Since his wife left him, the marchese Don Giulio has turned misogynist and has engaged Gregorio to tutor his sons Enrico and Pipetto with instructions that they never come into contact with young women. However, Enrico has already married their neighbour Gilda and together they have a son, while the simple-minded Pipetto has his eyes on the elderly housekeeper, Leonarda.
Gregorio decides to help Enrico, but after Gilda is smuggled into the house, he is forced to hide her in his own room and she is then wrongly assumed to be his mistress. When the truth is revealed, Don Guilio forgives the couple and, amid general rejoicing, Gilda celebrates the courage of women and suggests that a trip around the world will cure Pipetto of his unsuitable infatuation.
Such is the thin plot of Donizetti’s opera buffa that brought his first great stage success, but it is hard to discern many signs of his future comic genius in this workaday production from the Bergamo Donizetti Festival in 2022.
Director Francesco Micheli does, however, come up with an interesting concept that picks up on the closed vision of the marchese and projects the setting twenty years into the future. Performers wear virtual reality glasses, living in a world parallel to a digital one shown on screen. There is even a hint that some of them may be avatars anyway.
The cast comprises two experienced singers plus students of the Donizetti workshop, with the veteran Alessandro Corbelli as Don Guilio. There is no longer such depth in the 70-year-old voice, but it is still as agile as ever in Donizetti’s florid lines and, Corbelli being Corbelli, one cannot doubt the softer heart below his grouchy manner.
Alex Esposito comes to the fore as Gregorio in the lively exchanges with Gilda that bring out his sympathetic and wily character. Of the younger singers, Marilena Ruta deservedly has the last word as Gilda, in commanding voice as the video projection declares women are born to rule.
All sing creditably, with Lorenzo Martelli in the unenviable role of the twerp Pipetto, Francesco Lucii in unflattering moustache as a hesitant Enrico and Caterina Dellaere as a very young, elderly Leonarda. There seems little directorial intervention, however, to help them bring out the humour of the situation.
The young conductor Vincenzo Milletarì has a tough job matching orchestral tempi with those of the chorus at excitable times, and at other times they can drag. That the piece overall lacks the tautness that Donizetti would exercise in later comic masterpieces my also be a consequence of this being the first modern performance based on a reconstruction from the original, incomplete score, which seems to have added more than 25 minutes to the playing time, now running at two hours 12 minutes.