After seeing Rossi's Orfeo, I looked him up and saw that he'd written another opera, but I thought, man, it's hopeless. It's not available, it will never be available, all is darkness and despair. But! With Operavision, all things are possible. I should've had faith. That's on me. According to Operavision, this is the first time it's been performed since it's debut, which definitely make it the biggest gap in my operatic experience.
So first, we have a short prologue where allegorical representations of music, painting, poetry, and magic bicker over the upcoming opera (metatextual!). Then, the opera proper starts, and...well. Okay. So this is based on an episode of Orlando Furioso in which Ruggiero is taken captive by a sorcerer named Atlante, who has foreseen that he's going to become a Christian and help to defeat the Saracens and then die, and to stop these things from happening, takes him prisoner in his, well, enchanted palace, until his betrothed Bradamante rescues him. So...putatively. But, as you know, these operas based on Italian epics are pretty loose with the source material, so here we have a whole bunch of other characters just thrown in higglety-pigglety. The opera presupposes a degree of familiarity with the source material that, I don't know, maybe a half dozen Italian literature professors would have? I've read it and reread most of it, so I've gotta be in a pretty high percentile as far as Ariosto-knowing goes, and it was difficult going for me. Beyond the three aforementioned characters, here are some personages herein: Orlando, Angelica, Marfisa, Doralice, Sacripante, Gradasso, Astolfo, Mandricardo, Ferrau, Alceste, Iroldo, Fiordiligi, Prasildo, Olympia. The libretto also includes references to characters who don't appear: Brandimarte, Melissa, Rodomonte, and characters go on about other events in the poem that have minimal bearing on the current story. It's pretty intense. And, I should emphasize, most of these people are just here. We don't know why they are or what they want; they're just...here. Extremely shambolic libretti are a common feature of seventeenth-century opera: see Rossi's Orfeo or any ol' thing by Cavalli. But this may be the ultimate example of that.
I'm sort of of two minds about the production here, but not for the normal reasons. It's a modern-dress thing, which...fine. But that's not really the main point. You could go one of two ways with this: you could either decide "okay, this opera is kind of confusing, so we should give it the most 'normal' production we can so as not to compound that. Alternatively, you could decide, "this opera is kind of confusing, so we should have a production that play into that and compounds it." The producers here went with the latter option. This basically takes place in a hotel, except when it's in a prison or a hospital or an airport departure lounge. Also, the action's always being filmed by a cameraperson, and projected onto a screen above the stage (actually, I'm not sure if it's his actual footage that's being projected in real time, but that's certainly the intended impression). It all comes together to create a very labyrinthine construct. They accomplished what they were trying to do, for sure. It works. I'm just not convinced it's what you want, however. At two hundred fifteen minutes, this is a longish opera, and although I think Rossi's music is fantastic (lots of flowing arioso--Ariosto arioso), it does sometimes get a little boring in the back half. Like any work of art, an opera needs some kind of dramatic stakes, and when those are lacking, the whole suffers. It's possible that no production would adequately deal with this--it's jut baked in to the opera--but I'm not convinced this one does it any favors.
Regardless, not as good as Orfeo, but still in my estimation an enjoyable piece, and it rules that it's finally been rediscovered.
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