FULL MONDO NOVO (Paul Richards) Vienna 2022 Vienna Summer Music Festival
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: MONDO NOVO
- Composer: Richards Paul
- Libretto: Wendy Steiner Libretto Text, Libretto Index
- Venue & Opera Company: Palais Ehrbarsaal, Vienna, Austria
- Recorded: July 16 & 17, 2022
- Type: Staged Opera Live
- Singers: Nicole Chan, Mikayla Liu, Cassandra Petrie, Taylor Consiglio, Rachel Wilkins Pfeiffer, Francesca Fioravante, Therine Westhoven, Natalie Bychkovy, Rachel London, Sang Bin Park
- Conductor:
- Orchestra:
- Stage Director:
- Costume Designer:
Information about the Recording
- Published by: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW9S7VEYq1Q
- Date Published: 2023
- Format: Streaming
- Quality Video: 3 Audio:4
- Subtitles: nosubs
- Video Recording from: YouTube FULL VIDEO
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
Mondo Novo, Opera in Two Acts, 2022
The opera takes place on the first two days of a long-ago stay in Italy. Two 18th-century English girls, Annabel and Philomela, have arrived in Venice with their tutor Frances to pursue musical training at the famed Ospedale della Pietà. The orphans in the Ospedale are taught to sing and play instruments from an early age, but they must spend their lives cloistered in an all-female society of musicians: virgins performing in public unseen, hidden behind a grille.
Annabel’s mother (who is also Philomela’s guardian), Lady Caroline, has written daily instructions for the girls to follow. We see her the first day on stage “in London,” formulating these instructions, as Frances simultaneoulsy reads them aloud to the girls in Venice. Lady Caroline insists the girls avoid the city’s temptations, but at the same time, take full advantage of the new possibilities open to them as musicians abroad in the “modern” 18th Century. As Frances walks with the girls to the Ospedale, they thrill at the barkers, fortunetellers, and charlatans who crowd the streets of Venice.
Things were different for Lady Caroline. Her freedom was curtailed by a family secret, which she has arranged for the girls to learn on the second day of their stay, which is also Philomela’s eighteenth birthday. On this day, their music instructor Maestra reveals this hidden history. Eighteen years ago, she tells them, there had been an orphan at the Ospedale who was such a virtuosic singer that, against all the rules, she was permitted one night to perform unscreened on the stage of the opera house. An Englishman was in the audience—Lady Caroline’s husband and little Annabel’s father. He fell in love on the spot with the orphan soprano, but within a year, she died in childbirth in his arms. Distraught, he brought their infant daughter home to London for Lady Caroline to raise with Annabel, and immediately departed on a voyage of exploration from which he never returned. The orphaned infant was Philomela.
Despite the deep connection between the two girls, evident in their music making, Maestra convinces Philomela that she must abandon all she loves and enter the cloistered Ospedale to redeem her mother’s sin. Frances disagrees, arguing that two mothers have sacrificed their happiness for Philomela, and she must not squander their precious gift. Annabel describes Philomela’s future as a glorious new woman’s story that the two of them will write together. Convinced, Philomela composes a letter to her foster mother, which we see Lady Caroline simultaneously reading on stage, overjoyed that the risky revelation of her secret has ended well.
Through the new science of optics, “Mondo Novo” brought exotic places, historical events, and natural wonders vividly before the eyes of 18th-century viewers. Barkers for the device (also known as a magic lantern, cosmorama, raree-show, pantoscope) acted as “talking newspapers,” extolling modernity, innovation, and the scientific progress of the Age of Enlightenment.
But not everyone was enthusiastic. The artist Giambattista Tiepolo’s huge fresco, Mondo Novo, depicted a crowd so fascinated with the “new machine of illusions” that it ignored his and his son’s masterpieces. “Mondo Novo” thus symbolizes both the thrilling promise of the new and the pathos of the past that it displaces. In the opera, this conflict is the source of Annabel and Philomela’s pain and confusion. They learn that their explorer father deserted his family in his insatiable search for novelty, and their mothers paid a huge price. The girls, on the brink of womanhood and musical achievement, choose to be “modern” women, free to experience all the wonders the world offers, but aware of the sacrifices made by women before them that have given them this freedom.