A gale of great music full of humor, served by the best Rossini singers of the moment

“Questo è un nodo avviluppato,
Questo è un gruppo rintrecciato.
Chi sviluppa più inviluppa,
Chi più sgruppa, più raggruppa.”
La Cenerentola (act II) 

La Cenerentola, ossia La bontà in trionfo is the outcome of a commission given to Rossini by the Teatro Valle in Rome. Papal censorship banned the planned work as immoral and the hasty solution was to set Charles Perrault’s world-famous fable, Cinderella, to music. 

Rossini and Ferret replaced its traditional attributes and eliminated the magical and fabulous aspects of the original version by Perrault and Grimm: the cruel stepmother becomes a tyrannical stepfather, the grotesque Don Magnifico, unable to overcome the wounds from his past; the role of the de facto fairy is played by Alidoro, the prince’s tutor Don Ramiro, who, in disguise, detects the goodness of Angelina, the Cinderella humiliated by the ungraceful stepsisters Clorinda and Tisbe; the prince has swapped his clothes for those of his squire Dandini; Angelina immediately falls in love; Don Magnifico and his daughters are ridiculed by Dandini and the prince; the happy ending includes everyone’s absolution. 

Written for the Roman Carnival in 1871, in only 24 days, the young Rossini, with 19 operas behind him (including Il barbiere di Siviglia), wrote a score full of energy with its famous “crescendos” that shake up the dramatic tension. 

The most innovative aspects of La Cenerentola and the success it soon achieved – it premiered in Barcelona in 1818, a year after its premiere – emerge from the violent contrast between the main character’s personality, the sentimentality of the plot and the characters populating it from Rosini’s buffo world. From Angelina’s melancholy opening song: “Una volta c’era un re”, we hear a serious opera heroine with extraordinary vocal virtuosity.  

A veritable storm of great music, full of humour served up by the best Rossini singers of the moment with production by Emma Dante, that is delicate, full of subtle nuances, but which also has a sombre and burlesque melancholy. A dramma giocoso replete with lessons for modern-day society. 

With the sponsorship of:

La cenerentola 

MELODRAMMA GIOCOSO IN TWO ACTS
Libretto by Jacopo Ferretti based on Charles Perrault’s Cendrillon and libretti by Charles-Guillaume Étienne (for a Nicolas Isouard’s opera) and Francesco Fiorini (for a Stefano Pavesi’s opera)
World premiere: 25/1/1817 at the Teatro Valle in Rome
Barcelona premiere: 18/4/1818 at the Teatre de la Santa Creu
Last Liceu performance: 20/1/2008
Total number of Liceu performances: 42