In the standard repertoire, comic opera more or less starts with Mozart. Of course, others came before him, but his towering command of the form — the way he fully realizes characters from high and low backgrounds and gives them personal dignity, quirky foibles and exquisite arias — casts a long shadow over all of them.
Still, there’s a two-hander from the first half of the 18th century, a few decades before Mozart’s birth, that anticipates the comic style to come. Pitting a wily maid against a buffoonish master — stock types that Mozart, Rossini and Donizetti would continue to mine for the next 100-plus years — it entertained audiences with its delightful music, relatable characters and reversal of the traditional power dynamics accorded by gender and social station.
This is Georg Philipp Telemann’s “Pimpinone,” from 1725, which came eight years before Pergolesi’s better-known piece with the same premise, “La Serva Padrona,” but is rarely heard today. The Boston Early Music Festival, though, is presenting it in a rare staging at Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, in Great Barrington, Mass., on Friday and Saturday, then at Caramoor in Katonah, N.Y., on Sunday.
“It’s one of those quirks of history that ‘Pimpinone’ hasn’t become a repertory piece, because it really deserves to be,” said Steven Zohn, a Telemann scholar.
“Pimpinone” belongs to a long-obsolete genre of classical music, the intermezzo, a short comedy intended to be broken up and performed between the acts of a dramatic or tragic opera. Its everyday characters have jobs, worry about money and fall prey to gossip, in stark contrast to the noble bearing and life-or-death stakes of the mythological and historical personages of opera seria.
The relative obscurity of “Pimpinone” has a few potential causes aside from the dominance of Mozart. The score became available in a modern edition in the 1930s, said Zohn, who wonders whether “the fact that it was published during the Nazi era had anything to do with its initial neglect.” (Telemann was German.)
Posterity took a dim view of Telemann’s prodigious output as well. By one count, he wrote twice as much music as Bach and Handel combined. “That has not helped his reputation,” Zohn said. “If you’re Beethoven, you only wrote nine symphonies, but man, those are great nine symphonies. If you’re Haydn and you produce over 100 symphonies, well, they can’t be all good, right? You’re just scribbling them off.”
The concept of original genius, the Romantic-era notion that a select few composers like Beethoven were uniquely brilliant and disposed to produce masterpieces, was already emerging as an idea in the 1770s, Zohn said. On top of that, there was a concerted effort among modern Bach biographers to elevate Bach by knocking down contemporaries like Telemann, said Stephen Stubbs, a Baroque specialist and co-artistic director of the Boston Early Music Festival.
In Telemann’s time, though, it was simply a composer’s job to churn out high-quality works. “The astounding thing about Telemann is not that he wrote so much music, because other composers did write incredible amounts of music,” Zohn said, “but that the music is overall so good.”
“La Serva Padrona” made its way to Paris, where it became a lightning rod for the Querelle des Bouffons, an early-1750s clash in philosophical and musical circles over the relative merits of Italian and French opera. The Baroque opera revival of the 20th century focused squarely on Handel. Telemann didn’t have such luck.
The fact that he has fewer than 10 extant stage scores and a modern reputation focused on his instrumental music doesn’t help either. “Bach scholars have it easy,” Zohn said. “They’ve had easy access to good editions of all of his music, and same for Handel, for 150 years now. That’s a real luxury.”
And so “Pimpinone” has a hill to climb to wider recognition, despite its felicities, charm and accessibility. The plot is so cartoonishly simple that its three parts are more like tableaus than full-blown acts: Pimpinone encounters Vespetta, she becomes his maid, then she becomes his wife. That’s it.
The characters, with their complementary personalities and musical profiles, spark humor and chaos. Vespetta, a soubrette, sings graceful, fetching and ornamented melodies that make her endearing despite her scheming. Pimpinone is a classic buffo, prone to bluster, bungling and self-pity. (In an interesting echo, Vespetta means “little wasp,” and Serpina, the heroine of “Serva Padrona,” means “little snake,” both references to the heroines’ sharp, quarrelsome personalities.) The singers in “Pimpinone” switch back and forth between recitatives in German and arias in Italian, reflecting common practice at the time at the Hamburg Opera, where Telemann was musical director.
The early music festival is fortunate in the singer it has found for its coming “Pimpinone,” a revival of a pandemic-era staging from 2021: the Bavarian-born bass-baritone Christian Immler, who speaks German, French, Italian and English. “It comes relatively naturally to me,” Immler said of the opera’s linguistic demands.
The Italian lends itself beautifully to operatic singing and suits each aria’s particular character, Immler said, but the real art of Telemann’s vocal setting is the sung dialogue in German. “The recitatives do not feel at all like fillers or empty vehicles to transport a little bit of information,” he added. “They are full of colors, quick changes, very witty.”
Today, intermezzos are staged as self-contained comic operas or paired with another work as a double bill; they aren’t split up and shoehorned into other pieces. The Boston festival, having a little fun, interweaves “Pimpinone” with Telemann’s “Ino,” a solo dramatic cantata that depicts a heroine from Roman mythology and her desperate flight from her crazed, murderous husband. “Ino” (sung by Amanda Forsythe) is divided into two parts and interspersed among the three scenes of “Pimpinone.” Call it a reverse intermezzo: This time, the comedy is the main event, and the drama is the palate cleanser.
Stubbs sees the pairing as an opportunity to re-evaluate Telemann’s legacy through the lens of two works that, separated by 40 years, form rough bookends to his career. “You see this very special gift for comic opera with ‘Pimpinone,’” he said, “but then with ‘Ino,’ a very high style and one that goes basically 20 years beyond anything that Bach and Handel did.”
The cantata’s deft use of fully orchestrated recitatives heightens the drama and shows how Telemann, in his 80s, was dialed into the musical revolution of the early Classical period. “Telemann was right there with Gluck and Benda and Mozart capturing that feeling,” Stubbs said.
Zohn speculated that the stylistic progression in “Ino,” the way the piece’s musical language evolves from Baroque to midcentury galant to early Classical, is a metaphor for Ino’s metamorphosis into a goddess at the end.
“In 1765, Telemann was very much a composer of the past,” Zohn said. “I mean, he was a dinosaur, and yet he seems to be understanding what’s happening to music and even helping to tell this story. So perhaps he thought, ‘Well, what better way to underscore immortality than write the latest music, the music of the future.’”
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