Il cappello di paglia di Firenze

Il cappello di paglia di Firenze
Wexford Festival Opera
***

Nino Rota (1911-1979) was a hugely successful composer of film scores. He worked with the likes of Fellini, Visconti, and Zeffirelli and wrote the music for the first two parts of Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather trilogy.

His film music overshadows the fact that he started out as a 20th-century child prodigy. He completed his first opera in 1926, when he was still only in his mid-teens, and he wrote concert music throughout his life.

The best-known of his 10 operas, Il cappello di paglia di Firenze (The Florentine Straw Hat), a farsa musicale that he began in the mid-1940s, was first seen in Palermo in 1955. It's an adaptation of Eugène Labiche and Marc-Michel's 1851 French farce, Un chapeau de paille d'Italie, which had been filmed in the silent era.

The plot is, well, farcical. On the morning Fadinard is getting married, his horse eats a straw hat belonging to a woman out to meet her lover, a military man. The wedding guests all traipse after Fadinard on his quest for a replacement, a quest full of cross-purpose encounters, mistaken identities and increasing inebriation. The score is unashamed pastiche, a nostalgic 1950s immersion in the world of 19th-century operatic comedy, with copious clever references to historic musical styles, and a swathe of quotations in Rota's favoured
self-referential manner.

The trouble is that Rota doesn’t know when enough is enough. The music is tuneful and breezy (the few arresting moments in a minor key come as a great relief), and it is orchestrated with mid-20th-century resourcefulness. It’s incredibly short-breathed, yet many of the numbers still go on too long, as if the musical ideas were a recurrent tic that Rota couldn’t control.

The trouble with the new Wexford Festival Opera production, directed by Andrea Cigni and designed by Lorenzo Cutùli, is that the 1950s updating – the set is a postcard of Paris, surrounded by contemporary posters – is even twitchier than the music itself. Anything that can be wiggled, waved or wobbled – a hand, a head, a leg, a bum – is wiggled, waved and wobbled in time to the music. And the idea of having people enter and exit awkwardly through trapdoors in the postcard should have been ditched.

The performance under conductor Sergio Alaponte is energetic, Eleanor Lyons’s Anaide, Asude Karayavuz’s Baronessa di Champigny and Claudia Boyle’s Elena standing out among the women, and Filippo Fontana’s Beaupertuis among the men. Until November 1