Gioachino Rossini (1797-1868)
The story of Cinderella must be deeply lodged in the consciousness of anyone who was read stories as a child. I remember being bothered, even then, by some of the magical aspects of the story, especially the glass slipper - it must, I thought, have been dreadfully uncomfortable. What a pleasant experience to discover, in preparing this article, that the whole idea of a glass slipper may be based on a mistranslation! It seems that Perrault’s version of the story in his Mother Goose tales (1697) told of a pantoufle en vaire, a fur or sable slipper, worn only by kings or princes, and therefore appropriately given by a good fairy to one who was to become a princess (vaire was misread as verre, meaning ‘glass’). The human aspects of the story were more intriguing than the magical: especially the vindictiveness of her relatives to the downtrodden step-child, and the revelation of her essential goodness, even nobility of character in the end. Cinderella’s story seemed, more than many other fairy stories, to be overlaid with the trappings of pantomime, especially for English-speaking children. The pantomime tradition made caricatures of the ‘ugly’ sisters, the cruel step-parent, above all the fairy godmother with her stagy transformation devices: the dress, the slippers, the pumpkin carriage, the return to plain ordinariness on the stroke of twelve. It has taken the writings of psycho-cultural interpreters such as Bruno Bettelheim to remind us what powerful, even disturbing, and cathartic human experiences are hidden beneath these stories - but most people would rather remain wedded to Cinderella as a fantasy – perhaps that is why it has had more lastingly popular treatments as a ballet than as an opera. Of operatic versions, the nearest to keeping a place in the repertoire has been Massenet’s Cendrillon, and even that has the reputation of being dangerously close to sugar-floss.
Little in common with the story ‘as we know it’?
Rossini is hardly a composer one associates naturally with fairy stories - he seems too clear-eyed, too witty for that - indeed, people aware of his opera La Cenerentola by reputation rather than by direct experience, one suspects, do not always associate it with the Cinderella story. If they do, they may feel that what is remarkable is how little it has in common with the story ‘as we know it’. This impression is compounded by the familiarity of the one well-known extract – Cinderella’s big rondo aria from the end of the second act. How could this brilliant coloratura be an expression of the ash-sweeping, self-effacing household drudge? Had Rossini sacrificed dramatic truth to the flexible throats of virtuoso singers? The reality of Cenerentola as an opera will come as a very enlightening overturning of these preconceptions. Even those with no great liking for Rossini’s art may be prepared to make an exception here - the point is surprisingly underlined by the comments of Colin Graham, producer of the English National Opera Cinderella:
I am not a great lover of Rossini’s operas, although I do love his music, because I find none of them, except Cinderella, particularly amusing; they are brittle and heartless, and about cardboard, artificial people. But Cinderella is a very human story, about a tender person with real problems, and the music has for me much greater depths than Rossini's other scores.
Cenerentola, in fact, may be just the piece to wean adults back onto the Cinderella story, if only because it is treated in a way that throws some of the emphasis on the characters and their attitudes, even emotions, rather than on supernatural intervention. The absence of the fairy element has been attributed variously to Rossini’s dislike of the fantastic, to the Latin preference for rationalism, and to the resources of the Teatro Valle in Rome where the opera was to be premiered, which lacked the financial and mechanical means to effect elaborate transformations. This is the explanation given by the librettist (Jacopo Ferretti) himself:
If Cinderella does not appear in the company of a wizard who works fantastic miracles or a talking cat, and does not lose a slipper at the ball (but instead gives away a bracelet) as in the French theatre, or in some vast Italian theatre, it should not be considered an act of lèse majesté but rather a necessity of staging at the Teatro Valle and a gesture of respect for the delicacy of Roman taste which does not permit on the stage what might please in a fairy-tale beside the fire.
No fairy godmother
So the place of the fairy godmother in Perrault’s tale is taken by Alidoro, the philosopher and tutor of the Prince, who knows of Cinderella’s true worth and influences events towards a happy outcome for her. The nearest the opera comes to the magical is when Alidoro contrives to have the Prince’s carriage break down in the middle of a storm right outside Don Magnifico’s castle. The explanation of the ‘mundane, prosaic libretto’, as one writer has termed it, lies less in Rossini’s preference (after all, he was about to write a thoroughly ‘magical’ opera for Naples, Armida) than in the literary sources on which Ferretti drew.
Writing on the history of early 19th century opera (mostly drawn from participants’ memories after the event), is full of stories of operas written in astonishingly short time, with composer following head after heels on librettist. Such stories especially surround Rossini, who had, by the time they were told, become by far Europe’s most famous composer. They would not have seemed so astonishing to the many forgotten or half-forgotten composers who were Rossini’s operatic contemporaries – the wonder is that in Rossini’s case such perfectly normal methods produced such enduring work. It is in this light that we need to consider Ferretti’s own story of the genesis of Cenerentola, and let it be said at once that he deserves much of the credit for his excellent libretto, which has been gradually re-evaluated, from the dismissal of Rossini biographer Radiciotti to Toye’s ‘efficient, even at times ingenious’ to Arthur Jacobs (translator of the English National Opera version) ‘a brilliant piece of work’.
According to Ferretti, the modifications demanded by the Roman ecclesiastical censor in a proposed libretto for Rossini had driven the composer to press the weary literary collaborator for alternative suggestions:
'I proposed twenty or thirty subjects’, Ferretti recalls, ‘half falling asleep, in the middle of a yawn I murmured: Cinderella. Rossini, who had climbed into bed so as to concentrate better, sat up straight..: ‘Would you have the courage to write me a Cinderella?’ And I, in turn, asked him: ‘would you have the courage to set it to music?’, And he: ‘When can I have the outline?’ And I: ‘If I go without sleep, tomorrow morning.'
Libretto in 22 days; score in 24
With the help of good mocha coffee, but without a word-processor, Ferretti had the outline ready the next morning, and the whole libretto in 22 days. The music was completed in 24. A word-processor, in fact, would have helped Ferretti a good deal, because he drew heavily, as scholars have demonstrated, on earlier operatic versions of the story, to the extent that the libretto has been called ‘a true and genuine plagiarism’. This is of more than merely literary historical interest – a point made in slightly different ways both by Rossini expert Philip Gossett and by Jeremy Commons in the excellent article printed in the program for the Australian Opera production. Ferretti drew particularly on an opera composed in 1814 for La Scala, Milan, by Stefano Pavesi Agatina, or virtue rewarded (libretto by Felice Romani). This in turn drew on the successful Cendrillon written in 1810 for Paris by the Maltese composer Nicolò Isouard, to a libretto by Charles-Guillaume Etienne.
Already in Pavesi’s opera the non-Perraultian characters of Dandini and Alidoro appear, under the same names, and the Prince, Ramiro, changes place with his valet in order to check out his prospective brides. The pompous and unfeeling stepfather, the Baron of Montefiascone, is there too. Already the fairy godmother and the pumpkin which turns into a coach have been banished from the story. Yet Pavesi’s opera, as Jeremy Commons points out, does retain the magical element, except that Alidoro is substituted for the fairy godmother.
He is magician as well as philosopher, and he touches Agatina (Cinderella’s name in the Pavesi version) with a magic wand, transforming her rags into a beautiful gown, and later a rock into a carriage drawn by two dragons, and who, upon her arrival at the ball, presents her with a magic rose which enlivens her personality and makes her unrecognisable to all (Gossett, by the way, finds even fewer magical elements in Etienne and Romani’s libretti). So the Cinderella story was already current and attractive to composers in 1817 – Rossini, after some hesitation, joined Ferretti in giving it a new twist.
A libretto fit for the composer’s music
The pre-existence of the Pavesi libretto enabled Ferretti to take short cuts; maybe that is why the libretto is so good: he could concentrate on meeting Rossini’s needs – Arthur Jacobs writes: ‘such a libretto is written for music – to fit the successive types of musical form which the composer will wish to use’. Some of these forms, of course, are the conventional ones of opera buffa, such as Rossini immortalised in The Barber of Seville – and the most obvious stereotype is the stepfather, Don Magnifico, Baron of Montefiascone.
In Etienne’s French version this character is no buffoon – that was foreign to the French tradition – but in Pavesi’s opera already he has the name – literally ‘Mount Flagon’, which to an Italian audience would have suggested the wine growing district of this name near Orvieto, appropriately for a man whose first action on being appointed cellarer to the Prince is to issue an edict forbidding the adulteration of wine with water! The duet for Don Magnifico and Dandini, ‘Un segreto d'importanza’ is one of the finest of all buffo numbers. Even so, this Dandini is more than a mere buffo characterisation – in his impersonation of the Prince be enjoys developing another musical and dramatic persona, one of considerable bel canto elegance at times.
The end of the Act I finale has been recognised as unusual – it appears to be developing into the conventional arcistrepitoso, when, on the appearance of Cenerentola herself in disguise, the characters are snatched, in Colin Graham’s words, from reality onto Cloud Nine, a suspension wonderfully evoked by Rossini’s music.
A piece that comes at a crossroads in Rossini’s career
All these are indications of the distinctive nature of La Cenerentola - not a conventional buffa piece but a human comedy, whose magic is man-made. Cenerentola in fact, came at a cross-roads in Rossini’s career – the time when, offered a position in Naples by the impresario Barbaia, he was about to abandon opera buffa to concentrate his efforts on opera seria. As Philip Gossett points out, the main characters in Cenerentola, Cinderella herself and Ramiro, are sentimental, not comic characters. Ferretti’s subtitle, Goodness triumphant, is significant: these characters are heirs of the servant girl Pamela in Richardson’s novel, who is virtuous and loved and married by a noble patron. The sentimental genre had appeared in Italian opera in Piccini’s 1760 setting of Goldoni’s ‘Pamela imitation’, La buona figliola (produced some years ago by The Australian Opera). ‘From there through the remainder of the century’, Gossett continues, ‘opera buffa more and more frequently became the home for sentimental and pathetic heroines, expressing their sorrows and pleasures in a musically more simple and popular style’.
Rossini’s Cinderella
To a certain extent this generalisation is borne out by Rossini’s Cinderella. Her brilliant coloratura in the final scene has already been mentioned, but it is only one side of her musical characterisation, and entirely apt at this point, which represents the triumphant emergence of her lively personality, of which we have seen glimpses throughout. It is preceded by the touching eloquence of the opening slower section of the aria, where she generously forgives her ill-deserving relatives. Her opening ditty in Act I is simple and folk-like (indeed, in Etienne’s French version it was a ballad). Cinderella’s true personality emerges most in her exchanges with the tutor Alidoro, who – and not only for that reason – is an important character, although he is mostly confined to recitative, and is even denied a part in ensembles. The original singer of the part, Zenobio Vitarelli, may have been a singer of little worth, and was said to have the ‘evil eye’, which contributed to the initial failure of La Cenerentola with the audience. Rossini left the writing of Alidoro’s one aria to a collaborator, Agolini. On the other hand, Vitarelli was the original Don Basilio in Barber of Seville, and the fact that Rossini later composed a substitute aria of his own, for another singer, suggests that he may have realized that the importance of the part needed underlining. The style of that new aria was indistinguishable from that of opera seria, and has sometimes been deemed inappropriate for Cenerentola (but not in the Australian Opera production). Nowadays we can recognize how much more complex are Rossini’s comic operas than was once thought, from the musico-dramatic point of view, and of none is this so true as of Cenerentola. Even the relative simplicity and plain accompaniment of Alidoro’s part is significant in an opera in which the orchestra plays a subtle role: it is apt for a wordly-wise philosopher, who does not live in a world of fantasy and romantic illusion – unlike Don Magnifico, with his donkey that rose to the height of the steeple, and his gold-digging daughters. Alidoro, in fact is not altogether unlike the Don Alfonso of the Così fan tutte of Rossini’s idol Mozart – and his musical treatment has parallels. Rossini clearly meant his Cenerentola to move us through laughter to tears – to ponder anew on the insight into human behaviour of an ageless tale.
First published for Opera Australia, October 1987