Il Turco in Italia
Royal Opera, in rep until 19 April
Commentators on Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia tend to take a defensive line, comparing its absence from the repertoire for many decades with that of Così fan tutte, and even comparing the two works directly, as well as pointing out that Mozart’s great opera was playing in Milan at the time that Rossini was composing Turco. And Gregory Dart, in his essay in the programme of the Royal Opera’s production, first seen in 2005 and now revived for the first time, quotes Stendhal, a passionate admirer of both composers, writing that ‘Rossini is always amusing, Mozart never; Mozart is like a mistress who is always serious and often sad, but whose very sadness is a fascination, discovering ever deeper springs of love’. One can wholeheartedly agree with that second sentence, while being astonished at the falsity of the first. If it’s not simple slapstick that you want — and Die Zauberflöte will provide some of that — where are there more amusing things than the Count’s unveiling of Cherubino in Act I of Figaro, or Susanna’s pert stepping forth from the closet in Act II? It’s hard to credit that Stendhal, supreme master of shades of irony and of some comedy, could have been so crass, less hard to credit that many writers on opera have followed him.
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Così is of course a special case, in that once one has penetrated its superficial comic effects — the ‘Albanians’, Despina’s disguises — it makes you wince at least as much as you smile, yet the wincing and smiling are inextricable.
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