Vivaldi: LOracolo in Messenia – Biondi

Vivaldi wrote too much, too fast, for too long — that has always been the knock against him, the tired quip about the same concerto written six hundred times. Opera is where the charge really sticks, or so his detractors like to say. He composed nearly a hundred of them, by his own boast; perhaps twenty complete or near-complete scores survive. L’oracolo in Messenia is not even, strictly, a Vivaldi opera in the way we like to imagine authorship. It is a pasticcio, sewn together in under a month from Zeno’s much-recycled libretto, from Giacomelli’s earlier and much-admired setting, and from Vivaldi’s own bottom drawer. And yet here it is, sounding, in Fabio Biondi’s hands, like a composer working at the top of his powers under deadline pressure.

The circumstances are almost novelistic. Vivaldi needed a hit for the Sant’Angelo carnival season of 1737–38, and he needed it yesterday. So he did what any sensible eighteenth-century opera composer did when the clock was against him: he stole from himself, and from the competition. Giacomelli’s La Merope, three years earlier, had been the vehicle for Farinelli and Caffarelli. Vivaldi knew that score, admired it, and was not above lifting its dramatic contours wholesale. This was not plagiarism as we would understand it. It was homage, expedience, and showmanship rolled into one, typical of a Venetian operatic marketplace where originality mattered far less than effect.

The effect, apparently, was tremendous. Vivaldi got his triumph. Three years later he packed the score for Vienna, revising it, hoping to repeat the Venice success in a city that had no particular use for him. He died there in 1741, poor, and was tipped into a communal grave. The revision reached the stage only after his death, in 1742. Both scores, Venice and Vienna, are now lost. What survives is the libretto, annotated with the shape of Vivaldi’s revisions. Biondi has reconstructed the opera from that skeleton, and the results are persuasive enough that one stops thinking about the reconstruction and starts simply listening.

What there is to hear is glorious, on the whole. Ann Hallenberg’s Merope has the gravity the role demands — a queen who has buried a husband and believes she has lost a son — sung with a dark, burnished mezzo tone that never tips over into wailing. She phrases like someone who has lived inside this repertoire for decades, which she has. Vivica Genaux, as her disguised son Epitide, brings the coloratura fireworks you’d expect: agile through the passagework without ever sounding merely athletic. There’s real danger in some of her divisions, and Genaux navigates it as though she were born to sing trouser roles written for men who no longer exist.

Julia Lezhneva, cast rather against expectation as the minister Trasimede, brings a silvery, almost instrumental purity to her lines. She floats above the orchestral texture, spinning long phrases with a breath control that seems to defy physiology. Magnus Staveland’s Polifonte is appropriately villainous without descending into cartoon menace, and Xavier Sabata’s countertenor brings a burred, slightly grainy color to Anassandro that I found unexpectedly affecting. Not every countertenor understands that beauty of tone matters less, in a role like this, than dramatic pointedness.

Biondi conducts his own band, Europa Galante, with the wiry, sinewy energy that has been his trademark since the Vivaldi revival took hold in the 1990s. The strings dig into the crossings, the continuo bristles, tempos in the arias di furore have real teeth. I have heard performances of Vivaldi opera — some of Biondi’s own earlier ones included — where the drama gets lost under sheer virtuosic display. Not here. There’s shape to the recitative, air around the cadences, an ear for the theatrical pause. Whether this is “authentic” Vivaldi or a very sophisticated act of imaginative restoration hardly matters at this point. The booklet, incidentally, is superb: pages 18 through 21 alone amount to a small essay on the opera’s tangled genesis, and any listener curious about how eighteenth-century opera actually functioned as an industry would do well to read it before pressing play.

Is this an indispensable Vivaldi opera, on the order of Orlando furioso or Griselda? Probably not. The seams of the pasticcio show occasionally, and Zeno’s plot creaks under the weight of disguise and recognition tropes older than opera itself. But as a document of how a genius under pressure could still produce music of real dramatic conviction, and as a rendition of unusual scholarly care and vocal distinction, this release earns its place. Buy it for Hallenberg and Genaux alone.