Italy in the spring of 1813 was not exactly a barrel of laughs. Following the failure of Napoleon’s Russia campaign, it was not just Europe’s future that was up in the air; few were the Italian families that had not lost a son to the Bonapartist press gang, and fear was rife that the conscripts might never return from that harebrained adventure. And yet Italians were chortling. The staged work on everyone’s lips was Gioacchino Rossini’s L’ITALIANA IN ALGERI, a fast-moving comedy about a young Italian woman who’s brought in as a slave to satisfy the erotic urges of the Bey of Algiers but instead ends up creating waves in the ruler’s harem and even enabling all the captured Italians in Algiers to escape. Now, comic operas were being churned out by the dozen in Rossini’s time – and not only in Italy – and he himself had already penned multiple works of that ilk. However, Rossini’s ITALIANA resonated with the public for a quite different reason – and its success offers insights into what makes a good comic opera.

Firstly, it needs a good ending. We have to know that it’s ok to laugh, and our mirth has to give us some sense of relief and liberation, and that requires the self-assuredness of the lieto fine. The »comic« label reflects our slant on the storyline, even though the storyline of most comic operas is actually quite sobering: there’s nothing particularly hilarious about slavery in countries of the Mediterranean (as with ITALIANA) or death row for a deserter (as in Lortzing’s case in CZAR AND CARPENTER), yet our certainty that things are going to work out for the best allows us to get behind these stories – just as our memory of past dangers seems to ebb with the passage of time. Comedy aligns with hope …the suggestion that even the bleakest of situations may turn out well in the end.

For that to happen, though, and for all its comic absurdities, the piece must still have plot elements that audiences can relate to in some way: experiences with a small-minded authority in the form of Mayor van Bett in CZAR AND CARPENTER or the sense of a menacing autocratic power that emanates from the first aria by the (real) Czar. Or the reminder in ITALIANA of the many compatriots stranded in foreign lands – not for nothing did Rossini have his eponymous heroine sing her patriotic »Pensa alla patria« aria towards the end of the work. Even the famous finale to Act 1 in ITALIANA, in which the main characters dispense with meaningful texts in favour of utterances like »boom-boom« and »crack-crack«, has its own validity as a kind of commentary on a world in which individuals have been scattered like cogs in a societal machine whose workings no one understands anymore.

So the comedy allows us a few short hours of relief from the absurdity of our daily round – not as simple escapism but because the distance it affords us suggests that we will make it through. People who tread the boards tend to survive to tell the tale; the dead are the ones who have loved too much or hated too much.

Since August 2012 Jörg Königsdorf has been Head Dramaturg at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, where he has curated a Meyerbeer cycle, world premieres by Aribert Reimann and Detlev Glanert and the new RING OF THE NIBELUNG by director Stefan Herheim. Königsdorf studied Economics and History of Art and since 1995 has also worked as music critic for publications such as Süddeutsche Zeitung, Tagesspiegel and Opernwelt.