THE COMPOSER ANTONIO SPADAVECCHIA (1907–1988) AND HIS OPERA THE GADFLY

Music by Antonio Spadavecchia
Libretto by Iosif Keller after the eponymous novel by Ethel Voynich

Soloists of the Mariinsky Academy of Young Opera Singers
The Mariinsky Orchestra

Musical Preparation: Larisa Gergieva
Chorus Master: Pavel Teplov
Conductor: Andrei Petrenko

The composer Antonio Spadavecchia (1907–1988) and his opera The Gadfly

Happy is the composer whose melody – even if it’s just the one – becomes so popular with the nation that the composer himself might not always be remembered and at times is forgotten entirely. Such melodies include the magnificent La Marseillaise and L’Internationale, the Christmas carols Silent Night, Holy Night and The Forest Raised a Christmas Tree as well as many songs from the war years. Older people who grew up in the post-war era will also remember another wonderful cinematic fairy-tale – Cinderella directed by Nadezhda Kosheverova featuring the great actors Faina Ranevskaya (the Stepmother) and Erast Garin (the King) as well as the young Yanina Zhejmo (Cinderella). Her merry song Stand up, Children, Stand in a Circle... was loved by children and adults alike and became the “calling card” of the Russian composer Antonio Spadavecchia.

The name and surname “betray” the Italian ancestry of this People’s Artist of the RSFSR. The composer’s grandfather the Garibaldian Nicolò Spadavecchia fought with Garibaldi himself to free their country of foreign rule but after the defeat during the Roman Uprising, in order to save himself from prosecution by the authorities, he was forced to flee Italy to Russia with his family and settled in Odessa.

The Garibaldian’s son Emmanuel became a sea captain while his grandson Antonio, inheriting his family’s love of music (his father had a good knowledge of Italian operas and his mother – a pianist – was trained in St Petersburg), became a composer. One hundred years after the event he turned to the occurrences of the national liberation movement in Italy when working on his opera The Gadfly after the eponymous novel by Ethel Lilian Voynich.

Antonio Spadavecchia was born on 3 June 1907 in Odessa. Soon after Antonio’s birth the family moved to Baku. Musical culture in the capital of Azerbaijan in the 20s was very intense. Antonio went to concerts of chamber and symphony music and he attended the opera house where he heard Prince Igor, Rusalka, Eugene Onegin, The Demon, Carmen and Faust for the first time. Regular music lessons at home ceased with the death of his mother when he was thirteen years old. After leaving school Antonio became a sea cadet and later a sailor in the oil-tanker fleet. But his interest in music would not go away: in 1926 Antonio Spadavecchia, still with the fleet, began to attend evening classes at the Baku Music Technical College. Later stages in his life included the music workers’ school of the Moscow Conservatoire where at the faculty of theory he was taught by Nikolai Myaskovsky, Mikhail Gnessin, Anatoly Alexandrov and Igor Sposobin until, in 1932, Antonio Spadavecchia became a conservatoire student in the composition class of Vissarion Shebalin.

Already while still a student the composer-to-be’s interest in musical theatre had been defined in principle. His works include overtures, instrumental concerti, chamber ensembles and romances... But what he composed most were operas, musical comedies, music for plays and films (in addition to the aforementioned Cinderella there are such films as Brave People, Trial Period, Kaine XVIII and Gutta-Percha Boy). It would take too long to list all of Spadavecchia’s works for musical theatre, but the most important ones are the operas Mistress of the Inn (after Carlo Goldini), The Road to Calvary (after Alexei Tolstoy), The Good Soldier Švejk (after Jaroslav Hašek) and The Captain’s Daughter (after Alexander Pushkin), the ballet The Shore of Hope and the musical fairy-tale and play Cinderella... But inarguably it is his opera The Gadfly that has enjoyed the greatest fame; following the world premiere in Perm (1957) it was staged in Kharkov, Moscow, Novosibirsk, Kuibyshev, Lvov, Riga and other cities in the USSR as well as in Bulgaria, Poland and the Czech Republic.

Ethel Voynich’s novel The Gadfly is particularly popular in Russia. The drama of the protagonist Arthur is in an unresolvable contradiction between his youthful purity, enthusiasm and the brutal reality of power – of the State and of the Church. At confession the youth speaks honestly of the forthcoming gathering of the Garibaldian revolutionaries. The priest, breaking the tradition of the confessional, informs the police. Arthur inadvertently becomes guilty of his friends’ being arrested. His beloved Gemma accuses him of treachery and slaps him in the face. Arthur is surrounded by deceit – he learns that canon Montanelli, whom he admired as a mentor and friend, is actually his father. Many years later Arthur returns as a revolutionary calling himself Rivares – the Gadfly. Gemma sees that Rivares is actually Arthur. When the armed Gadfly bursts through a crowd of gendarmes Montanelli tells him to lay down his weapon. The Gadfly is seized; too late, Montanelli realises he has sentenced his son to death. The Gadfly accepts his sentence with no emotion and Montanelli curses Heaven in pure rage...

The music of the opera is traditional and vividly emotional, rich in the melodies of Italian songs and revolutionary hymns. To characterise the protagonists the composer uses a system of leitmotifs, revealing their symphonic development. One Italian newspaper picked up on the production of Antonio Spadavecchia’s The Gadfly: “Although he is a follower of the Russian opera school there is nevertheless a distinct Italian fingerprint on his work. Beyond all doubt he often found inspiration in the opuses of Verdi and Puccini... But he never copied them, because as a musician Spadavecchia is deeply individual, his own man.” (Alfredo Glovine. Antonio Spadavecchia. La Voce della Regione, 12 December 1979).
Iosif Raiskin

http://www.mariinsky.ru/en/playbill/playbill/2015/5/3/3_1900/