Giovanni Battista Rubini and the Bel Canto Tenors by Dan H. Marek

Author:Dan H. Marek [Marek, Dan H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

15

Operas and Concerts in London and Paris, 1836–1839

1836

After a Christmas break, the 1835–1836 season at the Italien resumed with a performance of Otello with Rubini in the title role on January 19. Marino Faliero, Teobaldo in I Capuleti e i Montecchi, and Don Giovanni followed in February and March. On March 22, Rubini sang the premiere of Ermano in Saverio Mercadante’s I briganti, along with the other three members of “The Great Quartet.” In spite of their best efforts, I briganti was a failure, but the experience in Paris was salutary for Mercadante. He changed his style and became the most important composer of the primo ottocento after Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini and had a considerable influence on the young Verdi.

Then, for Rubini, it was off again to the King’s Theater in London (that’s where the money was!) On April 9, the season opened with La gazza ladra. Other familiar works followed: Mosé in Egitto, I puritani, Il barbiere di Siviglia, La sonnambula, Otello, L’assedio di Corinto, Marino Faliero, Anna Bolena, Gnecco’s La prova d’un opera seria, Don Giovanni, and I briganti. Despite being a fan of “The Puritani Quartet” Chorley dismissed the whole season of 1836 with the following volley:

There was no novelty this year of much importance, either among the works performed or those who performed them.

I Briganti, by Signor Mercadante, commissioned for Paris—as an opera by Bellini, and as another by Donizetti, before it had been commissioned—failed to please here; in this following the fate of all its clever composer’s operas on our side of the Alps.

The music was well made. Rubini had a beautiful cantabile in the second act, but the transformed version of Schiller’s Robbers proved merely a “Transformed Deformed.”1

For all that, the 1836 season in London offered a very interesting schedule of concerts at the King’s Theater. For example, on May 2, besides Rubini, the singers were Grisi, Malibran (who did not participate in the Italian opera season), Lablache, Tamburini, Clara Novello (1818–1908), and Michael Balfe (1808–1870), an Irish composer, violinist, and also a fine baritone. Balfe’s opera The Maid of Artois, based on the story of Manon Lescaut, was written for Malibran and premiered in London on May 27, 1836. Apparently, Rubini had begun teaching in his frequent trips between Paris and London, for the following revue appeared in The Musical World for 1836:

A young English lady, Miss Isabella Trotter, a pupil of Rubini, has been singing twice last week, at the concerts of M. M. Sowinski and Profetti (in Paris). The beauty and extent of her voice, which nature has endowed with the rarest qualities, will doubtless be much improved by cultivation, so as to place her, at no distant day, at the head of her profession.2

Miss Trotter also appeared with Rubini and the other members of the “Puritani Quartet” as supporting artists (a prevalent practice of the time) in concerts given by Segismond Thalberg, (1812–1871), one of the greatest pianists of the nineteenth century and Ole Bull (1810–1890), the celebrated Norwegian violinist.

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