in Montclair, N.J., on July 20 and in New York on the 24<\/a>. Uccelli was indeed extraordinary, and so is the single surviving opera by which we can assess her abilities. Behind it lies a human story, touching and somewhat sad, to which there is now a chance to add a happy postscript.<\/p>\nItalian opera was the single most competitive and economically significant branch of music worldwide in the early 19th century. No female composer ever established herself in it. Success for women, at the time, meant publishing miniatures for the salon, and Uccelli achieved that while still in her teens. But conceiving whole music-dramas and wrangling them through the marketplace was a gritty, cutthroat business; nobody could imagine a woman pursuing it.<\/p>\n
The brave youngster who tried to make herself an exception was born Carolina Pazzini, in 1810, to an upper-class Florentine family. She had thorough musical training and gained a precocious local reputation for her singing and keyboard improvisations. Around 1827, when Italy\u2019s leading publisher issued an album of her ariettas, she married the widower Filippo Uccelli, a celebrated and sometimes controversial physician who was supportive of her improbable ambitions. He passed along to journalists a letter from Gioachino Rossini in praise of her first opera, \u201cSaul,\u201d <\/em>produced in Florence in 1830. He probably also paid some of its costs; one of Filippo\u2019s students later wrote disapprovingly that the good doctor had squandered what should have been his sons\u2019 inheritance on the \u201ccaprices\u201d of their young stepmother.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
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The opening night of \u201cSaul\u201d was by all accounts a triumph, but later in its run came evidence of the prejudice that could greet a woman stepping outside her expected sphere. The Harmonicon in London reported that \u201cthe Florentines have been making themselves merry, as well in verse as in prose, upon this lady\u2019s production, and the high and mighty protection <\/em>which Rossini is known to have afforded her.\u201d The German periodical Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung <\/em>allowed itself a baseless hint that Rossini\u2019s interest might have been more in Uccelli\u2019s beauty than in her talent. The Florence journal Il Censore rebuked the theater for giving place to \u201cfeminine vanity.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
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Others came to the debutante\u2019s defense, but it was clear that even after a promising start, the road ahead would not be easy. It became harder when Filippo died in 1832, leaving the composer a widow at 22 with a young child to raise. But Alessandro Lanari, the impresario who had managed the \u201cSaul\u201d premiere, believed in her. In 1834 he was contracted to run the royal theaters of Naples, and there \u2014 after considerable difficulty in persuading the court committee that had to approve his plans \u2014 he brought \u201cAnna di Resburgo\u201d to the stage the following year.<\/p>\n
Only one copy of \u201cAnna\u201d survives today, housed in the vast collection of the Naples Conservatory. It takes time to read an opera from a manuscript orchestral score. You have to decipher the calligraphy before you can start imagining the sounds, and this one is a particularly hasty job, full of errors and none too clear. But as I picked my way through it, appreciation gradually turned to admiration and eventually to outright amazement. This was the work of a born opera composer. This was the real thing.<\/p>\n
Here is one way of putting it. Bel canto operas are structured in individual numbers \u2014 cavatina, duet, finale and so forth \u2014 and \u201cAnna\u201d <\/em>is made of 12 such numbers. Not a single one is boring; not one sounds like padding, not one fails to embody and advance the story, not one falls in the wrong place. The 20-something beginner had a master\u2019s grasp of opera as drama.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
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So why don\u2019t we know about her? There are probably two main reasons. One is that \u2014 unlike Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann or Alma Mahler \u2014 Uccelli did not have a famous musical man in the family to draw attention. The other has to do with the fate of the work being revived this month.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The story of \u201cAnna di Resburgo\u201d (\u201cAnne of Roxburgh\u201d) is haunted by two feudal lords who have died before it begins \u2014 one murdered by the other in hope of seizing his lands. The killer left the dagger in the wound, then waited for the victim\u2019s son to enter the room and be caught with weapon in hand. That son (the tenor of the opera) has fled into exile. His wife (Anna) has gone into hiding and left her infant son to be raised as an unknown orphan. The guilty patriarch confessed on his deathbed to his own son and heir (the baritone of the opera), but the latter, stricken with shame, has chosen to conceal the confession.<\/p>\n
The action of the opera sees all this undone. The exile returns; the usurper recognizes the orphan and has him seized; the parents reveal themselves at risk of death. Anna, in a climactic scene, perceives the baritone\u2019s guilty conscience and confronts him. When the condemned husband is about to be executed beside his father\u2019s grave, the remorseful man reveals his own father\u2019s crime, and a happy ending is snatched from the jaws of tragedy.<\/p>\n
Uccelli was not granted such a happy ending; she had stumbled into the worst luck imaginable. Her opera was a rousing Scottish story of rival families and stolen lands, concluding with a dramatic scene in the ancestral cemetery. How could she have guessed that the premiere just before her own would share exactly those traits? It was called \u201cLucia di Lammermoor.\u201d Tracing the chronology in hindsight is like watching the proverbial slow-motion film of an imminent train wreck.<\/p>\n
The soprano Fanny Tacchinardi Persiani sang the premiere of \u201cAnna\u201d <\/em>on Oct. 29, 1835, just four days after her 17th Lucia. She had been driving the Neapolitan audience to frenzies of applause with Lucia\u2019s mad scene ever since the opening night in September. Anna is a great role, but it doesn\u2019t contain anything quite like that. <\/em>And it would have taken a miracle for the very next opera, set in the same ambience (Lammermuir Hills and Roxburgh are only 30 miles apart) and likely played on the same scenery (especially the two concluding tomb scenes), to be evaluated open-mindedly by a public besotted with Donizetti\u2019s new masterpiece. There was a second performance of \u201cAnna\u201d on Nov. 3, and then the management turned to repetitions of operas from earlier in the season.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
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Good operas could flop. \u201cLa Traviata\u201d <\/em>and \u201cMadama Butterfly\u201d famously did so at first. But Verdi and Puccini were established stars; their fiascos were bound to get a second look. Uccelli was not only a beginner, but also one who had pushed herself into a place where many felt a woman had no business. Nobody came to the rescue with a revival of \u201cAnna\u201d; Uccelli never obtained another theatrical contract, and might not even have sought one.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
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She stayed musically active with frequent private and public performances, published songs in Italian and French, and made an impression sufficient to win one of the extremely few entries for female composers in the \u201cBiographie Universelle des Musiciens\u201d of Fran\u00e7ois-Joseph F\u00e9tis. Star singers often joined in her recitals, reviewed with favor by critics throughout Europe, but blending in with a typical season\u2019s concert fare rather than standing out as a theatrical hit would have done. In 1852 Uccelli and her soprano daughter Emma were featured at one of the celebrated Parisian salons hosted by Rossini, who decades earlier had supported Carolina\u2019s bid for a place at the men\u2019s table in opera.<\/p>\n
Was she happy? Did she make peace with the career available to her? The only known portrait dates from sometime in the middle 1840s, and it is haunting: a gifted woman gazing into the distance at what might have been. I hope the revival of \u201cAnna\u201d will stimulate research; after spending part of every day for more than a year editing her opera, I long to know more about the person behind it.<\/p>\n
A short notice in L\u2019Italia Musicale <\/em>in March 1858 informed readers of Uccelli\u2019s death in Florence. By the time her name came up in the Gazzetta Musicale di Milano a few decades later, its correspondent could write that \u201cif F\u00e9tis had not mentioned her, we would scarcely know of her existence,\u201d and that state of affairs could easily have been permanent. Most of her music is lost; of \u201cSaul\u201d we have no trace. The published salon pieces, while elegant and idiomatically pleasing, would not by themselves have suggested a significant theatrical talent. But against all probability, the survival of one copy of one opera gives her a chance to speak for herself in the 21st century.<\/p>\nBetter late than never. We can\u2019t know what operas Uccelli might have written if she had been granted the career she so boldly sought, but the one she did leave behind is a gem. On page after page, she shows not just the assurance and expressiveness Rossini commended, but a daring capacity to experiment. A duet between solo flute and timpani? A spirited Italian cabaletta repeated in the academic form of a canon, with dovetailing entries of the tune one bar apart? A rapid-fire patter song that is not comic but deadly serious? Uccelli had these and more up her sleeve.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n