The Nearly Lost Work of a ‘Born Opera Composer’ Returns

Historians try to be precise, so it is awkward to admit that I can’t recall exactly when I first noticed the existence of an opera by Carolina Uccelli. At some point, maybe about six years ago, the name jumped out at me from a list. I do recall my reaction. A female composer got an opera onto the stage in 1835? With an all-star cast? She must have been extraordinary!

That was the start of a journey that culminates this month with the modern premiere of Uccelli’s “Anna di Resburgo” by the Teatro Nuovo company, in Montclair, N.J., on July 20 and in New York on the 24. Uccelli was indeed extraordinary, and so is the single surviving opera by which we can assess her abilities. Behind it lies a human story, touching and somewhat sad, to which there is now a chance to add a happy postscript.

Italian opera was the single most competitive and economically significant branch of music worldwide in the early 19th century. No female composer ever established herself in it. Success for women, at the time, meant publishing miniatures for the salon, and Uccelli achieved that while still in her teens. But conceiving whole music-dramas and wrangling them through the marketplace was a gritty, cutthroat business; nobody could imagine a woman pursuing it.

The brave youngster who tried to make herself an exception was born Carolina Pazzini, in 1810, to an upper-class Florentine family. She had thorough musical training and gained a precocious local reputation for her singing and keyboard improvisations. Around 1827, when Italy’s leading publisher issued an album of her ariettas, she married the widower Filippo Uccelli, a celebrated and sometimes controversial physician who was supportive of her improbable ambitions. He passed along to journalists a letter from Gioachino Rossini in praise of her first opera, “Saul,” produced in Florence in 1830. He probably also paid some of its costs; one of Filippo’s students later wrote disapprovingly that the good doctor had squandered what should have been his sons’ inheritance on the “caprices” of their young stepmother.

The opening night of “Saul” was by all accounts a triumph, but later in its run came evidence of the prejudice that could greet a woman stepping outside her expected sphere. The Harmonicon in London reported that “the Florentines have been making themselves merry, as well in verse as in prose, upon this lady’s production, and the high and mighty protection which Rossini is known to have afforded her.” The German periodical Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung allowed itself a baseless hint that Rossini’s interest might have been more in Uccelli’s beauty than in her talent. The Florence journal Il Censore rebuked the theater for giving place to “feminine vanity.”