Download Nina: Synopsis

Nina: Synopsis
As we learn from Susanna's account in the course of Act I, Nina's unhappy state is the result of
the Count's misplaced ambition for his daughter's marriage. Nina had fallen in love with Lindoro, a
match at first approved of by her father. When a wealthier rival presented himself, however, the
Count quickly changed his mind; Lindoro was dismissed and Nina's pleadings were to no avail.
Hoping to see her one last time, Lindoro encountered his rival and was mortally wounded in a
duel. The experience had a traumatic effect on Nina: she lost her reason and no longer
recognises her father or friends. Yet she clings to the expectation that Lindoro will return to her,
and waits daily for him at the garden gate.
Act I
In a sanatorium, staff and patients comment on the tragic fate of Nina. Her governess, Susanna,
appointed by her distraught father to watch over her, is deeply upset by the experience but the
Count's valet, Giorgio, is ever optimistic. Susanna relates the circumstances which brought about
Nina's illness. The Count is full of his own woes and rejection by his daughter, but also realises
that he is entirely to blame; Giorgio tries to cheer him.
Nina waits in the garden, and sings of her solitude and unhappiness as she waits for Lindoro to
return. She fails to remember Susanna's name, and dispenses gifts to the women. They comfort
her by singing a song to Lindoro. The Count approaches, unable to keep away, but Nina
imagines that he is a stranger. Her increasing misery is alleviated by the rustic song of a
musician, accompanied on the bagpipes. Susanna attempts to persuade her to leave her vigil and
go inside. Reluctantly, Nina agrees. Susanna, the musician, and the Count comment on Nina's
and their own distress.
Act II
Susanna sings of her devotion to Nina. Giorgio, quite breathless, arrives to announce to the
Count the amazing appearance of Lindoro in the grounds. Against all odds, his wounds from the
duel have been cured, and he is attempting to see Nina again. The repentant Count greets
Lindoro as his son, but warns him of Nina's illness, and advises caution in approaching her.
Alone, Lindoro meditates on his love, before leaving to await the Count's signal. The company,
hearing of Lindoro's return, try to hint to Nina that she should make herself ready for him.
Suddenly she encounters him but convinces herself that he is also a stranger. Lindoro adopts the
role of a friend, and cautiously tells of his love. Unaware of his true identity, Nina is enraptured by
his 'knowledge' of her love affair and, without realising it, projects her affections onto him. Finding
new contentment, she begins to recognise the familiar faces around her; true awareness of
Lindoro's presence soon follows and the two rejoice in their rediscovered love.
Nina, o sia La pazza per amore
Commedia in prosa ed in verso per musica in one act by Giovanni Paisiello to a libretto by
Giambattista Lorenzi after Giuseppe Carpani’s translation of Benoît-Joseph Marsollier des
Vivetières’ Nina, ou La folle par amour.
The sentimental story of the girl sent mad by love had already been intensely cultivated during
the previous decades. The French librettist Marsollier des Vivetières apparently made use of a
true story which had become the basis for ‘La nouvelle Clémentine’ in F.T.M. Baculard d’Arnaud’s
Délassements de l’homme sensible, 1783, and which had perhaps been available to Laurence
Sterne for his figure of Maria de Moulines in Tristam Shandy, 1760-67 and A Sentimental
Journey, 1768. The French libretto was used for a successful one-act opéra comique by NicolasMarie Dalayrac, given at the Comédie-Italienne in Paris in May 1786. Dalayrac’s success was
repeated, in translations, in London and in Hamburg, both in 1787, and remained popular in Paris
until the mid-19th century. Marsollier des Vivetières’ libretto was translated into Italian by
Giuseppe Carpani, later famed for his biographies of Haydn and Rossini, and further additions by
one of the great masters of Neapolitan comic opera, Giambattista Lorenzi, resulted in the text
used by Paisiello for the first version of Nina at the Royal Palace of Caserta in 1789. Both Lorenzi
and Paisiello further developed the piece into a two-act version given at the Teatro dei Fiorentini,
Naples, in 1790. A third version substituted sung recitatives (the music probably not by Paisiello)
for the spoken dialogue, and was performed at Parma during the Carnival of 1793 and at the
Fiorentini in 1795.
The success of Nina was considerable. It was taken up by most of the significant theatres in Italy,
remaining popular until 1845, performed often by the finest singers such as Rossini’s sometime
wife, Isabella Colbran, and Giuditta Pasta, probably the greatest soprano of her day. Da Ponte
reworked the text and Joseph Weigl added new music for a Vienna production in 1790, and in
Paris in 1791 Cherubini supplied recitatives and an aria. Translations were given in Mannheim,
Prague, St Petersburg, Warsaw and London (1825).
'The greatest composer there is:
Paisiello'
[remark attributed to Napoleon]
by Michael F. Robinson
Imagine for one second that you are back in the 1790s among a group of knowledgeable musical
connoisseurs. 'Which contemporary composers' you ask them, 'have the greatest appeal among
the public?' It is unlikely that any of your respondents puts Mozart on the list. Some, thinking of
recent developments in the symphony, may mention Joseph Haydn. But an equal number will opt
without hesitation for Giovanni Paisiello. It is a fact that during the 1780s and 1790s few
composers could claim greater popularity with musical society than could Paisiello.
By any standard, Paisiello's life story was one of outstanding success. At the time he wrote Nina
o sia La pazza per amore in the summer of 1789 (when he was 49), he already had seventy
operas to his credit. Endowed with a fine sense of melody and colour, and a sense of dynamic
rhythm that drives his music forward page after page, he created compositions that exactly
mirrored what society of the time regarded as 'good' music. It was progressive, yet not overexacting or difficult on the ear. This explains, on the one hand, why the number of performances
of his operas surpassed that of virtually any other composer, and, on the other, why he was the
favourite composer of many of Europe's rulers. He was much admired by the Empress Catherine
of Russia, whom he served for eight years between 1776 and 1784, and by Ferdinand, King of
the Two Sicilies, who in 1785 gave him a special, and sizeable, pension to induce him to settle in
Naples and not to serve another prince anywhere else. Napoleon esteemed Paisiello's music
highly later called the composer to Paris to become his maître de chapelle.
Nina was the result of a special commission from King Ferdinand. The King liked to spend much
of his time at his palace of Caserta, where he indulged in his favourite pursuit of hunting. Feeling
the need to show the world that he was also an Enlightened monarch, he took an interest in the
adjacent village of San Leucio and decided to turn it into a model community of silk
manufacturers with its own code of practice and constitution. By the summer of 1789 the
community had been established. On 25th June, at what might be described as an official
opening ceremony, the King invited 240 special guests to visit the silk mills. That evening he
entertained them with Paisiello's opera (in a specially constructed theatre in the garden) and with
a gala dinner and ball. The prima donna was Celeste Coltellini, and the evening was a triumph.
The first version of Nina has several unusual features. Instead of being in the usual two- or threeact format, it is in one act designed to run without a break. Furthermore it has spoken dialogue in
between the ensembles and arias instead of recitative. The reason for this is that it is modelled on
a French opéra comique called Nina, ou la folle par amour first performed in Paris in 1786 with
words by Benoît Joseph Marsollier and music by Nicholas Dalayrac. French comic opera, unlike
Italian, characteristically had spoken dialogue between the lyrical items. The question remains
why the subject should have been chosen for Paisiello. It is not a 'comedy of manners' as most
Italian comic operas of the period are. It is a highly charged, sentimental comedy, borrowing
motives from contemporary French larmoyants novels, in which the heroine, made insane by the
reported death of her lover, mopes from the start through to the finale when he is restored to her.
We can only conjecture that the subject may have appealed not merely because of its
sentimentality but also because it is set in pastoral surroundings, matching to some extent the
rusticity of the Caserta countryside. The composer's use of a rustic instrument called a zampogna
at one point hints at the 'back to nature' primitiveness of the rural setting.
As happened in the case of other Paisiello operas that were deemed successful and had
acquired a degree of publicity, theatre managers throughout Italy and abroad were soon trying to
get their hands on scores of Nina. The first public theatre to perform it was the Fiorentini Theatre
in Naples, where it went into production in the autumn of 1790. The printed libretto for that
production makes it clear that the opera was thought too long to be performed without a break, so
it was split into two halves. To provide a satisfactory finish to Part One, Paisiello added a new
ensemble. He also added a shepherd's song just before the new ensemble, and an extra aria for
Giorgio early in Part Two. It is this version of the opera that became the basis of the most
subsequent productions in other theatres.
The point to emphasise here is that once the opera had left the composer's hands, he was no
longer able to control its destiny. There were no internationally accepted copyright laws, so
singers and impresarios could treat the work how they wished. Scattered throughout European
and American libraries there are at least sixty manuscript scores of the work, many containing
insertions, substitutions, or other corrections to the music, corresponding to particular productions
during the 1790s or 1800s. With none of these did Paisiello apparently have anything to do. It is
becoming clear that the earliest productions tended to preserve the spoken dialogue, although
this was a feature which devotees of Italian opera were unaccustomed to. But Italian singers
seem to have been unhappy with the situation. The point was best put in the preface to the
libretto of the 1795 production in Naples, where it is stated that the opera was now to be sung
throughout (i.e. with recitatives replacing the dialogue). 'It was intended', the preface continues,
'to revive the opera as it had been performed in 1790. But limitations of time have prevented the
present cast learning to recite the prose with that degree of expertise that can only come with
much rehearsal'. In short, many Italian singers did not like mixing speech with song.
In many instances therefore Nina became an opera with conventional recitative. This recitative,
opera goers should note, is never by Paisiello. The earliest production in Italy that was sung
throughout appears to be the one at the court theatre in Parma in carnival time 1794. This is the
version upon which tonight's performance is based. It also seems to have been the basis of the
first ever production of the opera in England. This occurred at the Haymarket Theatre in April
1797, when the famous soprano Brigida Banti led the cast in the title rôle. We possess no musical
source associated directly with these English performances, but since the printed text is so close
to the text used at Parma, we may assume that Parma provided the material for London.
Tonight's performance therefore is not exactly according to the composer's intention, but it does
follow a pattern of performances that reaches back to his times.
By the 1820s the composer's star had waned and his operas had fallen out of the repertory. He
himself died in 1816. So if you could go back in time not to the 1790s but thirty years later and
ask the same question of your musical cognoscenti, you would hear not the name of Paisiello but,
above all, of Rossini. And Mozart's name might be beginning to crop up too. For all that, an
affection lingered on, especially in Italy, for particular items in Paisiello's best operas, Nina to the
fore among them. Mainly because Paisiello achieves in Nina a particular simplicity of melodic line
that is apt for expressing feelings of tenderness and sincerity, its music can be very touching.
Particularly for this reason it deserves more revivals than it receives in the present age.
(Michael Robinson is the author of Giovanni Paisiello: a Thematic Catalogue of his Works, and
Naples and Neapolitan Opera)