Don Giovanni as a Tenor?

I've been working my way through the fabulous contents of the recent reissue box of "The Complete Sony Recordings" made by the Tafelmusik original-instruments orchestra.  With 47 CDs in total, it's quite the treasure trove of music -- some rare, some well-known, and all beautifully performed.

One of the CDs contains an opera, complete except for the recitatives, of which I've never heard before: Don Giovanni, o sia Il Convitato di Pietra ("Don Juan, or the Stone Guest") by Giuseppe Gazzaniga, a composer who likewise has completely escaped my notice.

We're so used to thinking of Don Giovanni purely in terms of Mozart and his librettist, da Ponte, that it came as more than a bit of a surprise to me to discover another opera, to another librettist's text (Giovanni Bertati), also sung in Italian, and which in fact predates Mozart's masterpiece -- if only by a few months. 

I was also surprised to learn that the descriptive term Dramma giocoso which Mozart applied to his work was not invented by him, but was the name of a whole tradition of operatic composition in Italy, especially in Naples, and that Gazzaniga was considered its last major exponent.  He was no slacker by any yardstick, even if not as prolific as some composers.  During his career he composed over fifty operas, as well as sacred music, three piano concertos and one symphony.  Definitely, my encounter with this opera has been a learning curve for me!

Some of the character names, but not all, are the same in both works.  All three of the ladies whose seduction Don Giovanni attempts are noblewomen -- there's no peasant girl corresponding to the role of Zerlina.  In common with Mozart, though, the ladies are all portrayed by sopranos.    The Don himself, however, is here portrayed by a tenor, not by a baritone.  His servant, sung by a bass, is named Pasquariello.  Also sung by a bass voice is the role of the Commendatore, whose statue in the end of the opera dispatches the unrepentant Don Giovanni to hell.  The biggest single difference was that Gazzaniga composed his Don Giovanni as a one-act Dramma giocoso to be performed in harness with another opera.  This more compact plan, and the decision to record the opera without recitatives, means that the entire work fits comfortably onto a single CD. 

The recording session for this opera was actually taking place 25 years ago this week, in Haarlem, the Netherlands.  The nine soloists are mainly European.  The choral parts are contributed by voices of the Kammerchor Stuttgart.  The conductor was Bruno Weil, who led a number of recordings with Tafelmusik around that time.  These recordings led the way for the "period performance" movement to expand beyond the Baroque era, and featured such works as Haydn's Creation, several of the symphonies of Mozart, and the piano concertos of Beethoven. 

Listening to Gazzaniga's opera is an enjoyable experience, and it certainly bears repeating.  I find it annoying that the reissue box found no space for even a brief synopsis of the action, number by number, and certainly no room for a libretto!  But that's one of the key differences which makes reissue recordings cheaper than the original issues.  Now, if only I had made time to study Italian as well as French and German when I was young and my brain was still firing dependably on all cylinders!

While this opera poses little real challenge to the musical and dramatic pre-eminence of Mozart's famous work, it does highlight in no uncertain terms the strong Italian influences at work in Mozart's style.  Or, to put it another way, the music sounds at first acquaintance rather like Mozart.  This fact also points up something else that we're apt to forget -- namely, that Mozart and Haydn were only two among dozens or even hundreds of composers who were their contemporaries and who all worked in a broadly similar musical language.  We're so used to thinking of the late eighteenth century as the era of Mozart and Haydn that we can readily forget all those others. 

Well, I've now encountered Giuseppe Gazzaniga and certainly enjoyed his take on the famous legend of Don Juan, the libertine seducer of Seville.  With 46 more CDs to explore in this reissue box, the adventures continue!