Le convenienze e inconvenienze teatrali is a farce by Gaetano Donizetti whose title could be translated as Practice and Malpractice in the Theatre. It was performed in Munich in 1969 as Viva la mamma! and the title stuck. It is a wacky comedy about a small Italian opera company trying to put together a show, and everything goes wrong. The impresario is worried about the money, the performers try to get more numbers to sing, the composer and librettist pass the buck to each other on whose decision it is to sneak in another duet. The two female singers hate each other’s guts, the first supported by her husband, the second by her terrifying mother, sung by a baritone. The German tenor can’t pronounce Italian, and the castrato gets nothing to sing. A disaster.
The farce is all played on the vast egos of the singers, the vicious insults they throw at each other, the caricature of opera seria they perform, trying to upstage each other. Of course, a prominent element is Mamma Agata, who interferes, spreads discord, even raises her hands on other singers in trying to promote her daughter. It’s just a silly comedy, but it allows us to take a peek into the practice (and malpractice) of opera theatre in the 19th century.
Mélanie Huber adds a deeper layer to this work at Oper Zürich, with an extra (speaking) character, “Gaetano”, representing Donizetti himself, played by actor Fritz Fenne. The idea is that the composer, in an asylum, his mind already lost, tries to complete this work, imagining the characters around him and coaching them. A demon, who visits him in the last moments of his life, becomes the character of Mamma Agata, not too bad an idea, given how disruptive she is. But, overall, this concept does not work. Gaetano ends up explaining to the characters which jokes to tell (in German), then they tell the joke singing in Italian and then Gaetano explains the joke in German. “Cringe,” as the youngsters say these days. Comic timing is completely ruined. To make room for Gaetano’s end-of-life musings, many recitatives are cut, and the action becomes even more fragmented and harder to follow. Ultimately, deeper meanings and psychological investigations just don’t fit in this work.
Conductor Adrian Kelly led the Musikkollegium Winterthur in a precise reading of the score, perhaps a bit heavier than necessary, but he was effective in keeping pit and stage together in the ensembles. Huber also took some liberties with the music, asking a modern composer (Sebastian Androne-Nakanishi) to compose an overture in the style of Donizetti, reproducing some of the most important tunes in the opera. The result was very Donizettian and not bothersome, but it was a peculiar thing to do.
The shortcomings of the production were all the more lamentable because the singing cast, nearly all of them in their role debuts, were uniformly very good. Ambrogio Maestri was Mamma Agata; he gave a funny performance, exploiting his physique, highly unsuitable to drag, and his strong, well supported baritone. Procolo, the prima donna’s husband, was Pietro Spagnoli, a bel canto specialist who sang with a stylish, elegant baritone, and did not shy from singing purposefully out of tune when Procolo was asked to replace the tenor. The German tenor was sung by Andrew Owens with a light, yet powerful voice; he also sang “badly” for comical effect, and clearly was having fun interpreting the haughty Teutonic divo. The two female singers were Anna Aglatova (prima donna), with a high, bright soprano, and Deniz Uzun (seconda donna), with a warm mezzo. They were very effective in trying to upstage each other and constantly bickering.
Adriana Bignagni Lesca had the role of the castrato, who, in this production, was turned into Music itself, trying to inspire Gaetano by reminding him how great he used to be. She sang an aria from Maria di Rohan and impressed with a deep, velvety mezzo bordering on contralto. Stanislav Vorobyov, who has already appreciated here in La Cenerentola, sang the small part of the librettist, his smooth bass coming through beautifully in the ensembles, with a considerable comical attitude. The cast was admirably completed by two members of the Internationalen Opernstudios, Aksel Daveyan as the composer and Amin Ahangaran as the impresario.
At the end of this silly farce, after the German tenor storms out, the impresario realises that he cannot move forward with the production of the opera and, not knowing how to repay the investors, the whole company decides to secretly run away in the night, after a fast, intertwined, funny concertato.
