Alessandro Melani, L'empio punito (1669)

I will automatically pounce on any seventeenth-century opera I can find, as there are dramatically fewer available than those of any other century. This DVD just came out a month or two ago, giving us a look at a hitherto obscure piece.

So...it's about this rake. He's married, but he abandons his wife to chase after others, with the help of his servant with whom he has a love-hate relationship. Eventually, he kills a man in the course of a seduction. Later, in a graveyard, he sees a statue that speaks and, defiantly, invites it to dinner. Then--hmm...does this sound vaguely familiar? That's right: all opera lovers will have immediately thought of Alexander Dargomyzhsky's Stone Guest. There might also be other operas on the subject; I can't recall at the moment.

Yes well in all seriousness, obviously, this is based on the Don Juan legend--the first opera to be so, and therefore of automatic interest. It feels very different than the others, though (obviously comparing it to Don Giovanni isn't exactly fair, but it's probably unavoidable). Firstly, the names are completely different: the Don Juan character is Acrimante, Leporello is Bibi...the other characters don't really have exact parallels to Mozart. There's also a whole goofy subplot involving a romance between Bibi and the pants-role nursemaid Delfa. But I'd say that the biggest distinction, really, is that you don't get the impression that Acrimante is quite the remorseless seducer that Giovanni is. The opera doesn't emphasize the extent of his conquests, and he sings a lot--to himself, not as a seduction technique--about how in love he is with his latest prey. Flighty and inconsistent as this may be, it somehow makes him seem more sympathetic than Giovanni, who knows exactly who he is and what he wants. As such, the drama and the moral don't quite come home as hard as they might. The title means "the wicked punished," but you might wonder, really? Is that what happens?

Still extremely interesting, of course! The music isn't quite Cavalli level, but it's still great fun, with a lot of proto-arias. The production is...well, it's fine, you get used to it, but I feel like something slightly less Eurotrashy might have been called for under the circumstances. The opening--with servants singing a chorus about how hard their life is--is undercut in a weird way by the fact that they're all lounging around in old-fashioned bathing costumes. What? 'Sokay. I liked it.