Potsdam Music Festival: “pasta” rhymes with “basta”

The real sensation of the commemorative year 2012 for the 300th birthday of Frederick II of Prussia was the book “Frederick the Great.

Musician and Monarch” by Sabine Henze-Döhring.

It actually had something new to tell about Prussia's king - with the point that research did not destroy legends, but confirmed: The fame of the monarch as a musician shone even brighter.

Jan Brachmann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The flute king of Sanssouci and commander of the Silesian Wars was actually a true musical professional with brilliant expertise, especially in opera management.

He knew the European singers' market and was well informed about the forms of composition.

The bang: Frederick the Great was not only a supporter of serious opera,

, which served to represent courtly representation, he also promoted comic opera,

, with great pleasure and enormous knowledge .

In the Potsdam City Palace he had a comedy hall set up, where comic operas

, i.e. in regular game operations, not only at royal festivals, were played - as a means of entertaining public education.

One of his favorite pieces was called "I portentosi effetti della madre natura", in English: "The wondrous effects of mother nature", composed by Giuseppe Scarlatti to a libretto by Carlo Goldoni that was as clever as it was funny, premiered in Venice in 1752.

Prussia's great Friedrich opened the first carnival season in Berlin after the Seven Years' War on December 16, 1763. Later he also had the play performed in the Potsdam City Palace and in 1768 also in the palace theater of the recently completed New Palace.

The play is about how the imprisoned rightful king of Mallorca, who does not even know that he is king, was able to free himself from prison thanks to a lightning strike and now, as a young man, comes under human company for the first time.

He very quickly experiences the effect of nature – namely the strong attraction that women have on him – in himself. He just has to somehow reconcile it with the culture of the people – marriage as monogamy, family, state, rule.

When he then becomes the subject of a political upheaval and disempowers the illegitimate ruler Ruggiero, he also has to learn what it means to rule, punish and pardon.

To the amusement of viewers, this culture newcomer, Celidoro, gets caught in the snares of the Enlightenment notion of what it means to live "according to nature."

The fact that he ends up marrying a shepherdess is a signal against old class thinking.

"We're all made of the same dough.

So stop now!” he says, while Goldoni rhymes “pasta” (dough) with “basta”.

The creaturely effects of love in man

The Potsdam Sanssouci Music Festival, which has been directed by Dorothee Oberlinger since 2019, has now performed the forgotten gem again after 254 years - in the palace theater of the New Palace, in a critical edition prepared by Francesco Russo.

Director Emmanuel Mouret brings the story from medieval Mallorca to the office world of a dictatorship in the late 1980s;

the directing of the characters is obvious and precise – for example when the cleaners Cetronella and Ruspolina explain the cultural taming techniques of love to poor Celidoro, while deliberately stimulating its creaturely effects on him.

What Benedetta Mazzucato, Maria Ladurner and Rupert Charlesworth make of this situation is as comical as it is tactful, because it spurs the viewer's imagination more than it replaces it.

And the downward glissando in the cadence, with which Niccolò Porcedda as Poponcino makes it clear that he has lost the power to love in old age (only the ability, of course, not the will), relies on the symbolic intelligence of the listener.

The "Ensemble 1700", which plays under Oberlinger's direction, is delicately scored, especially in the continuo with harp, lute and fortepiano.

The sad serenade of the solo cello to the harp accompaniment before the aria of Dorina (Dana Marbach) is a black pearl of the score.

Giuseppe Scarlatti, whose relation to Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti is unknown, wrote in that gallant style so loved by Frederick II, the variety of aria forms astounding and socially precise.

Roberta Mameli as the wife of the dictator Ruggiero (Filippo Mineccia) is allowed to sing a da capo aria as if from a serious opera;

Cetronella gets a strophic song in the dialogue-ballad genre when she describes how her mother wants to marry her off.

Benedetta Mazzucato sings this with skillful jokes in the register changes,

The entire performance shows how surprisingly and intelligently the music festival, also under the direction of Dorothee Oberlinger, continues on the path that the predecessor Andrea Palent had shown in an exemplary manner for twenty-eight years: to develop art from the history and motifs of the Prussian palaces and gardens.

The fact that the decision has now been made to involve the city of Potsdam more closely is to be welcomed.

When Ann Hallenberg lets the basset horn throat of her mezzo-soprano rise out of the basset horn throat in the open air on the Alter Markt, when the luminous elegy of the aria "Verdi prati" (about the transience of creation) from Handel's opera "Alcina" emerges, while the ensemble "Il pomo d'oro" and Francesco Corti at the harpsichord surrounded her with the most loving warmth and the last light of the summer evening faded over it,