Cast

Conductor Alberto Zanardi
Director Silvia Paoli

Synopsis

An opera troupe gathers in the theatre of a small Italian town to rehearse the serious melodrama scheduled for the local fair season. The libretto—by none other than Metastasio—has been clumsily adapted by a local hack poet, then set to music by an even more provincial composer. As for the singers, they may be second-rate, but they carry themselves with all the airs and demands of true stars. And so the stage quickly fills with squabbles between rival prima donnas, grumbling from the disgruntled, and a harried poet and composer struggling to satisfy everyone’s whims—not to mention meddling mothers and intrusive husbands.

Donizetti composed this one-act farce in 1827 for Naples, with spoken dialogue and a dialect role. To make the work travel beyond the Neapolitan stage, he returned to it in 1831, expanding it to two acts, replacing the spoken scenes with sung recitatives, and rewriting the entire piece in standard Italian.