Cimarosa is mostly known for Il matrimonio segreto, but he wrote a ton more comic operas, of which this is one! Boom. And what's more, there's another coming out in 2024. The Cimarosa Renaissance is upon us, and I couldn't be happier.
How to even describe the plot to this? There's Bellina who just wants to marry her sweetheart, Filandro, but there's some hard-to-understand legal thing where she has to marry some other dude to get some inheritance or other? Can she, with the aid of her maidservants and (very occasionally) Filandro, solve all of the problems?
Hmm. We may never know. The plot here is actually a bit hard to follow in any great detail. It's standard opera buffa stuff, but the sense of it seems to be "people like this stuff; let's shovel a bunch of it fairly indiscriminately in front of them and see if they'll bite. And that's fine! On those terms, it works. I can't off-hand say if the music here is better or worse than Il matrimonio, but it's certainly a lot of fun, with infectious set pieces galore. The character of Filandro is kind of gormless, but that's not the kind of thing that bothers one too much. And the production here is a straightforward, traditional thing; it probably won't excite anyone too much, but nor is it likely to offend, and I think there's something to be said for a neutral sort of production in opera that's being released on video for the first time.
I do want to take a moment, however, to note that libretto quality is a severely undervalued thing in opera. Sure, this is good, but with a more coherent libretto, it could easily be transcendently great. Le nozzi di Figaro would never not be a popular opera, what with Mozart and all, but one thing about it is that it has a really good libretto (the goofy "lost parents" stuff notwithstanding), and I'm quite sure it wouldn't have the status it does today if not for that. Find a good libretto, composers! It may not seem super-vital in the moment, but your legacy will thank you.
