The Importance of Being Earnest (anteprima)

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST

Three Acts after the Comedy of Oscar Wilde (text adaptation and rhythmic version by the composer) Comic Opera for Eight Singers, Two Pianos and Percussion Op. 198 Characters

John Worthing, J.P. Tenor

Algernon Moncrieff Tenor

Rev. Canon Chasuble, D.D. Bass Merriman (butler) Baritone Lane (manser vant) Baritone Lady Bracknell Contralto Hon. Gwendolen Fairfax Soprano Cecily Cardew Soprano Miss Prism (governess) Mezzo-soprano

Scenes

ACT I Agernon Moncrieff’s flat ACT II The garden at the Manor House, Woolton ACT III Drawing-room of the Manor House, Woolton

Time: end of the 19th century Place: London

Edizioni Curci, in association with Cidim, Comitato nazionale italiano musica (Italian National Music Committee), is proud to present The Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco Collection, the first series ever published entirely dedicated to the composer from Florence (1895-1968) who settled in the United States, where he became known as “the Maestros’ Maestro”. The collection is edited by Angelo Gilardino, composer and scholar, who enjoys the full confidence of the Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s estate. The collection will present all of the musician’s as yet unpublished works, which are housed at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, according to the original manuscripts. Each volume has both Italian and English commentaries.

Editorial direction: Laura Moro

Editing: Samuele Pellizzari, Jansan Favazzo

Music engraving and layout: Giovanni Del Vecchio, Luca Valli

Music revision: Luca Valli

Cover artwork: Paolo Zeccara English text: Jed Jennings

© 2022 by Edizioni Curci S.r.l. – Milano

All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form

EC 12304 / ISMN: 9790215920118 www.edizionicurci.it

Printed in Italy in 2022 by Ciscra S.p.A. – Villanova del Ghebbo (RO), Italy

Of all the works that Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco composed for the theater, The Importance of Being Earnest. Three Acts after the Comedy of Oscar Wilde – L’importanza di esser Franco. Tre Atti dalla Commedia di Oscar Wilde, is the last, and it is also the only one of which he did not leave us a commentary, a presentation, or indeed any mention at all. While his autobiogra phy1 offers us lavish accounts of the origin, gestation, content and fate – very seldom fortu nate, alas – of his other operas, from La Mandragola (1920-1923) to Saùl (1958-1960), he says nothing about the Wildean work. It is not enough to attribute this silence to the fact that his autobiography breaks off in July 1961, while Earnest is from the following year (1962): we would expect to find at least some mention of the work in letters or interviews. And yet, so far, nothing has emerged.

This absence of first-hand information and references does not prevent us, however, from speculating about the origin of the work. It can be reasonably assumed that, after having just finished two highly dramatic works – The Merchant of Venice (1956) and Saùl (1958-60), interspersed with All’s Well That Ends Well (Giglietta di Narbona) (1955-58) – the composer would have wanted to turn to the more lighthearted and, if you will, frivolous genre of com edy, for his own pure and very personal amusement. It is not difficult to trace in CastelnuovoTedesco’s music, and also in his writings, a subtly ironic vein, recognizing in certain of his expressions an affinity with the refined, genteel, and at the same time disruptive humor of the British tradition which, while cultivated by many authors, had found in Oscar Wilde its champion. No surprise, then, that the composer should have resolved to use the famous Victorian comedy of manners as a springboard for his own musical humor, which he deploys here to create a most peculiar aural environment, capable of rendering the drawing room hijinks of the dense Wildean plot with supreme elegance and a most artful use of citation.

This was not the first time Castelnuovo-Tedesco had approached the work of Oscar Wilde. In fact, in 1941, while working in Hollywood at the studios of MGM, he had composed The Birthday of the Infanta (A Ballet Suite from a Tale by Oscar Wilde), an eight-movement instru mental work inspired by a short story in which the characters of Diego Velázquez’s master piece Las Meninas are brought delightfully to life. Unfortunately, the score of this orchestral suite – which was performed on 28 January 1947 in New Orleans with the local orchestra un der the direction of Massimo Freccia – is owned by MGM and gaining access to it has thus far proved impossible. Incidentally, it is also worth noting that Castelnuovo-Tedesco was called upon in 1945 to contribute to the soundtrack of the film The Picture of Dorian Gray, shot for MGM by director and screenwriter Albert Lewin, at which time he surely would have been stimulated to refresh his interest in an author who, in many ways, was a perfect fit for him.

Angelo Gilardino September 2020

1 Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Una vita di musica, Edizioni Cadmo, Florence, 2005.

The Importance of Being Earnest by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco: Themes and Citations

PREFACE

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s chamber opera The Importance of Being Earnest is a pure divertissement under the banner of a favorite motto of his, «and let me have my fun», bor rowed from the playfully anarchic side of Aldo Palazzeschi’s poetry, but not to be confused with Futurism, to whose Fascist-leaning ideologies Castelnuovo-Tedesco could never have adhered, being himself a victim of the racial laws that forced him into exile in the United States in 1938. This credo is prominently displayed on the first page of the manuscript of each of the opera’s three acts, which was composed on Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s own initiative, with neither patron nor deadline, between September 1961 and February 1962 in Beverly Hills, where he had at that point been living for decades. A gestation period of only five months for a work like this would seem very short indeed, considering its length – more than two-and-a-half hours of music – if we were not talking about a composer who was as prolific as he was meticulous.

A special feature of this work is the peculiarity of the ensemble: eight singers (two tenors, two sopranos, mezzo-soprano, alto, baritone, and bass), two pianos, and percussion instruments, making it a true unicum in the entire history of opera.

At first listen, a layman might find themself somewhat perplexed, indeed scandalized: «These famous melodies can’t all be by Castelnuovo-Tedesco! He must be a plagiarist!» Instead, for the experienced listener and passionate music lover, that perplexity quickly turns to delight the moment one grasps the connection, sometimes profound, sometimes witty, and always highly refined, between the musical citation and the dramaturgical situation it annotates.

Moreover, it is also important to take into account the fact that, throughout the opera, Castelnuovo-Tedesco uses both his own themes and numerous other borrowed themes as leading motifs, tying them («in a Wagnerian way», to quote a phrase from Oscar Wilde taken up in the libretto) to the various dramaturgical situations, transforming them from time to time in a flexible and amusing way, often superimposing one over the other with the contra puntal dexterity for which he is known, always with lightness and sophisticated humor.

The inventiveness flows with spontaneous ease, in most cases without any real forethought and in every case without pedantry: Castelnuovo-Tedesco merely states the sources in the score, without specifying anything else. The citations are from the works of the following composers (in order of appearance): Fryderyk Chopin, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Giuseppe Verdi, Richard Wagner, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the Gregorian chant tradition (Dies Irae), Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Gioachino Rossini, Johann Sebastian Bach, Charles Gounod, Claude Debussy, Antonín Dvořák, Georges Bizet, Robert Schumann, William Schwenck Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, and Gaetano Donizetti. Multiple excerpts are taken from all of them (with Verdi and Wagner in the lead), totaling over thirty more or less extensive and repeated citations, often with variations and ‘personalizations’. We then also encounter frequent stylings à la maniere de Igor Stravinsky, Giacomo Puccini, and Francis Poulenc, not to mention less ‘high-brow’ but impeccably deployed citations such as La Marseillaise and It’s a Long Way to Tipperary

Castelnuovo-Tedesco declares all borrowed themes in the score, with the exception of Debussy and the other 20th-century composers for whom copyrights had not yet expired in 1962.

The spirit driving this work is the desire to fully render the humor of Oscar Wilde’s comedy (which resides in a thousand details, quips, and double entendres), not without a certain prolixity, but with an original connotation that is evident right from the Italian title, where “Earnest” is replaced by “Franco” (meaning ‘sincere, frank, direct, honest’ in Italian), which deftly captures the Ernest/Earnest pun in the English original. It is no coincidence that the opera was conceived in two languages: Italian, the composer’s mother tongue, and English, his adopted language. Indeed, the librettos for both versions are by Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who simply uses Oscar Wilde’s text for the English version, and offers his own original, often literal but nonetheless effective translation for the Italian.

In the analysis of the score that follows, we will go over the plot of the opera (and thus of the play), given the very close interweaving of the story and the musical citations.

OVERTURE

No citations from other

Overture, but 6 characterizing elements (2

themes

of one

measures that we shall call mottos), which will be associated throughout the

with specific characters and/or actions. Here they are in order of appearance (the definitions are my own interpretations):

• motto 1 (“admonition”)

but not exclusively associated with the stern Aunt Augusta [bars 1-2].

SANDWICH

• LOVE THEME – very melodic, lovely, and effective. Harmonically, it vaguely recalls – without being a citation – the work for piano by Gioachino Rossini Une caresse à ma femme [bars 45-49, 50-54, 55-60]. It cements itself immediately in the listener’s memory and is often associated with Gwendolen.

• motto 3 (“vanity”) – bombastic and imperious, it recurs frequently in the opera, often ironically emphasizing the hauteur of the two male protagonists, Jack/Ernest and Algernon. In this first case, the vanity motto appears (intentionally?) at the same time as the second repetition of the love theme [bars 51-52] (my encyclopedic colleague Michele Ignelzi points out the similarity between this motif and a passage from Debussy’s Iberia, the second of the three Images pour orchestre, entrusted to the B b trumpet).

• motto 4 (Cecily) – every time her name is spoken, this descending 3-note scale appears in either major or minor mode (in this case B b ), preceded and/or followed by a few repeated notes [bar 56]. Here, Cecily’s motto appears (intentionally?) at the same time as the third repetition of the love theme.

From bar 61 onward we see repetitions, developments, and overlaps of all the above elements, including a couple of fugatos (one of which, from bar 114, by contrary motion) and two strettos on the sandwich theme, in a whirling crescendo of gaiety and excitement that is quelled only at bar 176 by the triple reappearance of the love theme.

ACT I SCENE 1

We are in the posh drawing room of the whimsical (and profligate) Algernon, who is «play ing a Chopin Nocturne with wrong notes». In fact, we hear a grotesque distortion of Fryderyk Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 32 No. 1, with the right hand playing the right notes in the original key of B major while the left hand accompanies in C major! The agony lasts until bar 8:

when the left hand finally finds the right key, it is overlaid first with the laughter motto [bar 8], then the little theme of the manservant lane [bars 9-10];

I

the two elements alternate as the Nocturne proceeds (correctly now, thankfully...). When the dialogue between Algernon and his butler then begins, the Nocturne ceases and the other themes remain. At bar 28 there is a small melodic exclamation from Algernon (immediately caricatured by the piano) when he declares that he, unlike everyone else (who plays accu rately), plays «with wonderful expression» and sententiously throws in the pun «as far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte!» (a pun that turns out to be equally effective in Italian, insofar as Wilde, in the English original, plays on the Italian terms piano and forte). Here, at bar 41, the sandwich theme appears («Have you to the cucumber sandwiches cut for Lady Bracknell?» i.e. for Aunt Augusta).

SCENE 2

Enter Ernest, a friend of Algernon’s who we will later discover is not named Ernest at all. We hear the second motto in march form [bars 1-4] followed by a thematic coda [bars 5-8]; throughout the opera we will hear it several times followed by this coda, which completes and defines it even better in its haughty swagger:

Atto I -

burro

Initially the two men exchange light banter, until Ernest notices the sandwiches [bars 33-40], which are intended for Aunt Augusta only (motto 1 when naming her [bars 48 and 51]).

In bar 57, Ernest mentions Gwendolen, Algernon’s cousin and daughter of the dour Aunt Augusta, to whom he intends to propose marriage, and we hear the love theme [bars 57-60], which a little later morphs into a minor key [bars 65-71]: evidently it will be a thwarted love, but not enough to take away Ernest’s appetite (the sandwich theme appears when he reaches out to steal one [bars 80-86]). Buttered bread also has its own theme [Algernon, bars 103-104]:

We also hear it soon thereafter from Ernest [bars 110-113]:

and it will be repeated several times throughout the work. We hear motto 1 whenever Aunt Augusta or the difficulties of negotiating marriage are mentioned [bars 48, 51, 91, 100, 118, 120, 128], as well as motto 2 [bars 93-94, 108, 110, 134], until Cecily is mentioned,

and we first hear her motto developed into a full theme: this motif (which is in a minor mode here) also has a coda of gracefully ascending triplets [bars 139-143]:

zione:glifu

datainvecedella

sua,pererror.

When Ernest accidentally leaves behind a cigarette case with an engraved dedication from Cecily, Algernon, partly facetious but also rather serious, asks for an explanation, particularly since it is up to him to approve the proposed marriage between Ernest and Gwendolen. Initially, Ernest claims that he knows no Cecily, but Algernon asks Lane, the manservant, to bring him the cigarette case. When Lane enters the scene, we hear his theme in direct mo tion [bars 148-149], and when he leaves it is played in contrary motion [bars 155-156], only to become a fugato when he re-enters with the cigarette case [bars 169ff]. In the meantime, there is a melodic flurry identical to the incipit of Puccini’s “Nei cieli bigi” [Ernest, bars 165166], an early example of the 20th-century stylistic features mentioned in the Preface. After trying to pass off Cecily as an old aunt and dressing the story up with other confusing excuses, Ernest finally reveals that his name is Jack, arousing surprise and dismay in Algernon [bars 231-240], and that he uses the name “Ernest” when he travels from the country to the city, pretending to be his own runaway brother. He also reveals that he is Cecily’s legal guardian, at the behest of Mr. Cardew, the man who adopted him as a child. This revelation occurs [bars 288ff. ] on the theme of the Minuet from the Finale of Act I of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni, when everyone is dancing and the composer ingeniously invents a threefold overlapping of this Minuet (in 3/4, danced by the nobles Donna Anna, Donna Elvira and Don Ottavio), with the Follia (in 3/8, danced by Leporello and the commoners) and with the Contraddanza (in 2/4, danced by Don Giovanni and Zerlina). It is one of Mozart’s most revolutionary pages, extremely modern because of its unprecedented layering of polyrhythms (this is 1787, after all!), each associated with a different social class. Castelnuovo-Tedesco uses this theme (we could call it the theme of noble origins) whenever Ernest/Jack mentions his own adoption by the nobleman Sir Thomas Cardew, grandfather of Cecily, who lives with Jack (whom she calls uncle) in a country manor.

At bar 308, the Miserere theme from Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore appears for the first time, which will later come to signal the tragicomic story of Cecilia’s housekeeper, Miss Prism. Twenty-seven years earlier, the unfortunate woman mistook the child entrusted to her for the voluminous manuscript of a novel of her own, putting the infant in a suitcase and the typescript in a stroller: the result of this blunder will be made clear toward the end of the opera. Castelnuovo-Tedesco ironically uses this emblematic theme from Il Trovatore, because it is the opera about child swapping par excellence.

In bars 365-368, we find the citation of another theme from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the Serenade (“Deh vieni alla finestra”), to which Castelnuovo-Tedesco appends an ironic de scending chromatic scale, to signify the shenanigans that Ernest, Jack’s alter ego, gets up to in the city. We will often hear the incipit of the Serenade from Don Giovanni (i.e., the scales and arpeggios of quavers and semiquavers that are played by the mandolin in the original) and much more rarely the actual melody. In any case, throughout the opera this excerpt will be manipulated in dozens of different ways.

Shortly thereafter, Algernon explains “Bunburyism”, the expedient (almost a philosophy of life) that he himself uses, much like Ernest/Jack, to evade family obligations. His ‘Ernest’ is an imaginary and seriously ill friend who lives in the countryside, Bunbury, to whose aid

“E lasciatemi

THE

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Castelnuovo-Tedesco

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (Reduction for voice and piano by Giovanni Del Vecchio)

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