Given that he was in charge of Prince Esterházy’s opera troupe staging 150 performances a year, it is extraordinary that Joseph Haydn, Esterházy’s Kapellmeister, is not better remembered for his numerous operas. L’infedeltà delusa, a comedic burletta per musica, was composed for the Dowager Princess Esterházy’s name day, the characters in Marco Coltellini’s tale perhaps inspired not by the Hungarian nobility, but those working downstairs and on the estate. The opera was revived for the visit of Empress Maria Theresa who said that if she wanted to hear good opera, she went to Esterháza.
L’infedeltà delusa is a simple Tuscan story of a peasant father Filippo arranging the marriage of his daughter, Sandrina, to a rich farmer, Nencio. Sandrina respects her father but already loves Nanni, a humble gardener, with the whole arrangement thrown upside down as Nanni’s sister, Vespina, is infatuated with Nencio. Director Jamie Manton and the cast have enormous fun unravelling the domestic conundrums in a production packed with zany wit, outrageous disguises and crafty scheming.
Musically, though very much an aria-and-recitative format, there are numerous ensemble pieces to keep a keen interest sharpened. Leverhulme Conducting Fellow Riley Court-Wood encouraged excellent symphonic playing from his medium-sized orchestra, a vividly crisp overture heralding a performance of elegance and nuance, in perfect balance with the five singers, Mark Wigglesworth’s harpsichord continuo providing intelligent shading. Arias ranged from sombre, contemplative and indignantly furious, Court-Wood guiding his musicians splendidly, taking off at an infectious lick when the music turned to dance.
Manton reimagined the plot from rural 18th-century Tuscany to a modern storage unit featuring doll-like characters who come to life in an upside-down world where normal rules cease to apply. If you can imagine what toy dolls get up to if left to their own devices with a dressing-up box, that’s close to the concept. Peiyao Wang designed a simple utilitarian sliding door set and costumed the five singers as blank canvasses in flesh coloured body suits. The characters all move in animatronic gesture, sometimes in unison, sometimes in complicated sequences, initially each brandishing a coloured prop, like a powder blue shovel for Nanni and a bright yellow umbrella for Nencio. Corina Würsch’s fiendish movement plot was brilliantly mastered by all as the characters jumped between natural and stylised form. The production’s biggest design talking point was the five grotesque outsized heads, worn as caricatures and a source of much amusement. Charlie Morgan Jones lit everything stylishly adding atmosphere with judicious use of follow spots.
In a finely sung ensemble, tenors Aidan Thomas Philips, as the gruff father Filippo, and Haydn Cullen, as the well-to-do farmer Nencio, were well matched by Fraser Robinson’s grounded luminous baritone as Nanni and soprano Qi Liu's brightly sung Sandrina, torn between duty to her father and the man she really loves. It is left to Vespina to mastermind the scheming plot playing out in the second act, with Stephanie Wong’s lyric soprano carrying the stage action. Diction was excellent with compulsive storytelling, especially in the recitatives. In the original, Vespina appears in various disguises, but Manton cunningly had her fitting the outlandish series of heads onto her brother Nanni which allowed him to clown and let Wong’s light coloratura shine out in the arias unencumbered by difficult costume. The coughing Old Woman, the German Peasant armed with two plastic steins and then the outrageous Marquis de Ripafratta unravel Vespina’s solution to the amorous tangle with enormous fun. A final scene with the last two heads had Vespina as a notary assisted by Nanni, now disguised as her assistant, draw up a marriage contract as the story finally resolves.
Manton's unconventional staging and interpretation might have become somewhat tiresome, but the madcap ideas were generally well thought through. I liked Sandrina’s large stacked wigs, her wooden framework on castors mimicking dress hoops and her dream house decked in Barbie-pink. As characters stepped in and out of stylised movement, were we looking at toys having a party or adults let loose in the nursery with no boundaries? It was an interesting concept in a production that came together in a well-judged fusion of wonderful music, lively movement and busy stagecraft. A concert performance of L’Infedeltà Delusa might be somewhat dry, but this lively production from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland makes a good case for staging this seldom performed work.
