This handsome, useful score appears as the scholarly affidavit, as it were, for a 2009 production of L’isola disabitata mounted by La Compañía del Príncipe and produced by Música Antigua Aranjuez (MAA; <www.musicaantiguaaranjuez.com>). In the late spring and early summer of every year since 1994, MAA has produced a series of concerts featuring leading Spanish and international early-music artists in the palaces, gardens and historic spaces of Aranjuez, about an hour south of Madrid, one of the sitios reales (royal sites) to which the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spanish monarchs regularly repaired. Apart from the edition, MAA have issued a recording (directed by Pablo Heras-Casado; MAA 009, 2013); there is also apparently a documentary about the revival of the piece (a trailer appears on YouTube at <www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgATdQzN61c> (24 March 2015)).
To give some sense of the late baroque heyday that was Aranjuez in the mid-eighteenth century, editor Juan Pablo Fernández-Cortés refers us to the paintings of Francesco Battaglioli (an example from the Museo del Prado may be viewed at <www.museodelprado.es/enciclopedia/enciclopedia-on-line/voz/battaglioli-francesco> (24 March 2015)) and to the Fiestas reales, a sort of documentary coffee-table book produced by Farinelli during his tenure as music director extraordinaire for the Borbón courts in Spain, and reproduced in facsimile by Turner Libros of Madrid in 1991. The setting is still lavish; Aranjuez is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Not only are the fine baroque, neoclassical and rococo buildings and open spaces preserved, but so are the royal gardens. Trees planted in the reign of King Fernando VI cast their shade over an impressive earthworks project that diverted the river Tajo into an artificial lake, explicitly so that the Borbón monarchs could mount mock naval battles on it several hundred miles from the sea.
Amid the carefully tended ghosts of such extravagance, the 2009 production of L’isola disabitata stood out for its attention to detail and its historical fidelity. As Fernández-Cortés informs us in his Introduction, engagingly written in Spanish, the poem was requested in early 1753 by Farinelli of his dear friend and ‘gemmello’ (twin), Metastasio, as a special recognition of the 30 May name day of Fernando VI, and to inaugurate a newly constructed small theatre in the Palacio Real at Aranjuez. After duly negotiating with his masters for permission, Metastasio obliged with his first work produced for a non-Viennese court in twenty-two years.
In one act it tells the story of a pair of sisters, Costanza and Silvia, abandoned on a desert island and there discovered years later by Gernando, husband of the elder sister. It turns out that he had not abandoned them but had been abducted by pirates, for which he is promptly forgiven by his wife; while Silvia, who has grown up without ever seeing a man, falls spontaneously in love with what she calls ‘il amabile oggetto’, Gernando's companion Enrico. Despite a vanishing slightness charged with pretty hoary cultural resonances, this little tale has a certain freshness thanks both to Metastasio's peerless verse and to his ability to give the actor-singers scope to develop their characters. Metastasio was to refer to it in a later letter to Farinelli as ‘the least imperfect of all my works’ (translated by Charles Burney in Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Abate Metastasio, three volumes (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1796), volume 2, 51).
The Neapolitan Giuseppe Bonno, by 1753 a fellow courtier of Metastasio's in Vienna, seems to have been approached rather late in the game, and to have produced his music very quickly indeed. It too has an unassuming freshness, meeting effortlessly the precise stylistic and prosodic requirements of the poetry, and providing those actor-singers with yet another dimension in which to explore pathos, outrage, awakening love, doubt and so on. In the event, the piece was a success with the Spanish monarchs. Metastasio received from them a precious tobacco-box full of gold, and Bonno a ‘chocolate pastry filled with a hundred doubloons’ (Farinelli, Fiestas reales, 101).
The transnational figure of Bonno provides a prime example of the mid-century ‘Italian invasion’ that took all Europe by storm. He is certainly in need of more sustained scholarly attention than he has yet received; for this reason alone, this is a welcome addition to music libraries. Yet curiously, it is not the first recent edition of Bonno's L’isola to come out of Spanish territory. L’isola disabitata: Aranjuez, Teatro Real, 1753, edited by Juan Bautista Otero, Isidro Olmo Castillo and Dani Buch Barris, appeared in Barcelona in 2012 (RCOC Editorial, Real Companyia Opera de Cambra. Biblioteca de Farinelli, volume 3).
Fernández-Cortés, a prominent younger Spanish scholar, author of La música en las Casas de Osuna y Benavente (Madrid: Sociedad Española de Musicología, 2007), has presented the score of this piece with care, and provided a transcription of Metastasio's poem along with a charming Spanish translation dated 1765 from Madrid, as well as thoughful, readable notes about the genesis of the piece, a short biography of Bonno, detailed but not obsessive critical notes on the sources and a brief exegesis on the style of the music, which he describes as a fine example of the ‘schematic galant’ as proposed by Daniel Heartz and expounded by Robert O. Gjerdingen. This, indeed, it certainly is; but such a summation is perhaps a bit disappointing. What else is this music besides a fine example of then-current convention? Does not its absolute up-to-the-minuteness tell us something important about the cosmopolitanism of music-making in eighteenth-century Spain? How does it compare with the much better-known setting of L’isola disabitata by Joseph Haydn? Would it be too much to wish that Fernández-Cortés had told us something about what the process of bringing a 256-year-old score to contemporary performance had revealed of what those galant conventions, so scrupulously observed, continue to do for us today, aesthetically, affectively, dramatically?
Probably, in fact, it is too much to wish this: the generic divide between scholarly editions, which still tend to subscribe to the idea of cultural Monumenta, and the criticism of performance, which still tends to be conceived as evanescent and beneath the scholarly radar, is still pretty profound everywhere. I mention my wish, then, not as a complaint about this edition, but in order to question the divide itself. It is a relic that we might well consider discarding, even as we preserve places like Aranjuez.
