Nostalgia for places one has never seen

Following Peter Mattei in Billy Budd last week, “Trove Thursday” turns to a different sort of Swedish royalty with Jacopo Foroni’s rare 1849 historical melodrama Cristina, Regina di Svezia to commemorate the 330th anniversary tomorrow of that enigmatic monarch’s death.

Foroni, an unsung mid-19th century composer, led a colorful if regrettably brief life. His early involvement in a political action during the Risorgimento forced him to flee Italy and he eventually settled in Sweden where he conducted the local premieres of important works by Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi and others. He perished in a cholera epidemic at just 33.

Cristina (composed in Italian) premiered in Stockholm when Foroni was just 23 and is considered his finest of his three operas. Based on historical events, it retains as little correspondence to what really happened as Rouben Mamoulian’s revered film Queen Christina starring a mesmerizing Greta Garbo.

This Cristina revival at Ireland’s Wexford Festival (which specializes in rescuing obscure repertoire) was so successful that the festival mounted Foroni’s first work—Margherita—just four years later. It’s remarkable how Foroni has been rediscovered in the 21st century. My enormous four-volume, 1300+ page New Grove Dictionary of Opera published in 1997 doesn’t even contain entries on either Foroni or Cristina.

Helena Dix, Wexford’s Cristina, bas been covering big roles like Norma and Semiramide at the Met and finally made her official stage debut there just last month as Alice Ford in Falstaff.

As Carl Gustav, Russian baritone Igor Golovatenko made his first big international splash at Wexford and since then his career has exploded with important engagements worldwide. Recently he was Onegin in DC and he will make his Met debut this fall as Prince Yeletsky in Pikovaya Dama.

Foroni: Cristina, Regina di Svezia
Wexford Festival
October 2013
Broadcast

Cristina Regina di Svezia — Helena Dix
Maria Euphrosina, — Lucia Cirillo
Axel Oxenstjerna, — David Stout
Erik — Patrick Hyland
Gabriele — John Bellemer
Carl Gustav — Igor Golovatenko
Johan — Daniel Szeili
Arnold Messenius — Thomas Faulkner

Conductor — Andrew Greenwood

Cristinacan be downloaded by clicking on the icon of a square with an arrow pointing downward on the audio player above and the resulting mp3 files will appear in your download directory.

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The archive which lists all “Trove Thursday” offerings in alphabetical order by composer has recently been updated to include all works posted up to last week.