Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari

Wolf-Ferrari is best known for his comic operas set to texts by the Venetian playwright, Carlo Goldoni, such as Le Donne Curiose (1903), I Quattro Rusteghi (1906), and Il Campiello (1936). He made only one foray into verismo with I Gioielli della Madonna which we are presenting in May, 2010.

Wolf-Ferrari was born in Venice in 1876, the son of an Italian mother and a German father. Although he studied piano from an early age, music was not the primary passion of his young life. In fact, as a teenager Wolf-Ferrari wanted to be a painter like his father; he studied intensively in Venice and even traveled abroad to study in Munich. It was in Munich that Wolf-Ferrari began getting serious about music. He enrolled in the conservatory there and began taking counterpoint and composition classes. These initially casual music classes eventually completely eclipsed his art studies, and music took over Wolf-Ferrari’s life.

At age 19, Wolf-Ferrari left the conservatory and traveled home to Venice. There he worked as a choral conductor, married, had a son called Max Winterfeld, and met both Arrigo Boïto and Verdi. Just a few years later Wolf-Ferrari debuted his first opera, Cenerentola, based on the story of Cinderella. The opera was a failure in Italy, and the humiliated young composer moved back to Munich. German audiences would prove more appreciative of his work; a few years later, a revised version of La Cenerentola was a hit in Brennan, while the beautiful cantata La vita nuova brought the young composer international fame.

Wolf-Ferrari now began transforming the wild and witty farces of the 18th-century Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni into comic operas. The resulting works were musically eclectic, melodic, and utterly hilarious; every single one became an international success. In fact, until the outbreak of World War I, Wolf-Ferrari’s operas were among the most performed in the world.

World War I, however, was a nightmare for Wolf-Ferrari. The young composer, who had been dividing his time between Munich and Venice, suddenly found his two countries at war with each other. He eventually moved to safety in Zürich, but the stress and sadness of the war brought him to a complete creative standstill. It was not until after the war’s end that Wolf-Ferrari moved back to Munich and began working again. A new melancholy vein appeared in his post-war work; his operas grew darker and more emotionally complex. Among these darker operas was Sly, an opera about a comic buffoon which transforms midstream into a tale of emotional torture and suicide. Ferrari was his mother's maiden-name, which he added to his own surname in 1895. His father was a painter, and sent Ermanno to Rome to study art. From there he went to Munich, and it was while there that he decided to concentrate instead on music, taking lessons from Josef Rheinberger. He wrote his first works in the 1890s.

In 1900, having failed to have two previous efforts published, Wolf-Ferrari saw the first performance of one of his operas, Cenerentola, which was given in Venice. This was a failure at its première, although a later performance in Bremen was a success, setting a pattern for his later work, much of which was premièred in Germany and was received a good deal better there than it was in his native Italy. Among these works are Le donne curiose (1903), I quattro rusteghi (1906), and Il segreto di Susanna (1909), all of them comedies, and all of them successful at their German premières.

With the outbreak of World War I, Wolf-Ferrari moved to Zürich and composed much less, though he still wrote another comedy, Gli amanti sposi (1916). He did not really pick up his rate of output until the 1920s, when he wrote Das Himmelskleid (1925) and Sly (1927), the latter based on William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. In 1939 he became professor of composition at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. In 1946 he moved again to Zürich before returning to Venice.

He is buried in the Venetian cemetery island of San Michele.

Jewels of the Madonna
I Gioielli della Madonna premièred in Berlin on December 23, 1911, in its German version, Der Schmuck Der Madonna. A few weeks later on January 16, 1912, the opera premiered in Italian at the Chicago Auditorium followed by its Metropolitan Opera première in March.

It was revived at the Met during the 1925/26 and 1926/27 seasons starring Maria Jeritza, Giovanni Martinelli and Giuseppe Danise. Our performance marks I Gioielli's first hearing in New York since then.

More about Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari at Wikipedia
List of Wolf-Ferrari's Operas