Ormindo, with music by Pier Francesco Cavalli and words by Giovanni Faustini, premiered in the San Cassiano Theater in Venice in 1644. There were a few performances of it back in Cavalli’s day, and then it disappeared from the world’s stages until its resurrection at the hands of the British conductor and scholar Raymond Leppard. Leppard’s version, which premiered at Glyndebourne in 1967, was the first revival of any of Cavalli’s operas.

I was curious to know what Bernard McDonald, the up-and-coming young Scottish conductor who’s leading Pittsburgh Opera’s Ormindo, thinks about Cavalli and his long absence from repertoire. After all, Cavalli was the most important opera composer to follow Monteverdi!

OL:   Do you think Cavalli is the next big composer to be revived?
BM:   I think he is certainly enjoying a revival and we hope that this production will help put Ormindo back on the map after 360-odd years of near-absence. It is so interesting to work on a piece that comes from close to the beginning of our western musical theater tradition. This piece was not written for the court or some other highly subsidized operation. It was capitalist, commercial musical theater, just like Broadway now, and Cavalli and his collaborators were hoping to make a profit. So it is truly “popular” music. Much of it is jauntily syncopated, with the occasional “blue note” that sounds positively jazzy!

OL:   If you could travel back in time to Venice in those days, what would you most like to find out?
BM:   I think it would be fun to have a drink with Cavalli in one of his favorite hostelries. His lifestyle would be familiar to many musicians in America today, and while he was unquestionably successful, he too would have been juggling a church job, sorting out funding for the next production, dealing with the vicissitudes of a musical career...

OL:   Your name is on the performing edition of Ormindo along with Peter Foster's. Why did you make a new edition? Couldn't we just rent the parts from somewhere?
BM:   No, we could not rent parts. Had Raymond Leppard not done his reconstructions of these pieces they might still be unknown. For that we owe him much. However, a couple of generations of scholarship and trends in performance practice have revolutionized the field in the past forty years.

Leppard’s Ormindo is a bit of a Reader's Digest version, with some surprisingly significant aspects of the plot cut, and in terms of instrumentation, he was using the London Philharmonic with many modern string instruments. Leppard also composed some bits of it himself. Our version is 100% Cavalli, although we have made some cuts for the purposes of this production. Putting together this version for Pittsburgh Opera with Peter Foster has been a fascinating and absorbing experience.

OL:   Have you seen the original source material for Ormindo? What did it look like, and where did you see it?
BM:   Yes, I have seen it on computer screen, from a microfilm in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice. It consists mainly of a scribbled vocal line and a bass line. Peter Foster did a fine job of producing a beautifully legible score from it.

I spent many hours translating the score word for word. This was a lot of linguistic detective work. Some of the language is archaic, and the syntax is often quite different from modern Italian, but it is extremely pithy, full of wit, double entendre and there are moments of real pathos, too.

Then Peter and I spent many, many, many hours together going through every measure of the score. We discussed every word and bar to come up with something that was faithful to Cavalli and Faustini and dramaturgically sound. I was also concerned with modernizing and standardizing the spelling of the libretto to produce something that was user-friendly for our performers. There are occasional copyists’ inconsistencies and errors in the source libretti that need investigation as to what Faustini actually wrote, so more detective work is needed. And then proof read, proof read, and proof read again!

OL:   No wonder we’re not flooded with early Baroque operas! It seems there’s a tremendous amount of work necessary even before you can think of programming one of these works. I’ve seen the score you produced. It doesn't specify what instruments are to play, so how do you know what instruments to use?
BM:   There are original parts for a five-part string texture, so we are using 2 baroque violins, 1 viola, 1 viola da gamba and a violone. For continuo [the chord-playing instruments that accompany the conversational recitative] we will have two players on theorbos and/or guitars, two harpsichords and organ in addition to viola da gamba and occasional violone. Obviously there is a lot of flexibility here. In recitative we make choices as to who plays what according to the characters, what they're saying, the dramatic context and so on. I am thrilled to have Chatham Baroque as my collaborators in this regard.

OL:   Since there weren't conductors waving sticks around in Cavalli's day, how will you lead the performance?
BM:   From the keyboard! The most important thing for me to do in rehearsal is to help establish a suitable pacing and accompaniment for the text and action. Conducting is required of course, but I will do that from my perch at the harpsichord.

OL:   What are the challenges and rewards of preparing a performance of early opera?
BM:   Well, in some ways they are the same challenges as mounting any work of musical theater, but one must make informed decisions about how to sing it. This music in particular demands a degree of literacy and intellectual curiosity on the part of the singers. They have to spend quite a lot of time thinking about how they would actually speak those words. Conveying the wit and rhythm of the text is entirely possible to an English-speaking audience, but it requires a feel for the meter of the text and much more than a surface knowledge of what you're talking/singing about. The freedom that is associated with this repertory should never be confused with carte blanche to do what you like with it. 

And I must say, in addition to much witty and earthy music, there are moments in Ormindo that are as exquisite and transcendental as music can be. It’s so beautiful, so flexible, so singable! It’s been such a revelation to investigate, prepare, and now perform such a lovely and fun piece.

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