A Hit for the Friar

"Cesti," wrote the Neapolitan landscape painter Salvator Rosa, "is the glory and splendor of the secular scene."

The scene was 17th century Italy, and Composer Pietro Cesti (1623-69), otherwise known as Father Antonio, contributed to its splendor in flamboyant fashion. Renowned for his unfriarly frolics (a partiality toward wine and the wives of his benefactors), he was unfrocked* and dismissed from the court of the Medici in Florence for "reprehensible conduct." In more sober moods he reputedly wrote 100 operas, many of them tradition-breaking efforts that helped determine the shape of opera to come. Last week the first, and one of the best, of Cesti's works, his three-act Orontea, was back in Milan after an absence of 300 years. It still looked fresh enough, enthused Milan's Il Giorno, "to teach today's composers how an opera should be written."

Great Gift. Although Cesti is not the father of modern opera (the credit usually goes to Monteverdi), he did more than any other composer to develop the aria and make it as important as the recitative. Cesti's gift for melody was so great that his tunes were often pilfered, and he knew far better than his contemporaries how to weld the melody of an opera to its drama. Orontea, a typical Cesti product, is the story of a skittish Egyptian queen who spurns all suitors because in her "breast love dwells not." But when a handsome shipwrecked sailor emerges from the sea, she becomes so unnerved that she 1) falls in love with him, 2) slashes to pieces a portrait he has painted of her. and 3) decides to marry him. Only then does she learn that he is a prince.

Despite its banal theme, Orontea became one of Italy's most popular works during Cesti's lifetime, and last week's La Piccola Scala performance suggested why. From start to finish, it was a singer's opera. The orchestration for the most part was slender, graceful, beautifully designed to give space to the principals (Mezzo-Soprano Teresa Berganza, Tenor Alvino Misciano), who sang aria after aria in serene, long-breathing lines. Bright with sentimentally colored melodies, Orontea scored a hit even with the critic of the Communist L'Unita, who conceded that "it really is beautiful music." The audience did not quite hail the composer as a "miracolo della musica," as it did in Cesti's day--but it gave the friar the honor of 27 curtain calls.

Applauding Feet. Sharing the applause with Composer Cesti was Spanish Mezzo Berganza, 27, who combined some fine acting with effortless singing in the title role. Fast emerging as one of Europe's top divas, Berganza originally studied piano at the Madrid Conservatory, took up singing as a joke, hit the concert circuit after unexpectedly winning the conservatory's singing prize, and married her accompanist.

Berganza's triumph last week ("The highest possible level!" glowed Cornere Lombardo) was even more notable because she sang the role of the determinedly virginal Egyptian queen while six months pregnant. "I have much less stage fright with baby in me, because I think of him and not the audience," she explained. "I took care not to push my high notes, because too much diaphragm might bump him on the head. He was quiet while I was singing, but as soon as I stopped he started to applaud with his feet."

* The charge, according to a contemporary report: "Father Cesti in a performance of his Orontea in Lucca did take the tenor role of Alindoro, embarrassing and loving all women and showing himself ready for amorous duets with all."

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