Lyric Opera 2022-2023 Issue 5 - Le Comte Ory

35 | Lyric Opera of Chicago Le Comte Ory , Mazzola points out, is a prime example of the time-honored Italian theater tradition of travestimento —the comedy of disguise. “ Comte Ory and Donizetti’s Don Pasquale are the two big examples of this type of masquerade comedy, from the age of bel canto to its culmination in Verdi’s Falstaff in 1893,” he observes. “It’s one of the reasons why I love this opera so much. In my mind, whenever I conduct Le Comte Ory , I draw parallels with Barbiere , because in that comedy Count Almaviva enters Don Bartolo’s house twice to declare his amorous intentions to a woman. And he is disguised both times, like the Count in Ory .” The University of Chicago musicologist and Rossini scholar Philip Gossett, in his essay accompanying the 1989 Philips recording of the opera, writes that the jewels of the score are the pieces Rossini prepared directly for Le Comte Ory . These include the the lusty drinking song of the quartet of pilgrim women—Ory and his men in disguise—who have begged “the noble châtelaine” of the castle for refuge from the wicked Count; once they are inside the castle, their carousing alternates with the pseudo-devout, unaccompanied prayer of the quartet, sung whenever they realize they are being overheard. Another highlight, in the late Gossett’s view, is the exquisite trio, “Á la faveur de cette nuit,” in which Ory solicits Isolier by mistake in the dim light of the Countess’s boudoir. Gossett wrote of the “nocturnal and insinuating quality” of the opening section, “its delicate orchestral shading, its erotic chromaticism (both structural and melodic), the shifting pairing of its voices.” The dramatic situation here recalls that of Act IV of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro , even as the music harkens to Mozart in its delicacy. No wonder that Hector Berlioz, no great fan of Italian art, considered the trio to be Rossini’s masterpiece. Indeed, the French composer went on to praise the opera as a whole as “a collection of diverse beauties which, if divided up ingeniously, would suffice to make the fortune of not one, but two or three operas.” Mazzola, for his part, is hardly less unstinting in his estimation. Le Comte Ory , the Maestro says, is “the summa — the summation, the ne plus ultra —of Rossinian vocal virtuosity.” John von Rhein retired as classical music critic of the Chicago Tribun e in 2018, after more than 40 years in that position. Cory Weaver/Lyric Opera of Chicago A scene from Lyric’s boisterous The Elixir of Love (2021/22),under the baton of Maestro Mazzola.