Edited by Eleonora Di Cintio (2023)
Naples, 27 September 1732. A new commedeja pe mmuseca was staged at the Teatro dei Fiorentini, by two young and promising authors: Gennarantonio Federico, heir to a generation of Neapolitan theatre poets who had forged the genre in the previous two decades, and Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, a composer who was a candidate to conquer a hegemonic position in the city’s musical panorama after the departure of some of the masters who had dominated it until then (Pietro Vinci and Johann Adolf Hasse among others). The theatrical backgrounds of both were sparse: Federico had a few comic dramas for the spoken word theatre and two comedies for music to his credit, Pergolesi ventured for the first time in his career with a commedeja. Yet Lo frate nnammorato was an exorbitant success, remaining on the programme in the Neapolitan theatre for many weeks and earning a series of revivals over the next twenty years, the first of which – in 1734, again at the Fiorentini – was overseen by both authors.
Over the course of the 20th century, the opera has stimulated the interests, episodic or systematic, of various scholars. Most recently, Francesco Degrada, who at the end of the 1980s edited an important edition of the Frate, used for the memorable La Scala production in the 1989-90 season, with Riccardo Muti conducting and Roberto De Simone as stage director. Degrada himself, however, noted at the time that the available musical sources did not allow for an exact reconstruction of either the ’32 or the ’34 version, presenting sections that, according to the surviving librettos, are afferent to one or the other, respectively.
Thanks to the recent acquisition by the Centro Studi Pergolesi of a manuscript score that was unknown to the musicological community until a few years ago and was certainly referable to the first of the two productions, the new critical edition succeeds in restoring the facies that Lo frate had on the occasion of the première in 1732: characterised, among other things, by an orchestration that is in many ways more articulate than that handed down by the other known sources, as well as by a Symphony and two arias that have never been performed since the first cycle of performances. On the other hand, the identification in the Diocesan Library in Münster of a few manuscript extracts miraculously saved from the flood that hit the city in 1946 – the only ones preserving some of the arias substituted by Federico and Pergolesi for the 1734 revival – makes it possible to reformulate and specify the second version of the opera and to offer performers, audiences and scholars compositions that for the most part were absent from the memory of their contemporaries.
By rendering the Frate nnammorato’s polymorphous nature and constituent richness, also through the detailed critical apparatus that accompanies it, the latest edition of the opera is thus configured as a useful tool for the knowledge of Federico and Pergolesi’s first great theatrical success and, more generally, for the exploration of a genre – that of the early 18th-century Neapolitan commedia per musica – still affected by large areas of obscurity.