Angelina (Cenerentola): Daria Rositskaya
Clorinda: Kristina Gontsa
Tisbe: Yekaterina Latysheva
Ramiro: Denis Zakirov
Alidoro: Maharram Huseynov
Dandini: Yaroslav Petryanik
Don Magnifico: Denis Begansky
Marina Mishuk (harpsichord)
World premiere: 25 January 1817, Teatro Valle, Rome
The premiere of the production: 17 April 2024, Mariinsky Theatre
Running time 3 hour 15 minutes
The performance has one interval
Gioachino Rossini composed La Cenerentola at the age of twenty-five, and it became his twentieth opera. Understandably, with such extraordinary productivity, finding plots became a challenging task, especially with the need to navigate censorship. Two days before Christmas in 1816 Rossini, his librettist Jacopo Ferretti and impresario Domenico Barbaja brainstormed suitable opera plots. They rejected around thirty of Ferretti’s suggestions until they finally settled on La Cenerentola. Ferretti drafted the libretto overnight, Rossini composed the music in less than a month, and the premiere took place the following Christmas, on 25 December 1817, at Rome’s Teatro Valle. The opera’s fate and its heroine’s story resonate with each other: initially underrated La Cenerentola later dazzled and captivated audiences worldwide. Yet, live performances of this music remain a rarity: only the highest-class virtuosos can sing La Cenerentola with its frantic tempos and dizzying passages.
Although the La Cenerentola libretto indirectly derives from Charles Perrault’s fairy tale (1697), one would not label it a fairy-tale opera. The Teatro Valle, for which Rossini composed this piece, lacked complex machinery, making it impossible to beautifully transform a pumpkin into a carriage, or mice into horses. The opera also omits the story of the glass slipper, as the scene of fitting the slipper would have been deemed indecent in Rossini’s time. The librettist replaced the stepmother with a stepfather, and the fairy godmother with a wise mentor. Rossini’s La Cenerentola primarily stands as a splendid Italian opera buffa filled with disguises, a dazzling musical garland of arias, ensembles, choruses, and symphonic fragments with recitatives in between. However, the composer didn’t limit himself to the comic genre, and while Don Magnifico and Dandini are purely buffoonish characters, Ramiro (the prince) and Angelina (Cinderella) sing in the language of serious opera: their feelings are lofty and noble. Contrary to opera norms, Rossini gave the title role not to a soprano but to a mezzo-soprano, and a very rare one at that – a coloratura! And although no magical transformations occur on stage, listening to La Cenerentola often evokes a sense of wonder. This wonder is the human voice and its truly fantastic capabilities. Christina Batyushina
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