L’Italiana in Algeri

There really was an Italian girl in Algiers. A Milanese singer named Antonietta Frapolli Suini, having been abducted from a ship by Algerian pirates, was made a perfumed slave and passed from one harem to the next. Eventually she gained her freedom, without ransom, and was allowed to return home aboard a Venetian ship. Showing the resolute spine of a prima donna, she resumed her stage career under the name Signora Losetti. Byron claimed to have seen her perform in Venice "by a strange coincidence, in Rossini's opera L'Italiana in Algeri." Performance records reveal Signora Losetti did indeed sing Isabella at Teatro San Luca in the spring of 1818, during Byron's visit to the Bridge of Sighs.

That was also the same time as the retirement of the first Isabella, Maria Marcolini. This provocative contralto was among those elite singers who ruled the operatic boards in their heyday, a regular at La Scala from 1809. When Marcolini met Rossini in 1811 she was also mistress to Napoleon's brother, Prince Lucien Bonaparte. After staring in two Rossinian operas, L'Equivoco stravagante (The Strange Misunderstanding, 1811) and Ciro in Babilonia (Cyrus in Babylon, 1812), Marcolini threw over Bonaparte in favor of the up-and-coming twenty year old maestro, and exerted her influence to win for him a La Scala commission. The result was Rossini's first masterpiece, La Pietra del paragone (The Touchstone), which he wrote especially for Marcolini at her Bologna villa. It soared in Milan and Rossini's career took flight.

Six months later the impresario Cesare Gallo staged the Venetian premiere of La Pietra del paragone at Teatro San Benedetto, but it inexplicably played to half-filled houses. The opera meant to replace it, commissioned of Carlo Coccia, failed to fully transfigure into an actual score. Hence, Gallo suddenly faced ruin. He appealed to the newly famous Rossini to save him.

With no time to waste, Rossini chose an existing text, L'Italiana in Algeri by the veteran librettist Angelo Anelli, which had already been set by Luigi Mosca and staged successfully at La Scala in 1808, but never in Venice. Anelli's libretto was derived from the popular legend of Roxelane, harem slave to the 16th century Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, who gains freedom by means of her wits. Could it also have been influenced by the Algerian misfortunes of Antonietta Frapolli Suini? Could Anelli have even known about Suini's harem career when he wrote his libretto? Posterity has left these questions unanswered. We can say only that Suini was abducted in 1805 and returned to Venice, as Byron reported, "a few years later."


In any event, it seems unlikely that Rossini gave the matter much thought. Twenty-seven days after the Venetian newspapers announced his arrival in the city he completed his two-act melodramma giocoso. Rossini later told a German journalist that he composed L'Italiana, that is, he remained specifically rooted to his desk, in eighteen days. Unlike many of his other operas, it is almost entirely free of self-borrowings. Rossini also made several changes in Anelli's libretto, most conspicuously the elimination of a love duet between Isabella and Lindoro. Rossini's oft-noted dislike of male-female duets has by now become downright Freudian (where's the love duet in The Barber of Seville?), but most probably his reasons were artistic.

Rossini's love duet was taking place off-stage, with Marcolini, around whose gifts as a comic actress L'Italiana was written. Alas, the premiere, Saturday evening, May 22, 1813, at Teatro San Benedetto, may not have shown off Marcolini at her finest, for the famed cantatrice buffa was unwell. All the same, the review in a leading Venetian newspaper, Giornale dipartimentale dell'Adriatico, reported "continuous, deafening general applause." After the premiere, performances were suspended due to Marcolini's indisposition until June 1, by which time rumors of plagiarism from Mosca's original had been floated throughout artistic Venice. How else could Rossini have composed so brilliantly so fast? Marcolini took it upon herself to squash this scandal in one blow. During the June 21 performance she attempted to sing Mosca's setting of "Pensa all patria." The juxtaposition with Rossini's own was so striking the audience raucously drowned out the singer before she could finish the aria.

It would not be the last time the exuberant "Pensa all patria" saved Rossini from false accusations. Years later, as fervor for a united Italy swept over the peninsula, Rossini's patriotism was questioned by certain firebrands. In his defense the maestro's hit rondo was cited: "Think of your country, and fearlessly pursue the path of glory; see reborn all over Italy examples of courage and valor!" Rossini was vindicated. Indeed, "Pensa all patria" had originally been so effective a patriotic incendiary that in 1815 after the Italian nationalist movement had been crushed by Napoleon, Rossini was compelled to substitute the aria with a flaccid call to "Think of your wives!" Thankfully, the change was short-lived.

L'Italiana in Algeri has been long-lived. It was the first opera by Rossini staged in Paris (February 1, 1817), and among the first Rossinian operas to gain a foothold in the modern comic opera repertoire, after its revival in 1925 at Teatro di Torino, Turin, with Conchita Supervia's Isabella, and four years later in her four fabled performances at Théatre des Champs-Elysées, Paris.