La finta giardiniera

• 1. Introduction

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  La finta giardiniera received its first performance on the 13th of January, 1775, at a theater in Munich. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had written it there that same month. He was eighteen years old. The opera is catalogued as K. 196, and its title translates from Italian as "The Pretend Garden-Girl." Before the music even begins, a crime has already taken place. Count Belfiore stabbed Marchioness Violante Onesti in a fit of rage. She survived, and now moves through the story under an assumed name, working as a gardener on a Podestà's estate near Milan. How that deception unravels, and what it costs the people caught in it, is what the opera spends three acts exploring. The identity of the person who wrote its libretto remains, even now, an open question.

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• 2. Masks and Motives

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  Rosa Manservisi sang the leading role at the premiere, playing a woman who has built an entirely false identity. Her character's servant Roberto has done the same, taking the name Nardo and working in the garden alongside her. Their employer, Don Anchise the Podestà of Lagonero, does not suspect that two of his garden staff are noblepersons in disguise. He is too busy pursuing an unrequited love for Sandrina to look closely. The Podestà's niece, Arminda, arrives already engaged to Count Belfiore and is not inclined toward warmth. Cavalier Ramiro, Arminda's discarded suitor, is present too, still raw from being set aside. Serpetta, a household servant with her own romantic interest in the Podestà, ensures that almost every person on the estate has a competing agenda. At the premiere, Ramiro was sung by Tommaso Consoli, a soprano castrato. Teresina Manservisi took on Serpetta. Into this already crowded situation, Count Belfiore makes his entrance, and he does not do so quietly. His opening aria traces his lineage back to Scipio, Cato, and Marcus Aurelius.

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• 3. Divine Madness

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  Ramiro returns from Milan in Act 2 with news that transforms the drama. Count Belfiore is wanted for the murder of Marchioness Violante Onesti. The Podestà summons Belfiore for questioning. Thoroughly baffled, Belfiore begins to implicate himself. Sandrina then claims to be Violante and halts the proceedings. Then she reverses herself, insisting she only said so to protect him.

  Arminda, suspicious and jealous, conspires with Serpetta to have Sandrina abducted and left in a remote, mountainous location. Belfiore and the others search for her in the dark. The Podestà mistakes Arminda for Sandrina in the darkness. The Count mistakes Serpetta for Sandrina. Arminda mistakes the Podestà for the Count. Nardo finds Sandrina by following her voice. Ramiro arrives with footmen carrying torches. When Belfiore and Sandrina find each other in that wilderness, something breaks in both of them. They believe themselves to be the Greek figures Medusa and Alcides. The assembled searchers become, in their vision, forest nymphs. Oblivious to their surroundings, the two begin to dance.

  Act 3 opens with Sandrina and Belfiore still convinced they are gods. They chase Nardo through a courtyard until he points at the sky to distract them. When they finally regain their senses, they awaken in a garden having slept a discreet distance from one another. Belfiore makes his final appeal. Violante admits who she is but claims she loves him no more. They begin to part. Within minutes, they fall into each other's arms. Arminda returns to Cavalier Ramiro, and Roberto finds love with Serpetta. The Podestà, left alone, accepts his fate philosophically. Perhaps, he says, he will find another Sandrina.

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• 4. The Disputed Libretto

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  Pasquale Anfossi set a libretto with the same title and story to music in 1774, a full year before Mozart's version premiered. The text Mozart used had been written for Anfossi's production, and its original author has never been firmly identified. For a long time, scholars ascribed it to Calzabigi. More recently, some musicologists have attributed it to Giuseppe Petrosellini. That attribution is also contested: researchers question whether the libretto is actually in Petrosellini's style. The text's true author may never be confirmed. Johann Nepomuk Cröner conducted the premiere, and within a decade, the opera would take on an entirely new form.

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• 5. Lost and Found

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  In 1780, five years after the Munich premiere, Mozart converted La finta giardiniera into a German-language Singspiel. The new version carried two alternate titles: Die Gärtnerin aus Liebe and Die verstellte Gärtnerin. Converting the opera was not a matter of simple translation. Mozart rewrote portions of the music itself. For much of the opera's subsequent history, this German version was the only known complete score. The original Italian text, the one performed at the Munich premiere, was considered lost. Then, in the 1970s, a complete copy of the Italian version was found. Its recovery restored the opera to the language and musical form of its first performance. Leopold Hager conducted a 1980 recording with Julia Conwell as Sandrina and Brigitte Fassbaender as Ramiro. That recording was later reissued as part of the Philips Complete Mozart Edition in 1991.

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