Following successful productions of three Restoration comedies by Mary Pix last summer, Wilton’s Music Hall was the venue for a lively performance of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s intermezzo La Serva Padrona this February. Insieme (a group of singers and instrumentalists) and the Creative Team of Wilton’s Music Hall recreated Marylebone’s Pleasure Garden within the cavernous shoebox-shaped space of Wilton’s, to perform Pergolesi’s popular comic opera. La Serva Padrona’s London premiere, in Italian, took place at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, in 1750. An English adaptation by Stephen Storace senior and James Oswald was performed at Marylebone Gardens in 1759. The opera enjoyed particular success in its outdoor performances.
At Wilton’s strings of sparkling lights rose above the audience to a centre point in the ceiling, reproducing the effect of the ‘thousand golden lamps, that emulate the noon-day sun’ in Tobias Smollett’s description of Ranelagh Gardens in Humphry Clinker. Foliage was hung around the slender columns that support the gallery in the auditorium, to reproduce the effect of the honeysuckle-covered tea arbours. Members of the audience were accosted on arrival by a collection of Commedia dell’arte characters – as appropriate to Italian opera buffa of the period – somersaulting, juggling up and down the aisles, and whistling to the gallery. A nimble Arlecchino (Harlequin: Connor Byrne) demonstrated his acrobatic skills, at one moment executing a double somersault with Brighella (Jacob Bettinelli) and picking up Columbina (Laura Monaghan) on the way. Brighella sported a half mask with beak-like nose, and Columbina danced to the virtuoso recorder playing of Arlecchina (Caoimhe de Paor). One audience member was offered a love potion, and I was given a moustache attached to a cocktail stick.
La Serva Padrona was written for the birthday celebrations of the Hapsburg Empress Elisabeth Christina, consort of Charles VI, and was first performed in Naples in 1733 between the acts of Pergolesi’s opera seria, Il Prigioniero Superbo. This early opera buffa became very popular throughout Europe, and sparked a pamphlet and newspaper war in Paris, the Querelle des Bouffons, which pitted the new genre of Italian opera buffa against the rule-bound French grand opera of Lully and Rameau and strict performing practices at the Opéra, a symbol of the absolute monarchy. The war became bound up in politics, with the Encyclopedists and Philosophes supporting the Italian comic style. La Serva Padrona influenced Rousseau’s Le devin du village (1752) and inspired English versions such as Bickerstaffe and Dibdin’s The Maid the Mistress (1770), which treats the subject of a maidservant marrying her master, and Bickerstaff and Arnold’s Maid of the Mill (1765; a musical treatment of Richardson’s Pamela of 1740).
La Serva Padrona was first performed in London as comic interludes between the acts of Pergolesi’s opera seria, Adriano in Syria. A 1755 performance at the Little Haymarket Theatre, between the first and second part of a concert of vocal and instrumental music, provided further inspiration for the performance at Wilton’s, with its feast of music before and between the two intermezzi that make up the opera.
The space of Wilton’s was used to maximum effect for a diverse selection of music familiar to eighteenth-century audiences. Caoimhe de Paor stood in the aisle to deliver virtuosic performances of recorder works, including Jacob van Eyck’s variations on ‘What shall we do this Evening’. The official ‘Evening’s Entertainment’ began agreeably with two popular Handel arias sung by tenor Thomas Lowe, ‘a famous singer’ (as performed by Brian Parsons). These were ‘Ombra mai fu’ from Serse and ‘Where’er you walk’ from Semele. Lighter fare was delivered by a group of characters laughing and chatting as they assembled on the stage to sing ‘Early one morning’ accompanied by violin and recorder. Then ‘On Richmond Hill’ was heard from the gallery, accompanied by recorder.
The Prologue was delivered by Director Johanna Byrne, who was to play the non-speaking, non-singing role of Vespone, the servant (although the character is recorded in the programme as being played by Alfred Hitchcock, who made fleeting appearances in his own films). This Prologue, which appears in Ricordi’s 1955 edition with English translation, told of the successful history of the opera, and anticipated the plot in which a female servant uses her cunning to induce her master to marry her. Byrne promised that, although we would see her again, she would ‘not say another word’. True to this promise, she appeared as submissive male servant, Vespone, later disguised as a moustachioed and belligerent soldier waving his sword at a cowering but jealous Uberto (Joe Corbettt, bass-baritone), in a scheme of Serpina’s (her name means ‘little snake’) to precipitate Uberto’s proposal of marriage. Finally Byrne donned the gown of a priest to marry Serpina (Eleanor Hemmens, soprano) and Uberto. Throughout the two acts of the opera, Vespone busied himself with dusting and sweeping, hanging out washing and watering flowers, providing variously a target for abuse from the two protagonists, and a humorous distraction from the emotional combat occurring between the two.
The stage comprised two levels, without proscenium arch or curtains. The set was thus visible from the moment the audience entered the theatre. The upper stage represented Uberto’s library, with desk, bookshelves, pictures on the walls and a screen at the left side. On the lower stage were some window boxes and male underwear hanging on a washing line. The accompaniment was capably provided by a string quartet, located below the right side of the stage, with a bewigged Clare Clements directing from the harpsichord. The violins were often in unison and the violas doubled the bass line, creating a lean two-part texture to accompany the singers.
The opera employs only two singing roles, wily servant Serpina, soprano prima donna, and her long-suffering master Uberto, bass-baritone primo buffo, as was the pattern in the emerging new form of comic opera. Acting skills were at least as important as singing skills, and Insieme’s soloists were gifted in both areas. Serpina’s combination of bullying, audacity, and fake compliance were convincingly portrayed both in Pergolesi’s arias for Serpina and in Hemmen’s acting and singing. The aria ‘A Serpina penserete’ (‘Your Serpina you will remember’) particularly conveys Serpina’s manipulative nature, as it alternates lyrical larghetto passages in which she coaxes Uberto, with spiky allegro bars in 3/8 time, where she assesses the progress of her plot. As Uberto queries his feelings for Serpina, his aria ‘Son imbrogliato io già’ juxtaposes wide-ranging and insistent quavers with pensive semibreves and minims.
After the opera, we were treated to a performance of Caccini’s song Amarylli sung by Jacob Bettinelli, who was also Uberto’s understudy. Audience participation was required at the end, as we sang a round ‘Tis men that makes us love’, at a gradually increasing speed that reflected the final words ‘And drinking makes us mad’. Insieme had given us a very enjoyable eighteenth-century experience within the walls of a nineteenth-century music hall.
La Serva Padrona was performed at Wilton’s Music Hall from February 3rd to February 8th 2015.