Overture to 'L'impresario in angustie'

Domenico Cimarosa was the most famous and popular Italian opera composer of the second half of the 18th Century. In the course of a brilliantly successful career he composed more than 65 operas as well as a significant body of instrumental music and works for the church. His operas were performed all over Europe, both in Italian and in translation. A number of Cimarosa’s operas continued to enjoy occasional stagings during the 19th Century, and his most famous work, Il matrimonio segreto, is one of only a handful of operas of the period never to have left the repertory. The one-act farsetta per musica, L’impresario in angustie (The Impresario in Distress), proved to be one of Domenico Cimarosa’s most successful works. Within a year of its prima in 1786 at Teatro Nuovo in Naples, it played in Rome and was soon heard in Paris (in a two-act version), Barcelona and at Eszterhàza under the musical direction of Joseph Haydn. By 1795 it had been produced in Lisbon, Warsaw, Vienna, Dresden, Copenhagen and St Petersburg. Before the turn of the century L’impresario in angustie had been performed in Danish, Swedish, Polish, Russian, French, German and English. There are at least five different overtures which have been found to exist for L’impresario in angustie, and each of these overtures clearly resembles overtures Cimarosa wrote for other operas, oratorios and cantatas. The version offered here is based on an 18th-century MS preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, the undoubted source of the printed edition of 1802 published in Paris by Sieber and the most widely-used version of the overture. Except for the scoring, this version is identical to the overture Cimarosa wrote three years earlier for La villana reconosciuta (The Country Girl Revealed). Like all of Cimarosa’s overtures, the current example is remarkable for its vitality, melodic invention and assured handling of the orchestra.