Giovanni Battista Pergolesi

Alfred, Alfred / La Serva Padrona - I Teatri di Reggio Emilia

This double bill from I Teatri Reggio Emila sets theatrical farce in private spaces. Alfred, Alfred, comes from the experience in hospital of its composer, Franco Donatoni, in 1992: a journey suspended between the surreal intimate visions of a patient and the reality of hospital life. Written three centuries earlier, Pergolesi’s La serva padrona offers a picture of domestic antics, where a shrewd maid outwits her grumpy master into marrying her.

Et si tu m’entends

Photos are no longer enough to nourish the memory of happy days... Poems are powerless to preserve lost love... To return to the place of ecstasy is to return to Eden... With risks and perils...

O Quam Tristis

A meditation on the generational tension between a mother and daughter, captured during a harmonious stroll to the beach - a prelude to the wrestling sequence. In the increasing disarray of their intermingled bodies, a touching poignancy resurfaces.

La Serva Padrona

Living in the house of Uberto as a child, Serpina is now a beautiful young woman who, seeing her master willing to marry, decides that it will be her and not any other woman. Adaptation of the Opera buffa La Serva Padrona.

Pergolesi: The Brother in Love (La Scala)

Live from La Scala Friday 22 December 1989

Pergolesi: Livietta e Tracollo / La serva padrona

Premiered in 1733, Pergolesi's La Serva Pedrona is a Major event in the history of opera. Due to the lightheatedness of the plot and the ordinariness of the characters – not to say their coarseness – La Serva Pedrona launched what is known today as "the Quarrel of the Comic Actors" ("la Querelle des Bouffons" in French), a quarrel that brought into conflict the advocates of the French tradition against the proponents of the Italian music, the latter gathered behing the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. If what they were fighting about seems trifling to the modern observer, the quarrel occasioned fierce reactions wavering between jingoistic arguements and unjustified critics of the French style. Be that as it may, La Serva Pedrona is a masterpiece, all the more so with the charmismatic Donato Di Stefano in the role of Uberto and the delightfull Patrizia Biccirè giving life to the mischievous Serpina.