Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Il Flaminio (1735)

So here it is: Pergolesi's last opera.  And it's another comedy!  How could this be bad?  Well, it's NOT.  Stop putting words in my mouth, doggone it!

Here's the plot as I can make out: Giustina is a young widow, engaged to Polidoro.  There's this guy, Flaminio, who loved her and whom she scored while married, but now she's in love with him, only he's undercover using the name Giulio.  Polidoro's sister Agata is engaged to Ferdinando, but she's in love with Giulio.  There's also a comedy servant couple, Checca and Vastiano (pictured on the box).  Ultimately, Flamino and Giustina end up together, Agata goes back to Ferdinando, and so Polidoro's the only one left single, but he deals with the situation with equanimity.

I say "as far as I can make out" because, while that might not sound overly complicated, the way it's presented is pretty hard to follow in places, and while the production isn't intentionally confusing or anything, the fact remains, most of the characters are played by similar-looking brunettes, which doesn't help with the confusion.

However, yes, it's lots o' fun, obvz.  I think probably Lo frate 'nnamorato had more stand-out moments, but I can't and won't complain too much, notwithstanding that, really, the libretto is kind of shambolic.  There's also some humor based different dialects of Italian which was, naturally, lost on me.  The production is fairly restrained, to its benefit.  The standout to me is Laura Cherici (who also played a comic servant in Lo frate 'nnamorato--beware of typecasting!) as Checca.

People naturally wonder what Pergolesi's career would've been like if he hadn't died so young.  Would he have become a talent spoken of in the same breath as Handel?  And I have to say: I doubt it.  It's not that I don't like his work; I like it a lot, obviously.  But it's not normal for talent to just steadily increase throughout a composer's career.  Sure, Mozart's later operas are better than his early ones, and had he lived longer, he no doubt would have written more great music--but would he have written music that's massively, obviously, superior to anything he'd written previous?  Do you listen to Handel's last opera, Deidamia, and say, wow, this is clearly way better than his first surviving opera, Agrippina?  I don't think so.  So while it's extremely impressive that Pergolesi was able to compose as well as he did as young as he was, I doubt his later work would've improved that much.  If he'd lived another fifty years and written dozens more operas, I think he'd probably be known to about the same degree as other long-lived composers like Galuppi and Hasse; that is to say--somewhat to baroque music aficionados, but not as an ultra-rare standout talent whose name even non-fans might know.  I'd say, in fact, that the fact that all his operas are available in video form is a function of his short career; paradoxically, if he'd lived longer and written a lot more, I'd bet fewer would be available.

But, of course, there's no way to know, and that is sad.