Released on Pentatone in March, Son regina e sono amante takes its title from an aria sung by Dido in Didone abbandonata, and also includes excerpts from Atys, Lo stravagante, Le faux lord, Ciro riconosciuto and Artaserse. In a break from rehearsals for La traviata in Berlin earlier this spring, Rosa spoke to me about how a veteran conductor's eigthieth birthday celebrations provided the impetus for the project, the joy of being able to bring her own Neapolitan heritage into the mix for some of these arias, the ways in which Piccinni's style evolved after his move to Paris, and making her film-debut (as the soprano soloist in an excerpt from Mahler's 'Resurrection' Symphony) in the 2023 Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro...
Italian musicologist Dinko Fabris introduces the composer...
'Niccolò Piccinni was one of the most famous composers of his time for over half of the 72 years of his life. After the premiere in Rome in 1760, his Italian opera Cecchina o la Buon Figliola, based on a text by Goldoni, was the most performed opera of the eighteenth century, with over 300 performances throughout the world at the time - as far as Russia and even China.
When Piccinni was called to Paris he was certainly the most famous Italian composer of the moment and it was no coincidence that he was opposed to Gluck, who represented the champion of French opera: they were certainly the two most important opera composers of the second half of the eighteenth century, while Mozart, who had arrived in Paris almost unknown, protested to his protector [Baron von] Grimm because he forced him to listen to works by Piccinni, the idol of the moment, every evening at the theatre.
Napoleon wanted him as his personal musician but Piccinni died shortly after and so he took on the other Neapolitan (also born in Puglia like Piccinni) Paisiello, who had been his student. I think that few composers had achieved the international fame of Piccinni, who was still esteemed by later composers such as Verdi. The rediscovery of Mozart then overshadowed all the extraordinary composers who lived around him, who today reveal an extraordinary musical heritage.'
Rosa Feola discusses the project with Presto...
Thanks for introducing me to a composer whose name I only really knew from the Grove Dictionary before this album landed!
This is exactly the aim, because I too was very surprised and happy to discover him: I didn’t know Piccinni at all until a few years ago, and the music’s very interesting. I also found it very easy to sing, and I hope that everybody will love it! The project has been a long time in the making. I met Tony [conductor Antonio Florio] three or four years ago for a concert in Naples to celebrate Riccardo Muti's birthday; it was dedicated to eighteenth-century Neapolitan music, because Maestro Muti loves that repertoire and Tony is an expert in it! We included two arias by Piccinni, and Tony and I enjoyed ourselves so much that we decided to collaborate on a longer-term project.
I first worked with Maestro Muti fifteen years ago when I sang Inez in Mercadante’s I due Figaro, another opera by a great composer from Southern Italy who’s been almost forgotten. Other than that I didn’t sing many arias from the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century repertoire as a student and young artist, so I hadn't quite realised how many undiscovered riches are out there…
How did you go about putting the programme together?
Breathing new life into this music was a complicated process, and we had to spend several afternoons at the piano together reading through the newly discovered scores: most of them were hidden away in obscure libraries around Italy, so Tony had to transcribe them electronically and edit things as we worked! Over the course of those sessions we selected the arias which were most suitable for my voice and personality, and we found out that the French arias in particular were very comfortable for me to sing because they’re very lyrical.
We eventually decided that this would be the start of a longer-term collaboration, because Piccinni is just the first of many composers of the Settecento that we want to bring to the public; Antonio Sacchini is the next one on our list, and we have another set of recording-sessions planned for next year.
Piccinni was born in Bari and trained in Naples, not so far from where you grew up…
Naples was so full of composers during this period that they didn’t have time to figure out which ones were the best - there was simply too much to choose from, and it’s part of our job to see which composers and operas speak most directly to a modern audience. At one point that relatively small city had four conservatoires, so can you imagine how many students passed through and moved onto other parts of Europe? Thousands!
And they influenced so many composers further afield, including Mozart: if you listen to Elettra’s Act Three aria from Idomeneo it’s almost an exact copy of an aria by Piccinni! Of course Mozart was a genius, but he was still inspired by other people’s music. I’ve sung Ilia in Idomeneo, but I might do Elettra one day…I like the angry characters!
Tony and I both come from the South of Italy, and we view it as our responsibility to champion these composers: I feel the music in my blood. I was like a blank canvas when we started the rehearsals, and I was so impressed and surprised how quickly my culture and heritage helped me to understand how to sing these arias. I was born in Caserta, half an hour away from Naples, so the culture is essentially the same.
And how about the language itself?
Neapolitan is my second language: I speak it with my family, or when I’m angry and frustrated! A lot of the vocabulary is common to both languages, but the most interesting thing about the Neapolitan language is the way we colour the words: we’ll often use the same word for two or three separate feelings, but the distinction is always clear from the inflection.
Understanding all of that made it so much easier to bring these characters to life, because we Southern Italians love drama in our language and Piccinni provides plenty of that! Of course most of the arias are about love, but there’s one in particular [from Lo stravagante] that speaks of love from the point of view of an absolutely desperate woman: it’s difficult to translate, but she’s essentially saying ‘I am your caregiver, I would give you everything, I would be a servant under your feet!’. That’s strong stuff, and it strikes me as very Neapolitan!
Southern Italians are also very into sarcasm as an expressive quality, and we see that in another of the arias - 'Signora padroncina' from the comic opera La Capricciosa. The character Nannetta is a servant telling her employer that she’s unhappy about her job, and she’s very sassy and sarcastic about it!
Do you notice a significant change in Piccinni's style after he relocated to Paris at the invitation of Marie Antoinette?
When Piccinni settled in France after his early success in Italy, he learned how to create a new structure for operatic arias and to embrace a different style of singing. The French loved dramatic recitatives and long lines that require a lot of lyric power, and that was the most interesting part of this project for me: although it’s eighteenth-century music I felt able to sing the high notes in full voice without placing any restrictions on myself, which isn’t always the case with Italian arias of that period.
The beauty of this repertoire is that the composers write the most captivating melodies: on the surface the vocal lines seem very simple, but that simplicity hides such a deep understanding of polyphony and counterpoint. In a sense it’s the ‘easy listening’ of its era, and it’s comparatively easy to sing because it doesn’t jump around as much as the Italian arias which are often full of leaps between registers for dramatic effect.
Finally, tell me a little about your film debut in the excerpt from Mahler's 'Resurrection' Symphony in the Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro...
It was Yannick Nézet-Séguin who chose us – we’d just done a project together a few months earlier, and I was very happy to be involved. It was my first experience of being in a movie, and it was completely unlike anything I’d ever done before: until I arrived at Ely Cathedral, I hadn’t realised that we’d have to fake singing! We did it live maybe three or four times, and then the production-team had to work out what was the best option for capturing it…We tried to film it live once and that didn’t work, then we did another take with us lip-syncing to the recording. But that didn’t look realistic enough, so we tried singing along to the soundtrack for real…
It took three or four days to film those six minutes of music. Everything had to be super-realistic because it was a copy of that legendary concert, so our costumes, positions and even facial expressions needed to be exactly right. And of course our ‘Leonard Bernstein’ [Bradley Cooper] spent several years learning how to conduct that excerpt - sometimes it was easy to follow him and sometimes not so much! But everything he did was always very intense and full of energy.
After the final take we were all so happy that we performed the whole thing again for real with no cameras or tapes running, just to preserve the memory in our hearts. You know how powerful that music is, and we had everybody screaming their lungs out and crying at the same time! It was such a joy to be a part of that.
Rosa Feola (soprano), Cappella Neapolitana, Antonio Florio
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