly. There aren’t just endless fat jokes – it’s a Falstaff plot, after all – but French jokes, Welsh jokes, class jokes and jokes about men marrying men. More seriously for a production whose unequivocally talented personnel are all at the start of operatic careers, Sir John in Love is a piece dominated by older characters, including its title role, and with multiple generation gaps at its core. And don’t get me started on the vocal ensembles, whose auto-muddiness is beyond the reach of any surtitling.
