Wednesday, October 26, 4:30Conservatory of Frosinone, Italy
The first opera in the history of music based on the Don Giovanni’s subject, L’empio punito of Alessandro Melani was staged on February 17, 1669 in the Teatro Colonna in Rome. The setting is in an imaginary Greece and the characters have names that evoke the Italian literary tradition. From the libretto and the diary sources on the first performance, we know that the opera included many spectacular scenographic effects. The main character – Acrimante – departs very far from the analogous ones of the texts based on the same subject. He never wears others’ clothes to hide his identity. He is a burlador, but only in the background of the story: he deceived Atamira into a false marriage through the employment of costumed witnesses and then abandoned her. When he flirts with Ipomene, he ignores her love for his friend Cloridoro, and for her he sings the most poignant musical moment of the opera, Se d’amor la cruda sfinge. The only strong connection element of the libretto with the previous texts is the dramatic final encounter with the statue of the dead, in which, moreover, an important element is missing, the request for repentance. L’empio punito lacks also many dramaturgical topoi of Don Giovanni’s tradition: family ties, honor, contempt for morality and faith.
The libretto, in which I have traced fragments and quotes of previous operas, instead contains some topoi very common in the European theatrical tradition, but missing in the previous texts on this subject: the dream, the sleeping, the false poison, the pact with the Devil. The dramaturgical core of the story (the disrespect to the dead in the form of a dinner invitation) represented the starting point, a reservoir from which to draw. The result is that libertinism, contempt for death, and the rules of honor are dried up, as it were, to give more space to spectacular ostentation, the power of figurative impact, and the charm of music.