Steeeeelllaaaaa!
Right, now that we've gotten that out of our system...This one had been on my radar for a long time, but I just got to it. The idea here is we've got this king, Orismondo, who's head over heels for Stellidaura, but she already has a lover, Armidoro--or Armadillo, as I preferred to think of him. Orismondo is hella jealous, leading him to shoot and wound Armadillo, causing Stellidaura to vow revenge--there's a lot more of the heroine waving swords around than you usually see in these things. There are misunderstandings caused by people getting the wrong letters and leaping to conclusions. Armadillo protects Orismondo when Stellidaura, in disguise, is about to run him through ('cause he's just so gosh-darned chivalrous); she's sent to the dungeon, and Orismondo sends one of the comic-relief servants, Giampetro, to make her drink poison to kill her (still not knowing who she is). Soon after, he learns who she is, but it's TOO LATE, she's already taken the poison...but since this is a baroque opera, it's NBD; it turns out Giampetro accidentally just gave her a sleeping potion ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . Finally, Orismondo reads in an, uh, book (visualized here as a letter in a bottle, which somehow makes even less sense) that Stellidaura is actually secretly his sister, so that...solves the problem? I guess? It seems like the sudden revelation that the person you really, really want to fuck is a blood relative would do odd things to your libido. Or at the very least, make for a super-awkward time at family get-togethers. Also, it's kind of surprising that there's not an alternate love interest for Orismondo. But there you go.
I was a bit surprised by the voice types on display: only Armillo (the other servant) is sung by a countertenor; Orismondo and Armadillo are both tenors, which seems quite atypical--for all that the tenor eventually became the default hero role, it didn't play much of a part in Italian baroque opera (French is another story). Still, there's quite a contrast between them, the one super-low and the other high, that it's easy to imagine that they were originally baritone and castrato roles, which would certainly have been more typical. Still, it's fine. Also, allegedly Giampetro is singing in dialect, which is supposed to be another innovation of the piece that, naturally, was lost on me.
I mean, this is a perfectly acceptable example of the thing that it is, so if you like that thing, as I do, you're sure to like it. I have to admit, though, all the hype surrounding this, heralding it as a long-lost classic and all that, made me like it perhaps a bit less: because it's really not all that special. The libretto is slight, and there are no musical moments that I found really transcendent. Know what I'm sayin'?
Still, I really want to see as many seventeenth-century operas as I can; according to my all-knowing list, I'm currently at an even forty, which seems like kind of a lot, and yet I still don't feel I really have a clear grasp of the development of opera in the seventeenth century, whereas I feel like I sort of do for the eighteenth and beyond. It looks like I will have no choice but to watch more. Darn!
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