Mozart: La finta semplice – Hager

Nobody goes to La finta semplice looking for the composer of Figaro. You go, instead, for the strange pleasure of hearing genius still in short pants, fumbling toward its own voice while a twelve-year-old’s father hovers nearby doing the actual negotiating. Leopold Mozart wanted his prodigy installed at the Imperial theater in Vienna; he neglected to get anything in writing, and the Viennese establishment — threatened, probably, by the very idea of a child outshining their journeymen composers — saw to it that the opera never reached that stage at all. Salzburg got it instead, a year late, the wound never quite healed. Leopold nursed grievances the way other men nurse gout.

None of this backstory improves the piece, which trundles along amiably enough on Marco Coltellini’s reworking of a Goldoni libretto that was tired even in 1768. Two idiot brothers, a scheming sister, marriages engineered through wounded pride — you have seen it before, done better, and you will see it again. The recitatives pile up. Mercifully this Orfeo set bands them separately, so the impatient listener can hopscotch straight to the numbers, and I recommend doing exactly that.

Because the numbers, some of them, are startling. Don Cassandro’s “Ella vuole ed io vorrei” in act one has real teeth — the orchestra suddenly alert, biting, comic and dramatic in the same breath, the woodwinds needling away underneath in a manner that has nothing to do with pastiche Italian buffa and everything to do with a mind already restless with possibility. Rosina’s “Senti l’eco, ove t’aggiri,” which follows almost immediately, is lovelier still: obbligato winds curling around the vocal line with a tenderness that the boy could not have learned from Piccinni or Galuppi. He must have heard it internally, whole, the way children sometimes do. The act one finale, too, has an ambition beyond its material — you sense a composer already bored with the conventions he’s dutifully fulfilling.

Leopold Hager made this release for Orfeo back in 1983, a decade or so after he’d led several of the early Mozart stage works for Deutsche Grammophon, before Philips folded that complete edition into its catalog with Peter Schreier conducting this particular opera instead. Schreier’s version is not to be dismissed — decently sung, well-drilled — but Hager’s cast here has more personality, more actual voice.

Helen Donath’s Rosina is what you’d expect from her by this stage of a long, distinguished career: silvery at the top, unfailingly musical, the trill genuinely trilled rather than approximated. Teresa Berganza brings a creaminess of tone that the role of Giacinta scarcely deserves — she phrases as if this were Rossini, finding shape and wit in music that doesn’t always supply either. But it’s Jutta-Renate Ihloff, as the maid Ninetta, who steals the whole enterprise out from under everyone. Light, quick, mischievous — her “Sono in amore” bounces with an ease that seems to cost her nothing, and every time she reappears the interpretation simply wakes up.

The men divide more unevenly. Anthony Rolfe Johnson sings competently as Don Polidoro but leaves no particular fingerprint; you forget him between scenes. Thomas Moser, by contrast, already sounds like a tenor with somewhere else to go — and indeed he did, into Radames, into Tristan, repertory requiring exactly the steel audible here in the long, unexpectedly dramatic “Nelle guerre d’amore.” Robert Lloyd anchors things with the kind of unforced authority that comes from decades of singing Sarastro and Osmin and knowing precisely how much weight a comic bass role can bear without collapsing into buffoonery.

Is this an opera you need? No. Is it one worth hearing once, maybe twice, for the glimpses it offers of a composer not yet arrived but already, unmistakably, on his way? Absolutely — and in this company, played with evident affection under Hager’s unfussy direction, those glimpses register more vividly than they have any right to. Recommended, with the private understanding that recommendation here means something a little different than it would for Così or Don Giovanni. This is Mozart’s baby teeth. They’re worth keeping, in their little box, if only to marvel at what came in behind them.