Although the Frankfurt Opera has resumed performance since September 12th, it is hardly a mistake to describe last weekend as the actual end of the pandemic stranglehold.

The premiere of Handel's “Amadigi” had already taken place on Saturday in the Bockenheimer Depot, on Sunday the new production of Domenico Cimarosa's “L'Italiana in Londra” followed at Willy-Brandt-Platz.

The Cimarosa premiere ended, hopefully for good, the music-theatrical famine.

And she didn't end it with a bang or a whimper (not even with a full-bodied bel canto, as some have wished), but with liberating laughter.

Seldom has the opera laughed so often and so heartily: about the jokes of the librettist Giuseppe Petrosellini, which were flippantly but faithfully translated in the upper titles, as well as about the comical actions of the actors, whose physical effort reminded one of the origins of the work: the Commedia dell'arte - and last but not least about the funny drive of the music.

A moment of irritation

"L'Italiana in Londra", premiered in Rome in 1778 and a European success piece in its time, which was also performed in Frankfurt in 1783, is a comic opera of the purest quality. Musicology may agonize over its changing names in the sources as “Intermezzo”, “Opera buffa” or “Melodramma giocoso”, but in Frankfurt it is clear that after all the hustle and bustle, there are two of the five guests in a London hotel Couples will come together.

The American director RB Schlather simply staged this musical comedy as such.

Where she is silly, she stays silly.

Where she - in the "high couple", the eponymous Italian Livia (Angela Vallone), who has followed her apparently faithless lover Milord Arespingh (Iurii Samoilov) to London - brings elements of the opera seria with a wink, these are implemented with a wink.

Where at the end all the heartache dissolves into a frenzied Stretta, that happens too, and a tiny final gag at the end creates a moment of irritation, but does not lapse into the customary directors' theater reverse conclusion, but only makes the audience laugh all the more freely the end.

Between longing for love and intrusiveness

The sharply outlined comedy types are exhibited as such, supported by the costumes by Doey Lüthi, which only play with national clichés, and the abstract, effective stage design by Paul Steinberg (only the telephone booth is not British!). According to Schlather, he was inspired by West End theater farces, the collages by Linder Sterling and Monty Python. In fact, the enterprising but warm-hearted Dutch Sumers (Theo Lebow) and the lovable, self-loving and gullible Neapolitan Don Polidoro (Gordon Bintner) look as if they had completed an internship at the Ministry of Silly Gaits.

The hotel owner Madama Brillante (Bianca Tognocchi) is more differentiated and gorgeous in her vacillation between chubby longing for love and lustful intrusiveness.

They all sing and play very well and in style, and they do bella figura too.

Angela Vallone has the only opportunity to actually exude some bel canto.

But her “performance” aria (she actually floats in, wrapped in a Union Jack) got a little tight and monochrome.

But she increased herself in her big scene in the second act.

Style and genre awareness

In Frankfurt - you can experience it in such enchanting productions as Flotow's "Martha" and Lehár's "Lustiger Witwe" - it is still allowed to simply have fun in the opera. A piece in which essential scenic moments are determined by the fact that someone very mistakenly considers himself invisible or an involuntary sword owner is asked twice by unhappy lovers to pierce them, cannot and does not want to be taken seriously. Exactly that is part of the freedom of art - even if GEMA should actually book this gorgeous evening under "light music".

In Cimarosa's score, especially in the large ensembles and the two act finals, one can study the elements of a music-dramatic language that Mozart also mastered (when in “Figaro” Susanna names her adversary “Madama Brillante”, she plays on “L'Italiana in Londra ”. But where Mozart used a richer orchestral line-up, more differentiated harmonies and in-depth psychology, Cimarosa remains on the surface, not out of inability, but out of style and genre awareness: strings and pairs of oboes and horns are enough for him to let a rapid mechanism run off get intoxicated by his own movement. Admittedly not as automated as it was later with Rossini: The conductor Leo Hussain organizes the flow as well as the small impulses,which give music and drama a new direction - because the opera buffa has decisively contributed to the dramatization of the musical course of time, with consequences up to the symphonic of the Viennese classical music.

In addition, with the accompaniment of the recitatives on the fortepiano, Hussain creates an extremely witty, punctuating, sometimes humorously quoting discourse - as the sixth interlocutor of the quintet, as it were.

Here, as always with comedies, everything depends on the precisely timed punchline, and here the director and conductor have worked together wonderfully, music and scene mesh like hand and glove.

The evening can also be summed up as the rebirth of the - Frankfurt - opera from the spirit of comedy.