Saturday, November 20, 2010; 8:00 pm
Wortham Center, Cullen Theater

As orchestral director for the Ospedale della Pietà, a home for abandoned girls, Antonio Lucio Vivaldi’s historical reputation rests on his instrumental music.  Hundreds of concertos and hundreds of years later, we’re just finding our way into other marvelous works of this great master.  Among these unjustly neglected works rests his huge store of vocal music – cantatas and operas. But not all of these vocal works found themselves overshadowed by the charm of the master’s concertos.  One work, an opera, simply disappeared.

Vivaldi apparently composed nearly 100 operas.  In 1733, at the age of 55, he took the Venetian audience to an exotic new world via an Italian opera about a Spanish conquistador, who traveled to North America, doing battle with the indigenous peoples.  Using a libretto by Luigi Giusti, who spelled the name without the “n” more commonly used among English speakers or the “c” (Moctezuma) more commonly used in Mexico, Vivaldi composed an opera with a sensual fictionalization of 16th-century events. Music critic Mark Swed called it the “Baroque equivalent of many a summer movie.” That might be because Vivaldi, as was typical of his era, wanted a happy ending, so the actual violent death of the title character was re-imagined. And then the score disappeared!

While searching for cantatas by Handel, musicologist Steffen Voss, located the score in Berlin, of all places, in 2002.  But the story is stranger than that.  During World War II, the Russian Army had taken Berlin’s huge Singakademie library to Kiev as a species of cultural reparations for the trouble they had with Germany during the war. Scholars from Harvard identified this massive archive in 1999 and the Ukrainian government agreed to return the music and books, which included “Motezuma,” to Germany. And there the opera lay unperformed most likely since its premiere in 1733.

Although the surviving score of this chorus-free opera lacks the first seven scenes, more and more opera companies throughout the world actively work toward performances of “Motezuma” in a reconstruction by Alessandro Ciccolini and Alan Curtis.  These scholars have replaced the missing arias using appropriate excerpts from other Vivaldi works, such as a violin part originally intended for a now missing aria.

Vivaldi’s opera puts us in a space capsule to the times of Hernando Cortés as the Spanish adventurer matched wits and might with the Aztec ruler Montezuma. In a twist on the Romeo and Juliet theme, Montezuma’s daughter Teutile falls in love with Cortés’ brother Ramiro.  Montezuma is forced by tradition to order the death of his beloved daughter for her betrayal of the Aztec people, but her mother, Mitrena, comes to the rescue.  Librettist Giusti shows us that mother love is the same the world ‘round.  Attributing the same emotional depths to people regardless of their culture surely represents Enlightenment ideals.

Dr. Yvonne Kendall

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