When Francesco Cavalli, Venice’s most celebrated opera composer, completed the crowning achievement of his long career in 1667, the theater summarily rejected it and asked a younger composer to hurriedly write a substitute work on the same theme.
Swallowing what must have been a huge blow to his pride and reputation, he carefully entrusted the score to “Eliogabalo” to the Marciana Library in Venice, believing the opera would someday be performed.
Cavalli’s faith was validated, but it took nearly 3 1/2 centuries for the long-forgotten work to finally reach the stage. After a modest, little-publicized debut in 1998 in his native Crema, it was performed to considerable acclaim at the Théatre de la Monnaie in Brussels in 2004.
Beginning Tuesday with the first of three performances, the Aspen Opera Theater Center, a training company under the auspices of the Aspen Music Festival, will present the work’s long-overdue North American premiere.
Famed conductor and Cavalli scholar Jane Glover, who will be in the pit for the Aspen performances, calls Cavalli (1602-74) one of the leading composers of the early baroque period, ranking him right below Henry Purcell and Claudio Monteverdi.
“What we have in Cavalli is this incredible fluency of storytelling, where actually there are no real double-bar lines (breaks) between aria and recitative, but the whole thing is one glorious continuum,” she said. “It’s as a near as you can get to a play.”
A disciple and friend of Monteverdi, the composer of “Orfeo” (1607), opera’s first enduring masterpiece, Cavalli created 32 works from 1639 through 1673, scrambling to fill the appetites of the new public opera houses mushrooming across the city.
But with the changing tastes after his death, Cavalli gradually came to be forgotten and his operas no longer performed. It was only with the rise of original-instrument ensembles in 1960s and ’70s and renewed interest in baroque opera that the music world began to rediscover Cavalli and appreciate him anew.
Leading the way was conductor Raymond Leppard, who presented groundbreaking productions of Cavalli’s “L’Ormindo” in 1967 and “La Calisto” three years later at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera. They sparked Glover’s interest as a student at Oxford University and helped inspire her to write a doctoral dissertation on 17th century Venetian opera.
In the decades since, some of Cavalli’s best operas, such as the 1651 comedy, “La Calisto,” have been produced with some regularity. But “Eliogabalo,” probably because of its ignoble beginnings and lurid subject matter, took longer to be dusted off and given a second chance.
Most experts agree that the opera was rejected in part because of its antiquated reliance on plot-advancing recitative at a time when show-stopping arias spotlighting the era’s vocal stars had become more popular.
“There is an awful lot of story-telling – stile recitativo,” Glover said. “I sort of see why they were saying, ‘Oh come on, get on with it, give us another tune.’ And this is one of the real challenges to us now – to make this come alive, particularly in a foreign language.”
While conceding its stylistic anachronisms, Mauro Calcagno, an associate professor of music at Harvard University and editor of the score used for this production, believes the opera was censored. Its lurid mix of sex, politics and violence was at odds with the rising influence of the Jesuits at the time.
The work is based on the life of Roman emperor Heliogabalus, who was notorious for his unfettered sexual appetites and extravagant, often bizarre lifestyle. Calcagno calls it the “Don Giovanni” of the 17th century.
“In the opera, there is an attempted murder of the cousin of Eliogabalo,” he said. “There is an attempted rape of Flavia Gemmira, another character, and you have a real murder of Eliogabalo and his servant in the end.
“It’s a very violent opera in some aspects, despite the fact that you have fun and there are some comic parts.”
This production will employ period instruments, with Aspen students supplying the upper strings and guest professionals playing the two harpsichords, two theorbos (large members of the lute family) and two baroque cellos.
As with Monteverdi and other composers of the period, Cavalli’s original manuscript provides only rudimentary vocal and bass lines, and Glover, in conjunction with her fellow musicians, has had to use her best judgment to fill in the gaps.
“With all the 17th century operas, there’s a tremendous amount of editorial work one has to do,” she said. “The scores have been left to us in a sort of shorthand and every performer has to make huge numbers of decisions as to what happens musically.”
With the boost from the Aspen and Brussels productions and the decision by the German firm, Bärenreiter, to publish editions of “Eliogabalo” and other Cavalli works, Glover is convinced that more companies will take on the long-overlooked opera.
“I think it will have a great future,” she said.
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
“Eliogabalo”
OPERA|Aspen Opera Theater Center’s North American premiere of the long-forgotten 1667 opera by Francesco Cavalli|Aspen Music Festival, Wheeler Opera House, 427 Rio
