La finita giardiniera

After his first major successes with Mitridate and Lucio Silla in Italy, Mozart was commissioned to compose an opera for the Carnival in Munich at the age of 18. The libretto was, as was customary at the time, stipulated by the client: La finta giardiniera had been written by the experienced comedy writer Giuseppe Petrosellini. Audiences expected an opera buffa to contain burlesque scenes of confused identities and disguises, moments of surprising revelations, and parodistic, but also emotional numbers. The convoluted plot surrounds the gardener Sandrina, who is in fact a countess and whose real name is Violante Onesti. The première was favourably received, and the composer reported proudly: “There was a terrible hullabaloo with applause and calls of ‘Viva maestro’ after every aria.” However, La finta giardiniera was performed only three times. Only few people recognised Mozart’s importance as an operatic composer at the time. Yet his sophisticated musical characterisation is already fully developed in this work: the melancholy Ramiro, the narcissistic Belfiore, the scheming Arminda or the aging lecher Don Anchise – Mozart allocated to each their own musical sphere. Together with the singers of the International Opera Studio, Tatjana Gürbaca will explore the emotional entanglements of Mozart’s protagonists. The spirited Gianluca Capuano, who has already worked on Haydn’s Orlando paladino with the Musikkollegium Winterthur and for whom a great future is predicted, especially in the repertoire of the 18th century, will be at the rostrum.

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