One Man, Many Playwrights

First published Exeunt Magazine, September 2011

The National Theatre’s current hit show One Man, Two Guvnors is a modernised version by Richard Bean of Carlo Goldoni’s 1745 Il servitore di due padroni (The Servant of Two Masters). Anyone seeing this knockabout farce may feel they’ve witnessed a typical Goldoni play but that’s not the case. To experience true Goldonian comedy it’s necessary to fast-forward to the 1750s and 60s, when his experimentation in form and content produced works that anticipated Pirandello, Brecht and Chekov, rather than Feydeau or Ray Cooney.

Goldoni was born in Venice in 1707. He trained, and spent his early working life, as a lawyer but found himself gradually drawn into the world of theatre, first as an amateur writer and then as the self-styled reformer of Italian comedy. His earliest efforts, some ill-fated tragedies aside, were transcriptions of commedia dell’arte scenarios, which he soon improved with his own ideas. We’re dependent, to a large extent, on his memoirs published in French at the end of his life, for the history of his early days and it’s generally thought that this rambling, picaresque collection of memories is as much a work of fiction as one of his plays. He seemed to have had a knack of reinventing history and painting himself in a better light in the process.

One aspect of the memoirs that is often considered to be imaginary is his claim that he consciously set out to reform theatrical form and practice. It’s difficult to say whether this assertion was retrospective thinking or not but when you trace the rapid development of his style and the distance he travelled in his 45 year writing career, it’s hard to believe it was a purely natural evolution. The commedia dell’arte, a form of rough and bawdy street theatre, had been at its height in the preceding two centuries and by the early 1700s was very much in decline. Over a short period in the 1740s, Goldoni got his actors to stop using masks, to speak words he’d written for them (rather than improvise), and to portray more and more naturalistic and ordinary situations.

The Servant of Two Masters is typical of what he was writing by 1745 and has a lot in common with contemporaneous works like I due gemelli veneziani (The Venetian Twins). By then, he’d got rid of the masks and made the actors learn his lines but he was still hampered by the commedia-based characters and situations. These plays, probably the best-known of his comedies today, depend upon a central conceit – in the first a servant takes on two masters in order to earn two wages and, in the second, one actor plays identical twins. Il servitore allows for a great set piece scene, where the servant has to serve dinner to both of his masters simultaneously without either finding out about the other, and this sort of contrivance is a typical showpiece for the physical skills of his actors. It’s not far from the commedia scenarios they’d been performing for a very long time.

Goldoni was still using similar devices five years later with a lesser-known, but equally ingenious, piece called Il bugiardo (The Liar), where a compulsive liar on the make gets himself into all sorts of scrapes by pretending to be different people (here he’s a nobleman rather than the wily servant of Il servitore). By then he was embarking on a new course, though, with a series of plays that forged ahead into a new naturalism. During the 1750-1 season he wrote La buona figliuola (The Good Girl), not a very good play but one in which gondoliers argued and waited round for their masters outside the theatre and La bottega del caffè (The Coffee Shop), where characters sat around in the street, reflecting the everyday lives of the audience. The stock characters were on the way out and at the beginning of the following season came La locandiera (The Mistress of the Inn, often known in English translation by the name of its heroine, Mirandolina); true Goldonian comedy had begun.

The three earlier plays mentioned – The Servant of Two Masters, The Venetian Twins and The Liar – are peopled by characters drawn from the commedia stereotypes: Arlecchino (or Truffaldino), Pantalone, Brighella, Il Dottore, Columbina and lovers with names likes Lelio, Florindo, Rosaura and Beatrice. With La locandiera and La bottega del caffè, Goldoni dropped the names, although the character types to some extent remained. Mirandolina, a sexy, conniving hotel-owner who plays along with a set of upper-class, would-be lovers, is not so very different from Columbina, and the Count and Marquis who woo her are lusting, toothless old men very like Pantalone. Nevertheless, they are closer to the original characters Goldoni was soon to create than anything he’d written before.

Another fascinating work written in the previous season was, in some respects, even more forward looking. Il teatro comico (The Comic Theatre) not only does away with the comic types, it also gives hints of the extreme naturalism that was to follow, with plot contrivances almost completely dismissed. The play is as much a treatise as a comedy, spelling out Goldoni’s views on theatre in an almost Pirandellian manner. It opens with an argument about whether the curtain should be up or down and goes on to show a troupe of actors in rehearsal. The stock commedia characters do appear, in a play within a play, but what Il teatro comico mainly shows is a group of real people arguing about their profession.

Stanislavski’s illustration of his theories comes to mind in the scenes where the theatre manager explains the craft to a would-be actor (cf the teacher/student relationship in Stanislavski’s books on the art of acting):

ORAZIO: Signor Lelio, who do you think you’re speaking to?

LELIO: But can’t you see I was acting?

ORAZIO: Yes, I understand that, but while you’re acting, who are you speaking to?

LELIO: Well, to myself. I’m making an entrance. It’s a soliloquy.

ORAZIO: And when you speak to yourself do you say “I’ve been to see my beloved”? A man on his own doesn’t speak like that. Instead it seems as if you’ve come on the stage to tell someone where you’ve been.

LELIO: Alright, then, I was addressing the audience.

ORAZIO: Just as I thought. Don’t you understand that you simply can’t speak to the audience? When an actor’s alone on the stage he supposes that he can’t be seen or heard. Speaking to the audience is an unbearable habit, and it should never be allowed.

And there’s something of Hamlet’s advice to the players when the same character tutors an aspiring actress:

ORAZIO: As a beginner you’re acceptable. Your voice isn’t strong, but you will acquire that over time. Make sure you stress the final syllables so that you can be understood. Speak slowly, but not too much, and in the emotional parts you must build your voice and speed-up the words more than usual. Be careful, above all, not to sing the text or declaim, but speak your words naturally as in everyday life. Drama is an imitation of nature, and you should show only what’s believable. As for gestures, they should also be natural. Move your hands according to the sense of the words.

Goldoni is here laying out his manifesto for a new theatre and style of acting. He was to follow those extraordinary scenes a few years later with Il campiello (1756), moving into a completely new sphere by giving a slice-of-life commentary on contemporary society. A campiello is a small square, many of which can still be seen all over Venice, and the play describes a day in the life of the folk who live and work there. It shows the comings and goings, arguments and flirtations that held a mirror up to the audience, with no machinations, coincidences or mistaken identities. It’s highly structured but, with minimal plot and the focus on character, it gives the impression of a camera pointed at the square for 12 hours and left to run its course. The original Italian (actually Venetian dialect and in verse) has a great poetic beauty, with language used like musical themes.

La guerra (The Battlefield) of 1760 can scarcely be considered a comedy. Its subject is war and, while Goldoni never went in fully for satire or social criticism, it has a clear anti-war message. He had witnessed a battle at first hand and was sickened by the destruction and killing. What is most striking about La guerra now is the very close similarity of two of the characters to Brecht’s Mother Courage and it’s hard to believe that the later playwright didn’t know Goldoni’s work (there were certainly German translations of the play available). The quartermaster Polidoro and canteen woman Orsolina (who follows the army dragging her cart of wares) talk exactly like Brecht’s character:

POLIDORO: War is a marvelous thing. I always speak well of it. There’s no danger of me voting for peace. You could say I’m like the hangman’s wife who prayed to heaven to provide her husband with plenty of customers.

ORSOLINA: Oh yes, God bless and preserve the war and let it never end.

Like Mother Courage, their venality overcomes any personal loss they suffer through their trade (Orsolina has already lost her husband to the war) and one can’t help feeling that Goldoni, like Brecht, was warning his audience against perpetuating war for personal interests.

On a much more domestic level, Goldoni wrote La casa nova (The New House) during the same year. It has a similarly natural feel to Il campiello, as a family move into a new and better residence and show all the aspirations and desires of a bourgeois family, with the inevitable love stories thrown in (there isn’t a Goldoni play that doesn't have love at its heart). With La villeggiatura of 1761, we see Goldoni at his most Chekovian. Slice of life reality had become the norm by now and with this wonderful trilogy, which describes the fashionable summer outing to the countryside beloved of the upper classes, he introduces a poetic wistfulness that is truly moving. He followed it a year later with Le baruffe chiozzotte (The Chioggian Squabbles), written in Venetian dialect , which chronicles the ebb and flow of disputes between ordinary fishing folk while a Goldoni-like lawyer observes with affectionate amusement.

Towards the end of his career, we see Goldoni making a slight return to coincidence and misunderstanding as plot-drivers. This could be seen as a decline in his powers or could also be interpreted as something akin to Ibsen’s yearning for the poetic expression of his youth in his final plays. Il ventaglio (The Fan) of 1765 does show a dependence on contrivance but is a wonderfully mature and satisfying work that brings together many elements of a lifetime’s craft. He spent the last 30 years of his life in self-imposed exile in Paris, writing his final plays in French. His penultimate play Le bourru bienfaisant (The Beneficent Bear), 1771, fulfilled his wish of being performed at La Comédie-Française, home of his beloved Moliere. It’s set in a Parisian chateau and describes a domestic situation like so many others he’d created. The central character, Monsieur Geronte could be from an earlier play, with much of the action stemming from his strong personality trait, a quick temper that belies his true nature. He’s a loveable grumpy old man who flies off the handle at the slightest provocation but has the best interest of his loved ones very much at heart. While this return to a comedy of “types” might seem retrogressive, its apparent naivety rather adds to the play’s charm.

There’s dispute among Goldoni commentators as to how many works he actually wrote during his long life (it could be as many as 400) but none that the quality varies enormously. Even when he’d reached maturity as a playwright, he was capable of churning out poor work, maybe inevitable given his level of output and the fact that he was constantly working to deadlines. This brief survey can only mention a few of the extant plays but, hopefully, gives a taste of the great range of his work. It’s unfortunate that Goldoni is known in this country for just a few plays, and ones that don’t represent his full achievement. The Servant of Two Masters and The Venetian Twins will always be popular as they are great fun works but they are immature and tell us more about the outdated traditions that Goldoni was leaving behind, while an exploration of the later plays opens up a wealth of mature dramatic expression.

Goldoni and Opera

First published whatsonstage.com, February 2009

Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) was a prolific opera librettist and is often credited with developing opera buffa as a genre. It’s an area of his work that is worthy of study but here we take a look at operas based on plays by the Italian playwright, most of which were written in a much later period.

GOLDONI AND GOZZI

Goldoni’s great rival, during the time he was living and working in Venice, was Count Carlo Gozzi and their operatic legacies make for interesting comparison. Gozzi, forgotten as a playwright, is best remembered now for inspiring two enduring operas: Puccini’s final work Turandot and Prokofiev’s The Love of Three Oranges. They may not be among the most-often performed operas but they’re far more prominent than any of those based on Goldoni plays, which is ironic considering the standing of both men as dramatists.

Gozzi was a backward-looking playwright, who sought to hang on to the outdated traditions of the commedia dell’Arte, writing fanciful fairy tales with the old stock characters (lovers of the Puccini in particular may not fully recognise Turandot in its original form). Goldoni forged a new naturalistic style of comedy, which saw the actors speaking words written for them, instead of improvising and using masks. It says something about the differences between theatre and opera that Gozzi has only been rescued from complete obscurity through operas based on his work while Goldoni is fondly thought of now as one of the great dramatists of his era.

As a librettist, Goldoni worked with some of the foremost composers of his day – Haydn and Vivaldi among them– but also with many who are now forgotten (Piccinni, Galuppi, Latilla and Fischietti), explaining in part why he hasn’t survived as an opera writer. Of those composers, contemporary and later, who took inspiration from his plays – Salieri, Wolf-Ferrari, Martinu - none are considered in the front rank of their profession (although I suspect and hope that Martinu’s day will come).

GOLDONI AND MOZART

And then, of course, there was Mozart. Goldoni didn’t work directly with him but the 12 year old genius used one of his plays for La Finta Semplice. Like all of Mozart’s works written as a child, it is astonishingly precocious, a breezy, tuneful waft through a story that reads as more Marivauxesque than Goldonian.

It has also been suggested that Goldoni’s Don Juan was a major influence on Mozart’s own Don Giovanni. Those familiar with Mozart’s masterpiece will recognise Goldoni’s plot, although the autobiographical element that Goldoni wickedly put into the Masetto/Zerlina characters (called Carino and Elisa in his version) would be lost on most. Forever, drawing on his own life for inspiration, Goldoni cast himself as the put-upon peasant, who is double-crossed by his rustic love, in revenge for a real-life betrayal by the very actress he made play the part. It was a colourful incident in an eventful life.

In Goldoni’s Don Juan, written very early in his career, the Donna Elvira character (here called Isabella) pursues the Don, as she does in Mozart and Da Ponte’s version but in male attire. There’s a nice comic touch, in a work that is largely serious, with her disguise taking in virtually no-one; the convention may be that a cross-dressed character fools all those around them but here they all recognise her as a woman from first meeting.

SALIERI: LA LOCANDIERA

The first of the extant adaptations of a Goldoni play to an opera was Antonio Salieri’s La locandiera (1773), based on the play of the same name written 20 years earlier. It comes from Goldoni’s middle period, by which time he had pulled theatre away from the direct influence of commedia and was starting to write full-blooded creations from his own imagination. Salieri’s opera was very popular for a few years and then fell into obscurity until revived in 1989 by Teatro Rossini in Emilia Romagna, in the wake of renewed interest in the composer’s work aroused by Peter Shaffer’s play (and subsequent film) Amadeus.

It follows Goldoni’s play quite faithfully (despite the insertion of one new character and the excision of the two actresses, scenes that are often cut even when the original play is produced). It’s a pleasant work by the 23 year old Salieri although not particularly inspired and, as we’ve come to expect from the two composers, it can’t musically hold a candle to Mozart’s juvenilia. To the best of my knowledge, it hasn’t been produced outside Italy (something it has in common with most of Goldoni’s comedies).

MARTINU: MIRANDOLINA

The same play was turned into an opera some two centuries later by Bohuslav Martinu, the title taken from the name of the leading character: Mirandolina (several English translations of the play do the same thing). Martinu makes a much better job of the story than Salieri did, with a delightfully light score that resembles his symphonic output maybe more than any other of his operas. At just 100 minutes, it moves at great speed, unlike Salieri’s slightly plodding version (half an hour longer although it handles less dramatic material). Martinu retains the actress scenes.

Although the score sounds more middle than southern European, the lively Saltarello, which preludes the third act is based on the same dance that Mendelssohn used in the final movement of his fourth (“Italian”) symphony. It stands alone as a short orchestral piece that has been performed in concert programmes (it was recorded by Vaclav Neumann and can be found on the disc of extracts from Martinu’s stage works re-released a few years ago).

Martinu does allow things to drag a little in the third act, with too much repetition and commenting on the action from the peripheral characters but it is nevertheless a splendid work, far too little known (like so many of the composer’s compositions) this side of the former Iron Curtain. It was given a production at the Wexford Festival in 2002 and a good recording exists of the performance on Supraphon.

WOLF-FERRARI

The most prolific adaptor of Goldoni plays was the early 20th Century Italian/German Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari. In total, he wrote five operas based on the plays: Le donne curiose (1903), I Quattro Rusteghi (1906), Gli amanti sposi (1916), La vedova scaltra (1931) and Il Campiello (1936). Two of these were based on Goldoni’s early commedia - based plays and the others stem from his much more fruitful later naturalistic period.

To my mind, Wolf-Ferrari does much greater justice to the later plays, as they suit operatic convention more readily. The repetition and lingering nature of opera brings depth to the characterizations, whereas the fast and physical aspects of commedia (not qualities easily attributable to opera performance) get lost in La vedova scaltra, which makes rather a hash of the play’s knockabout origins.

There have been several attempts to incorporate commedia style and tradition into opera – most obviously in Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos and Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci - with varying degrees of success. Strauss’ treatment succeeds to some extent in capturing the quicksilver feel of the stock characters of Arlecchino, Brighella and Zerbinetta (a variant of Columbina) but Wolf-Ferrari’s does not, dragging everything down to a leaden level.

Which is not to say that La vedova scaltra is not tuneful and enjoyable in its way but Il Campiello and I Quattro Rusteghi work much better. The former is perhaps the best of all the adaptations of Goldoni plays, with a fidelity to the original and a score of great beauty that make it an utterly delightful work.

IL CAMPIELLO

Il Campiello (1756) comes from Goldoni’s great naturalistic period and it describes the comings and goings in a small square in Venice. The lower orders bicker and fight, while the fading aristocracy look on with amusement, and such is the reality and naturalness of Goldoni’s observation of everyday life that its dramatic structure could be considered uneventful and even boring. It was an extraordinary development for a playwright with such stylized beginnings.

Wolf-Ferrari injects a degree of drama and exuberance, with a whirling central ballet section, but the whole opera still veers towards fly-on-the wall reality. For those wanting blood, guts and sensation, it may, like Gustave Charpentier’s Louise (1900) where the characters spend several minutes eating soup, prove just too ordinary. For those content with utter truthfulness expressed through a gorgeously lyrical score, it’s one opera that is long overdue for greater exposure.

I QUATTRO RUSTEGHI

I Quattro Rusteghi (1760) comes from a similar period in Goldoni’s output and is another of his finest comedies. The conceit is a collection of four boorish old men (the irascible old man is a standard character from drama of the period but Goldoni with characteristic flair gives us a whole bunch of them) who do what they can to interrupt the love lives of their young folk.

It is a melodious work but, like La vedova scaltra is over-long at about 140 minutes, the material outstaying its welcome. Here Il Campiello scores again, running for an ideal length of just 100 minutes. Goldoni never over-exploits his situations and one failing of the opera versions is this tendency to stretch slight resources too thin.

Gli amanti sposi is based on another of Goldoni’s very best plays, Il Ventaglio (The Fan), written in Italian while he was exiled in Paris, where he lived out his artistically-strained final 25 years. Le donne curiose is another early work, employing the stock characters of Pantalone, Arlecchino etc but adding en element of Goldonian uniqueness by dipping into the playwright’s personal experience of freemasonry.

If Goldoni was a great playwright, a view I’d certainly back, the operas inspired by his works are not at the forefront of popular repertoire (as much could be said of course for Hamlet and King Lear). They are well worth the effort of digging around a bit to find them, though. Recordings exist of most of the works discussed, although live performances are rare indeed. If any ever come your way, you’re urged to grab the opportunity.