L' amor coniugale

Farsa sentimentale in one act
libretto by Gaetano Rossi
concert performance in Italian with German surtitles

Opera Fuoco Orchestra
Conductor: David Stern

The plot of this opera caused a sensation at the Theater an der Wien over 200 years ago when it was presented in another form: a woman disguises herself as a man in order to infiltrate a prison incognito and rescue her husband. But only a few months before Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fidelio, which is far better known today, Johann Simon Mayr’s opera premiered in Padua in 1805: a paean to marital love, in other words, "l’ amor coniugale". In the 19th century, Mayr sank into obscurity and today his music is often unfairly regarded as marking nothing more than a transition from the Classically oriented works of, say, Giovanni Paisiello, to bel canto. However, streamlined performances of his operas have since shown how rewarding exploration of his works is.