Il templario
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| Title: | The Knights Templar |
| Original title: | Il templario |
| Original language: | Italian |
| Music: | Otto Nicolai |
| Libretto : | Girolamo Maria Marini |
| Literary source: | Walter Scott : Ivanhoe |
| Premiere: | February 11, 1840 |
| Place of premiere: | Turin, Teatro Regio |
| Place and time of the action: | England, 1194 |
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Il templario (German: The Templar ) is an opera in three acts by Otto Nicolai based on a libretto by Girolamo Maria Marini , which goes back to the novel Ivanhoe by Walter Scott . The first performance took place in the Teatro Regio in Turin on February 11, 1840.
Work history
Nicolai's opera has a complex genesis. Even before the Turin premiere, it was fundamentally reworked, insofar as the originally planned lieto fine was replaced by a tragic ending. This meant that Nicolai made further changes in almost all subsequent performances that he himself conducted. The piano reduction published by Lucca in Milan is only an intermediate stage in this regard.
At the premiere on February 11, 1840 at the Teatro Regio in Turin, Pio Botticelli (Cedrico), Lorenzo Salvi (Vilfredo), Luigia Abbadia (Rovena), Eutimio Polonini (Luca), Cesare Badiali (Briano), Achille Bassi (Isacco), Antonietta Marini Raineri (Rebecca), Angela Villa (Emma) and Antonio Bruni (Gualtiero).
The opera was a worldwide success for the time and saw more than seventy productions. Only in the German-speaking area could it not prevail against Heinrich Marschner's Der Templer und die Jüdin , although Nicolai himself re-published the work on December 20, 1845 in a German translation of Siegfried Kapper's libretto ( The Knight Templar ). An arrangement planned by the Reich Office for Music Processing under the title The Sarazenin could no longer be completed due to the war.
For a long time the opera was considered impossible to perform, insofar as the only known score was burned in Berlin in 1943. In the meantime, the musicologist Michael Wittmann has discovered four more copies and combined them into a critical edition. The first re-performance took place in 2008 at the Opera in Chemnitz ; another performance took place in 2016 at the Salzburg Festival .
Nicolais Il templario , along with Saverio Mercadantes La vestale and Giovanni Pacini's Sappho, was one of the three great operatic successes of the Italian opera season in 1840. These formed the framework within which the work of the young Giuseppe Verdi moved. In addition to this music-historical aspect, Nicolais Templario also has a highly topical plot insofar as the tragic turn of the opera here results from the inability of the nations and religions involved to communicate, although they do not communicate with one another. In this respect, it is a parable about the difficulty of a multicultural society.
Edition
Otto Nicolai: Il templario. Editio princeps. Presented by Michael Wittmann. 3 volumes, Berlin 2008.
Web links
- Il templario (Otto Nicolai) in the Corago information system of the University of Bologna
Individual evidence
- ↑ Work data for Il templario by Otto Nicolai based on the MGG with discography in Operone
- ^ Michael Wittmann: Il Templario - Notes on a rediscovery . Ed .: Program booklet Theater Chemnitz 2008.