New production by Piccolo Opera Festival – with the special support of Eu Japan Fest and ZTKMS Brda

Rita:

I’m cheerful and I sing: this house is mine!
Who on earth could be happier than I am?
Here, I’m both queen and king!

…

Ah! I truly must thank the Blessed Virgin
for all the misfortunes I’ve suffered;
I lost my husband, my house burned down… along with
all the others in the village…
A widow, devastated, I came to settle in Bergamo..
I remarried… and now here I am, the happiest woman of all.
What a difference between my Beppe and the other one! That other one! A husband who thought
he had the right to hit his wife… How awful!
So, to avoid a repeat of that little pattern
in my second marriage, I didn’t let myself be caught off guard—
and now, from time to time: wham, bam… I give him a taste myself!
As a rule, once a week…

 

This entertaining one-act opera was composed by Donizetti in Paris between 1839 and 1841 (as recently reconstructed by the critical edition Ricordi), while awaiting a new commission from the Opéra, thanks to the successes he had already achieved in the French capital, where he had moved in 1838.

Although complete in its draft form, the opera was not performed until after the composer’s death, on April 29, 1860, at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, under the title Rita, ou Le mari battu, which in the Italian version was simply shortened to Rita.. From the composer’s final revisions to the score, his choice had ultimately fallen on the title Deux hommes et une femme, which effectively encapsulates the dramatic core of the opera, in which the protagonist, Rita, finds herself torn between… two husbands!

Donizetti’s one-act score is based on the text of a vaudeville written by librettist Gustave Vaëz. The cast includes only three roles, Rita, Beppe, and Gasparo (soprano, tenor, and baritone, respectively), who are involved in a plot based on an unexpected marital triangle in which Rita finds herself unwillingly entangled.

Her first husband, Gasparo, after beating and abandoning her, suddenly reappears to erase all evidence of their marriage so that he can remarry a girlfriend who is waiting for him in Canada. In the meantime, Rita has remarried Beppe, whom she beats from time to time, just to be on the safe side. Both husbands, therefore, try to get rid of their troublesome wife in a crescendo of challenges that culminates in a decisive duel. And it is here, after Rita confesses that she only slaps him because she is afraid of being beaten by him, that Beppe admits his love for his wife and his desire to stay with her. Gasparo, on the other hand, after destroying the marriage certificate and dictating to Beppe the recipe for how husbands should treat their wives, returns to his beautiful Canadian girlfriend.

The uniqueness of this new production lies in the staging conceived by director Anna Etsuko Tsuri, which the Festival has welcomed thanks to the support of EU Japan Fest, on the occasion of GO! 2025. 2025. Instead of a small Italian inn, the opera will be set in a Japanese martial arts dojo in the early 20th century. In these disciplines, power is not used for violence, but is allowed for peace and love, incorporating even that of the opponent into the fight as a single flow of energy. This vision contrasts with that of a pyramid-structured society, where the strong are considered superior and the weak must obey the strong, in order to build a more equitable world based on mutual respect.