“When I found the autograph manuscript of Il proscritto in the Naples Conservatory archives, I was immediately struck by its musical qualities and originality. We at Opera Rara look through and discuss a huge amount of unknown music, and often we decide that “forgotten” operas have some frailty that makes them unlikely to communicate with today’s audiences. But it became immediately clear to me that Il proscritto was something different: here was a work that could have a powerful effect. What makes the opera so compelling for me is its melodic inventiveness, its fascinating orchestral textures and its unique vocal sound world. The impressive choral opening, with its off-stage band, and the two big concertati at the end of Acts 1 and 2, are among the grandest inspirations in Italian opera of this period; but there are also lyrical, intimate arias such as those of Arturo and Giorgio in Act 1; a marvellous series of confrontational duets; and intensely dramatic scenes such as the poignant death of Malvina at the end of the entire drama. There is so much musical variety for audiences to enjoy. I feel sure that, in this first ever performance for nearly 200 years, Mercadante’s opera will offer the public a fascinating and dramatically involving evening of music.”

Saverio Mercadante (1795-1870), certainly the most successful nineteenth-century Italian opera composer outside the “big four” (Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini and Verdi), had a chequered career. Born illegitimate (his noble father and domestic servant mother might themselves have peopled an operatic plot), he managed to gain an education at the Naples conservatory and around 1820 transitioned to an operatic career, inevitably as a follower of Rossini. His greatest earlier success was with the comic opera Elisa e Claudio, whose triumph at Milan’s La Scala in 1821 led to many new commissions. International achievement seemed assured when the Neapolitan impresario Domenico Barbaja engaged him to feature in a season at Vienna’s Kärtnerthortheater in 1824. But that went badly (the Rossini-obsessed Viennese were as yet unwilling to contemplate an Italian successor) and by the time Mercadante returned to Naples a rival composer, Giovanni Pacini, had established himself there. And so the rollercoaster went on. Successful stints in the Iberian peninsula again raised his stakes, and in 1833 he was appointed maestro di cappella at Novara Cathedral, a position that, while it clearly required the production of religious music, also allowed him periodic leave to continue his operatic career. A further watershed moment occurred in 1836: Rossini, by then retired and eminence grise of the Théâtre Italien in Paris, arranged for him to give a premiere in that most prestigious of theatres (as had Bellini and Donizetti in the previous year). But the impact of the opera he produced, I briganti, was only modest.

The major consequence of Mercadante’s Parisian trip came from his attendance at one of the most influential premieres of the entire nineteenth century, that of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots. In the wake of that experience, Mercadante returned home determined to reform Italian opera along the lines of Meyerbeer’s spectacular brand of grand opéra. His very next work, Il giuramento (first performed to great acclaim at La Scala Milan in 1837), was meant to be the spearhead, and in a letter to his Neapolitan friend Francesco Florimo, he laid out an ambitious manifesto:

With Il giuramento [I have] varied the forms, abolished trivial cabalettas, exiled the crescendos; concision, less repetition, some novelty in the cadences; due regard paid to the dramatic side; the orchestration richer, without swamping the voices; long solos in the ensemble numbers avoided, as they obliged the other parts to stands coldly by, to the detriment of the dramatic action; not much bass drum and cymbals, and very little banda [stage band].

The proclaimed distance from the Donizettian/Bellinian norm of the 1830s was clear and provocative, and in the three years following Il giuramento, Mercadante produced a series of further “reform” operas: Elena da Feltre, Il bravo and La vestale. All of them were well-received, and some commentators in the wider European musical community saw them as marking a new seriousness of purpose in a genre that was otherwise dangerously popular. But, even at the time, critics in Italy often thought there was a price to pay for the “reform” agenda: they claimed that the operas’ exploration of harmonic and orchestral complexity sometimes came at the expense of melodic fluency and even dramatic cohesion. Although on occasions much-praised, the “reform” operas did not take decisive root, the old, singer-centred way of doing things remaining stubbornly in place. In 1840, at another watershed, Mercadante was appointed director of the Naples Conservatory (a position that Donizetti had long lobbied for) and began to devote increasing time and energy to the composition of instrumental music. He toyed with the idea of giving up operatic composition entirely, but eventually returned to composing for the stage, although at a much slower rate.

Il proscritto, first performed at Naples’ Teatro San Carlo on 4 January 1842, was the first opera to emerge in this new phase of Mercadante’s life. It augured well, not least because of a fine libretto by Salvadore Cammarano, based (as was usual at the time) on a recent French mélodrame. At the centre of the drama is a classic love triangle, set in the “exotic” location of Scotland during the rule of Oliver Cromwell. The tortured heroine Malvina is torn between two political opponents: Giorgio, her first husband and a passionate royalist, is believed dead at sea; Arturo, now her betrothed, is – of course – a convinced Cromwellian. The fourth principal is a so-called “trouser role”, Malvina’s younger brother Odoardo. The cast chosen to impersonate these warring characters was indeed stellar. Malvina was sung by mezzo soprano Antonietta Ranieri Marini, who had in the preceding years been the female lead in Verdi’s first two operas. Giorgio was baritonal tenor Giovanni Basadonna, who some years earlier had created the title role in Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux; Arturo was another tenor, Gaetano Fraschini, then near the start of an important career that would see him develop into an imposing tenore di forza (he created the title role in Verdi’s Stiffelio and was the first Riccardo in Un ballo in maschera). The fourth principal was Eloisa Buccini, a prima donna contralto who plied her trade in many distinguished opera houses during this period.

Alas, and in spite of such persuasive interpreters, all reviewers agreed that the première didn’t go well: the first act was applauded, but the other two were received with indifference. One long review in the journal Teatri, arti e letteratura is unequivocal about the reason: it was that the music “imitates the Germans, who care about instruments rather than voices”. Warming to the polemic, the critic continued: “the theatre is not a cathedral in which one preaches the rules of counterpoint”. At subsequent performances, however, there were distinct signs of a public turn-around, perhaps as the opera’s unusual musical idioms became more familiar. Certainly the Naples correspondent of the Revue et gazette musicale reported public acclaim gradually emerging and boldly stated that “everything suggests a long and glorious future for this work”. He could not have been further from the mark. Perhaps in part because of the highly unusual vocal line-up (two tenors, a mezzo and a contralto) the opera was never revived, either in Naples or elsewhere.

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What are we to make of Il proscritto as it emerges after nearly 200 years of complete obscurity? One point needs stressing immediately. The fact that the opera was not revived is not at all unusual and should not be granted undue significance: this fate, after all, befell the majority of operas in early nineteenth-century Italy. In a cultural economy in which (a little like today’s cinema) the greatest interest was always attached to new creations, works especially written for the occasion, many operas had to be cast aside to make room for the constant influx of the new. On the other hand, it is clear from the reviews and reports of the public response that Mercadante’s idiom was unusual and considered somewhat “difficult”. Worst of all, perhaps, at a time when the great Neapolitan school of opera was in evident decline, the composer was accused in this opera of betraying his homeland and seeking to emulate “northern” influences. Why this accusation was particularly attached to Il proscritto remains a mystery, but – whatever the case – we are dealing with distinctly local concerns; the Neapolitan judgements of 1842 are hardly likely to impinge much on us, 200 years later, with the history of all that has occurred operatically since then now ringing in our ears. We must try to think afresh.

In this context, what is immediately striking and paradoxical is that, in some senses at least, Mercadante’s new opera rowed back on his “reform” agenda of the previous decade. For example, the solo numbers (notably for Arturo and Giorgio in the first act) are full of lyric inspiration, and while they do indeed have some ear-catching harmonic and orchestral diversions, these serve to support rather than undermine the melodic outpouring. What’s more, and contrary to Mercadante’s manifesto quoted earlier, the opera has its fair share of exuberant cabalettas, starts with a prominent racket from the banda and is (when the mood demands it) liberal with the bass drum and cymbals. However, it is also true that one of the great glories of the score is its sequence of duets, and here the “reform” agenda is more visible. A partial exception is the Act 1 duet between Malvina and Odoardo, whose slow movement (an Andante sostenuto) is a wonderful addition to the tradition of two-women duets that grace the Italian nineteenth century. But in Acts 2 and 3 (that is, in the acts that froze the audience into disapproval on first night) there are three scenes of angry confrontation, between Malvina and each of her two lovers, and between the lovers themselves. And here, although one can sometimes trace shards of the conventional series of “movements” that most duets shared in the period, Mercadante’s typical procedure was to explore a more dynamic conception of musical drama, in which fluidity of emotional response and declamatory outbursts are brought to the fore.

Perhaps even more radical, though, are the opera’s three finales. These act-ending moments were those in which Italian composers of the period displayed their “science”: their ability to blend voices and themes skilfully, and to undertake long, complex harmonic unfolding. Typically, though, this “science” would be tempered by the delights of solo song, one of the principal characters initiating the whole adventure with a winning melody (the Duca di Mantova’s “Bella figlia dell’amore” from Act 3 of Verdi’s Rigoletto is a classic case). In the first two finales of Il proscritto, Mercadante stuck to his “reform” by banning any lengthy indulgence to an individual singer: each finale begins with the choral ensemble, the first with fragmented, shocked utterances, the second with a dark, brooding unison theme; and each rises to great heights of communal emotion in climaxes as grand as any created by his more famous Italian contemporaries. And then the final act’s ending is utterly different: much like Verdi’s Nabucco, which was premiered in Milan only a couple of months later, the opera ends with the fractured voice of a dying woman, in this case punctuated only by the distraught cries and melodramatic excesses of her two lovers: it was a bold decision after all the choral magnificence, but one that surely makes dramatic sense in the larger context.

There is so much more to say about this remarkable opera. About how its unusual blend of lead singers, its two warring tenors and its concentration on the lower reaches of the female voice, is matched by a consistent preference for “dark” tonalities (as far as D♭ minor in the second finale). About the sheer daring of some of the harmonic excursions: listen out for deft harmonic touches in many orchestral passages, in one case even a lingering on the Tristan chord; or the extraordinarily atmospheric orchestral opening of the Malvina-Giorgio duet in Act 2, which illustrates Giorgio’s troubled sleep. About the continual inventiveness of Mercadante’s “bridge” passages between lyrical sections, which never lapse into routine and often present a level of musical originality entirely unusual in such circumstances. Above all, perhaps, about the manner in which the music responds to the unusual psychological complexity of the principal characters. Malvina, Giorgio and Arturo all begin the opera in what we might call classic melodramatic situations; but in each case their beliefs are called into question, causing strange reversals and creating situations in which they show a psychological depth which is rare indeed in this operatic period. Mercadante responds magnificently to the challenge of this complexity, in particular through his ability to sustain prolonged moments of free-form declamation in which the emotional attitudes of the characters are in flux. The result is an opera which, although it disappeared from view almost immediately after it was created, can nevertheless communicate powerfully to a contemporary audience, perhaps even causing a rethink of the historical landscape that produced so much of our staple operatic repertoire.