Verdi was thirty-seven days past his twenty-sixth birthday when Un Giorno di Regno had its disastrous premiere at La Scala on September 5, 1840. His wife Margherita had died in June. His infant daughter Icilio had died the previous April. His son Virginia had died in 1838. The man who sat down to write a comic opera that summer had buried his entire family in less than two years — and the Milanese audience, famously, booed the piece off the stage after a single rendition.
That biographical shadow falls across the opera in peculiar ways. Not in the obvious ways you might expect.
What’s strange is how little self-pity the score contains. There is something almost manic in its energy — the driving, steely rhythms that cut through the buffo conventions like a blade through silk. This is not Rossini’s warm, oleaginous comedy, and it isn’t Donizetti’s either. Un Giorno di Regno is descended from both masters, no question, but the inheritance has been put through something harder and faster. The buffo duets for the Barone and the Cavaliere have that requisite patter-and-tumble shape, all the familiar furniture is in place — yet the propulsion is unmistakably Verdian, and unmistakably young. Frenzied, even. Which is, when you think about it, entirely consistent with a man who was holding himself together by sheer force of will.
This recording — a historical document, however one judges it as a listening experience — was the first commercial release the opera ever received. That alone justifies its existence. It is also, one must say immediately and emphatically, brutally cut. Not trimmed: gutted. Second verses vanish. Chunks disappear from inside numbers, sometimes without any apparent rationale, leaving melodic lines that feel truncated, structural arches that never reach their keystones. The harm to individual numbers is genuinely drastic. Anyone wanting to understand what Verdi actually wrote owes it to themselves to seek out the Philips recording with Jessye Norman and José Carreras under Lamberto Gardelli — the first genuinely complete version — which has unfortunately been in and out of the catalog. If the Verdi anniversary occasions a reissue, it would be cause for real celebration.
Renato Capecchi, Sesto Bruscantini — these are not merely names from the golden age of Italian baritones. They are artists who knew precisely what comic singing requires: not mugging, not generic bluster, but a specific weight given to words, a relishing of consonants, a sense that each syllable costs something and delivers something in return. In the ensembles especially, the way these singers inhabit the text rather than merely deliver it makes the difference between comedy that lands and comedy that sits there waiting to be laughed at. Bruscantini in particular had a kind of sardonic authority in buffo roles that nobody has quite replicated since.
Lina Pagliughi is a different pleasure entirely — that light, sweetly pure soprano, the ease in the upper register, the effortlessness. Pagliughi was by 1940 well past the peak of her career, the coloratura somewhat reduced from what it had been, but what remains is genuine: real singing, not mere mastery, and a kind of warmth that makes Marchesa del Poggio feel like an actual person caught in an absurd situation rather than an operatic construct. Juan Oncina, too, brings that same idiomatic sweetness to his contributions. The Italianate style — not as an affectation but as a native condition — keeps the opera from collapsing into mere routine.
The recorded sound is dim. There is no text, no translation, no synopsis. The disc is available elsewhere. None of this recommends the present reissue particularly.
What it offers, finally, is a glimpse: of singers who understood this music from the inside out, of a comic tradition that has largely been lost, and of a young composer working at full throttle through the worst year of his life — producing something that is not a masterpiece, was probably never going to be a masterpiece, but is alive in ways that a hundred more polished recordings are not. Worth hearing, with reservations held firmly in hand.
