Le Comte Ory inaugurates the 43rd ROF

The 43rd edition of the Rossini Opera Festival will take place in Pesaro from the 9th to the 21st August 2022. The programme offers two new productions (Le Comte Ory and Otello), the revival of La Gazzetta, the revival of Il viaggio a Reims by the Accademia Rossiniana “Alberto Zedda”, four Opera Concerts with Orchestra, two Belcanto Concerts, the return of Rossinimania and a Gala Concert celebrating the 40 years of Pier Luigi Pizzi at the ROF. 

The Festival will open on Tuesday 9th August at 8.00 p.m. at the Vitrifrigo Arena with a new production of  Le Comte Ory with Diego Matheuz conducting the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della Rai and the Chorus of the Teatro Ventidio Basso.  The production, scenery and costumes are by Hugo De Ana, the lighting by Valerio Alfieri.  The opera is a co-production with the Teatro Comunale, Bologna.  The cast features Juan Diego Flórez, Julie Fuchs, Nahuel Di Pierro, Maria Kataeva, Andrzej Filonczyk, Monica Bacelli and Anna-Doris Capitelli.  Three repeats will be given on the 12th, 16th and 19th August.

Le Comte Ory, opéra en deux actes to a libretto by Eugène Scribe and Charles-Gaspard Delestre-Poirson, was first performed at the Théâtre de l’Académie Royale de Musique on the 20th August 1828.

Autograph manuscripts of portions of the work are conserved  at the Opéra, Paris, which also has a manuscript copy of the full score including an autograph annotation by Rossini, and in the Fonds Michotte in Brussels.

A good half of the music of the opera derives from Il viaggio a Reims,  the dramma giocoso [comic opera] composed by Rossini for the Théâtre-Italien, Paris, of which he was “directeur de la musique et de la scène” [director of music and staging], on the occasion of the celebrations for the coronation of Charles X as King of France at the cathedral of Reims in 1825.

The story of the opera is based on a popular ballad from Picardy, collected and published, together with the music to which it was traditionally sung, by Pierre-Antoine de la Place in 1785.  The librettists Scribe and Delestre-Poirson built round it a vaudeville [light comedy] entitled Le Comte Ory, staged at the Théâtre du Vaudeville in December 1816.  More than ten years later the two authors returned to their subject to turn it into a libretto for Rossini.