Fabrizio Sansoni-Teatro dell’Opera di Roma

L’italiana in Algeri, Rossini’s opera buffa, dramatizes the story of an Italian woman, Isabella, captured by Algerian pirates, and her strategic manipulation of the Ottoman Algerian Mustafà Bey who lecherously seeks to install her in his seraglio. Ultimately Isabella masterminds the befuddlement of Mustafà and the escape of all the Italian captives from Algiers for a happy and harmonious ending, following the libretto of Angelo Anelli. The comedy can be more awkward for us today, some two centuries after the opera’s Venice premiere in 1813, since in addition to the comic contest of the sexes, it clearly celebrates a sort of imperial victory of European cleverness over Muslim North Africans.

On June 5 the Rome Opera revived the classic production created by the eminent Roman director Maurizio Scaparro in 2000 for Palermo. Scaparro, who died in 2023 at the age of 91, was closely associated with Giorgio Strehler, the titan of postwar Italian theater. Inspired by the values of carnival culture, Scaparro actually helped to revive the Venetian Carnival in 1979 while he was working with the Venice Biennale, and carnivalesque accents shape his sense of Rossinian comedy. Scaparro also engaged in theatrical projects that explored the spirit of the Mediterranean and emphasized the common culture of the Mediterranean lands and peoples.

Palermo was the perfect place for Scaparro to create his 2000 L’italiana, with Sicily geographically poised between Italy and North Africa, for centuries in the early Middle Ages a part of the Muslim world. Rome, however, is a fitting place for the revival, the Italian capital where government has been polarized and preoccupied now for the last decade by the crisis of impoverished Mediterranean refugees from Africa, risking their lives in desperate efforts to reach Italy. The Rome production of 2025 was restaged by Scaparro’s frequent collaborator Orlando Forioso.

L’italiana is an opera of particular interest to me, because it plays a large role in my book The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon, published in 2016. The book project emerged from a paper that I initially meant to write about Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio; the research led me to realize that the Abductionbelonged to a huge repertory of largely forgotten operas about Turkish subjects that culminated in Rossini’s masterpieces L’italiana in Algeri (1813), Il turco in Italia (1814), and Maometto Secondo(1820) which was recomposed for Paris as Le siège de Corinthe (1826).

Since June is the month of book chat on this website, I take the liberty of summarizing briefly the argument of my own book: operas with Turkish scenarios were intended to dramatize issues of absolute government and arbitrary power (as in the case of Mustafà Bey) which were conventionally associated with the Ottoman empire, but were also clearly recognized as relevant to contemporary Europe. For instance, Rossini’s opera about Maometto (Mehmet), who besieged and conquered Byzantine Constantinople in 1453, was certainly intended as masked commentary on the conqueror Napoleon whose rise and fall had so recently shaped the lives of the composer and all his audiences.

Rossini himself was hailed ironically as the new Napoleon by the French writer Stendhal: “Since the death of Napoleon there has been another man spoken of every day in Moscow and Naples, London and Vienna, Paris and Calcutta.” This new conqueror was the astonishingly popular Rossini. When he triumphed with L’italiana in Venice in 1813 he was precociously 21, but since Rossini’s birthday was on February 29, 1792, only recurring in leap year, by 1813, according to the “ingenious paradox” of Gilbert and Sullivan, he would have been just “a little boy of five.”

The musical director of the Rome Opera is Michele Mariotti, whose father Gianfranco Mariotti was the founder and longtime superintendent of the Pesaro Rossini Festival, established in 1979 in the composer’s birthplace. Michele trained at the Pesaro Rossini Conservatory and has been an advocate for Rossini’s work in Italy. It was he who conducted the new production of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell at La Scala in 2024, though he did not himself conduct L’italiana in Rome in 2025. The opera was led by the young Roman conductor Sesto Quatrini who had a lovely sense of Rossini’s rhythms which, in the overture to L’italiana, seem animated by the frothy currents of the Mediterranean.

The current artistic director of the Pesaro Festival is Mariotti’s close friend Juan Diego Flórez, and between them they have done an enormous amount to bring the spirit of Pesaro— of elegantly and delicately thrilling bel canto Rossinian singing and conducting— to the stages of Italy and the wider operatic world. Pesaro has also celebrated the variety of Rossini’s 39 operas and transformed the performance repertory. It is worth noting that when L’italiana was performed at the Metropolitan Opera in 1973 (starring Marilyn Horne), no Rossini opera except the Barber of Seville had been performed at the Met in forty years, dating back to 1933 when the one-Act Signor Bruschino was given on a double bill with Elektra!

Fabrizio Sansoni – Teatro dell’Opera di Roma

The Rome Opera’s 2025 L’italiana channels the seaside Pesaro spirit with a stunningly beautiful production by Scapparo—built around carved Moorish screens, the Mediterranean sea and sky, and jewel-colored costumes— and consummately stylish Rossini singing from a young and largely Italian cast. Pesaro veteran bass-baritone Paolo Bordogna was Mustafà, though at the premiere it was announced that he had been “suddenly struck by aphonia” after he mysteriously lost his voice in the middle of the first Act: After the curtain came down for 15 minutes the opera resumed with the very youthful Adolfo Corrado as Mustafà, in scarlet robes with jeweled turban, but somehow still wearing his eyeglasses; he saved the evening, and had a fine success as an unusually amiable Mustafà, a little goofy in glasses but not without charm. Furthermore, unlike the bass-baritone Bordogna who was clearly not at his best, Corrado sang the role as a true basso, just as Rossini intended, with a husky booming voice and real relish for both the frisky ornamentation and the sonorous low notes.

When I wrote The Singing Turk, I was interested to learn that the very same basso, Roman-born Filippo Galli, created the role of Mustafà in Venice and each of the other Rossinian singing Turks: the irresistible Prince Selim in Il turco in Italia at La Scala in Milan and the invincible Sultan Maometto at San Carlo in Naples. In short, Rossini looked to Galli as the incarnation of Turkishness, his basso voice conveying hyper-masculinity in these bel canto roles, while a contemporary print shows him with dark complexion, a wide-open shirt collar revealing his chest hair, and a hand tucked into his jacket in the manner of Napoleon. While Mustafà is the most lecherous of the three Rossinian Turks, all three were meant to possess a certain sexual charisma deriving from their basso vocal display and related to their positions of prestige and authority. Galli’s modern descendant was Samuel Ramey, a masterful singing Turk. Corrado, jumping in as Mustafà in Rome, rose to the challenges of the role.

If Mustafà, in the wrong production, can come off as a farcical caricature, Isabella, who tames the Turk, may seem to take a cruel pleasure in the humiliation of the besotted Algerian while appearing rather bossy even toward her Italian lovers, tenor Lindoro and bass-baritone Taddeo. In Rome, the Sicilian mezzo-soprano Chiara Amarù found the gorgeous sensuality of the vocal role with its seductive coloratura and rich mezzo colorings but also the tender heart of a character whose spirit of flirtation was interpreted with supreme geniality. Her entrance aria, after her ship has been taken by pirates, begins by lamenting her fate but leads to the brilliant cabaletta in which she takes courage and affirms, “so a domar gli uomini,” (I know how to tame men), already enjoying her own captivity.

It is perhaps worth noting that the Barber of Seville follows the formula of a “singing Turk” opera: if Dr. Bartolo were a basso Turk, and Rosina his captive (instead of his ward), Almaviva would be undertaking the abduction from the seraglio. Rosina, of course, is nominally Spanish though she sings in lovely Rossinian Italian (and the role is certainly in Amarù’s repertory), but Isabella connects more directly with Italian audiences as a self-declared Italian girl. In the lovely rondo aria “Pensa alla patria,” she urges the Italian captives to think patriotically of the fatherland, but Amarù sang without a trace of earnest didacticism, as if her homeland Italy were the true romantic passion of a young woman who already had too many suitors.

The Napoleonic “Kingdom of Italy,” created in 1805, was already coming undone as Napoleon retreated from Russia in the winter of 1812-1813, just as Rossini’s Isabella was taking the stage in Venice. Her patriotic sentiment was controversial enough, adumbrating the Risorgimento nationalism of the next generation, so that one early production in Rome changed the title to “Pensa alla sposa:” think about your wife! Tenor Lindoro hardly needed that lesson, for he could only think of Isabella, and young Italian tenor Dave Monaco, sang with exquisite sweetness from his very first aria “Languir per una bella” (To languish for a beauty), with horn obbligato.

While giving lessons in Italian patriotism to Lindoro, Isabella also offered lessons in seduction to Mustafà’s rejected harem wife Elvira: “Io v’insegnerò” (I will teach you). Amarù was at her very loveliest singing with flute obbligato the long winding line of the cavatina “Per lui che adoro” (For him whom I adore), though she sang to her mirror, clearly adoring herself, while her trio of besotted admirers, Mustafà, Lindoro, and Taddeo, watched from behind a carved screen. The big-voiced Georgian bass-baritone Misha Kiria was excellent as Taddeo, worrying over his prospective castration as a harem eunuch, while soprano Jessica Ricci as Elvira beautifully occupied the top of the staff in Rossini’s vocal ensembles.

Fabrizio Sansoni-Teatro dell’Opera di Roma

The structure of the plot begins with Lindoro as a slave in Algiers, to be rescued by his beloved Isabella, thus creating an operatic reversal of gender roles. In Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio, after all, it is the tenor who arrives in the Ottoman world to rescue the woman he loves. Though it seems likely that Rossini had some familiarity with Mozart’s Abduction, presented in Vienna in 1782, the huge success of L’italiana in some sense rendered Mozart’s Turkish rescue opera unnecessary in Italy. In fact Die Entführung aus dem Serail seems not to have been performed in Italy until the very late date of 1952, when Il ratto dal serraglio was staged at La Scala with Maria Callas in the role of the captive Konstanze, her only Mozart role.

The Ottoman empire, in the times of Mozart and Rossini, was not an Orientalist fantasy but a real and mappable polity, circling the shores of the Mediterranean from Greece to Morocco, with its capital at Constantinople/Istanbul. Piracy and captivity, so essential to the plot of Die Entführung and L’italiana, as well as numerous other eighteenth-century operas about singing Turks, were not merely melodramatic devices for separating operatic lovers. From the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century, there were constant and reciprocal pirate raids carried out by Muslim and Christian ships on the Mediterranean, with captives frequently enslaved and sometimes ransomed or rescued. This constituted an arena of Mediterranean slave trade alongside the better-known Atlantic slave trade, and probably involved hundreds of thousands of captives across three centuries.

The Barbary pirates of Algiers, operating under the implicit protection of the Ottoman empire in Constantinople, were still active enough in Rossini’s early lifetime so that even faraway America fought two “Barbary wars” against the pirates of Algiers, one under Thomas Jefferson from 1801 to 1805, one under James Madison in 1815-1816. By the next generation such captivity was already becoming the stuff of lurid literary fantasy, as detailed in the classic work of British pornography The Lustful Turk in 1828. In 1830, the age of modern Mediterranean imperialism was inaugurated with the French occupation of Ottoman Algeria. By then Rossini had given up composing operas, retiring from opera in his thirties with Guillaume Tell in Paris in 1829.

Fabrizio Sansoni – Teatro dell’Opera di Roma

Operas about Turks largely disappeared after Rossini stopped composing, and across the nineteenth century the Mediterranean was reshaped by an imperial imbalance of power, with the Ottoman empire seen as “the sick man of Europe”— no longer operatically interesting. Yet, Rossini’s great ensembles in L’italiana celebrate a certain cultural unity of the Mediterranean, and Scaparro appreciated the carnival aspects of the composer’s perspective. When Isabella and Mustafà come face to face, toward the end of Act I, he is instantly smitten, and she enjoys her triumph, but Corrado and Amarù performed a kind of spectacular vocal mating dance, responding to each other in swirls of semi-staccato sixteenth notes. The famous Act I finale then culminates in all the characters— Turks and Italians— taking on the voices of percussion instruments, singing as bells and drums, din din and bum bum.

They claim to be dazed and confused, but in fact they come together to form a sort of Janissary band playing Turkish “mehter” music together, echoing the Janissary band in the orchestra. The Act II finale stages the distraction of Mustafà with an honorary induction into the Italian society of Pappataci, an order of gentlemen who solemnly dedicate themselves to sleeping and eating. The bey is ridiculously eager to become a Pappataci, donning a chef’s toque in place of his turban, but in fact the opera is laughing at all Mediterranean men, Italian and Turkish. In this opera, which is much more about the war of the sexes than the clash of civilizations, Mustafà’s male arrogance is also meant as a commentary on Italian masculinity, anticipating the modern cinematic perspective of film comedies like Divorce, Italian Style in 1961.

The Pappataci initiation provides cover for the Italians’ escape, and the choruses of Turks and Italians join in the finale, not raging against one another, but perfectly harmonious as they look to their respective shores of the Mediterranean. Scaparro’s production insists that this is not a triumph of Italians over Turks, and they salute each other in a spirit of reconciliation. The disturbing presence of Mussolini’s name over the proscenium in Rome, credited with the 1920s renovation of the opera house, serves as a reminder that Italy once nourished aggressively imperial designs on the Mediterranean as “Mare Nostrum.” At the current moment of Mediterranean crisis in the 2020s— vulnerable boats, desperate immigrants, fatal voyages, nasty xenophobia, and, most recently, brutal warfare on the eastern Mediterranean shore—Rossini, as interpreted by Scaparro, offers another vision: a familial sea of resemblances, where cultural tensions may be reconciled in musical harmony.