Santa Fe Opera, Part 3: An Enchanted Garden

Mozart, in a letter to his father, described La Finta Giardiniera as a success; yet success was not enough to prevent its rapid disappearance from the theatre. Although it was subsequently rewritten as a German-language Singspiel, and a revised Italian version enjoyed a brief posthumous revival in Prague, Mozart’s early comic gem would spend the better part of the next two centuries as an obscurity. Its fortunes have improved only slightly since the appearance of the first widely available LP recording in 1980; only in the last two decades has it started to appear more frequently, both on the stage and in the racks of music shops. This season La Finta Giardiniera made its first appearance at the Santa Fe Opera, and the production – directed by Tim Albery, with inspired musical direction from Harry Bicket – was both a persuasive work of…