La casa disabitata

La casa disabitata (The Uninhabited House) is a comic opera in one act composed by Princess Amalie of Saxony to her own Italian-language libretto. It was first performed in the court theatre of Pillnitz Castle in Dresden on 17 September 1835. The opera had no further performances until it was revived in 2012 as part of the Dresden Music Festival after its manuscript score was found in a Moscow library. Background and performance history La casa disabitata was the last of the 12 short comic operas which Princess Amalie had composed to her own libretti as entertainments for the Saxon court in Dresden. The story is not original. The opera's title, plot, setting, and characters are the same as those of Giovanni Giraud's one-act farce La casa disabitata, first performed in 1808 and published in 1825. Giraud's play was also the basis of the two-act opera La casa disabitata, composed by Lauro Rossi to a libretto by Jacopo Ferretti. Rossi's opera premiered at La Scala to great success in 1834, a year before Princess Amalie's version, and was subsequently performed throughout Italy and in Paris. Princess Amalie's La casa disabitata was performed in the small court theatre of Pillnitz Castle on 17 September 1835. The evening also included Johann Pixis performing his piano composition Les trois Clochettes and his adopted daughter Francilla Pixis singing Dessauer's bolero "Le Retour des promis". According to Prince Albert of Saxony, opera performances like this were generally for special court occasions and not repeated. The Saxon State Library holds a copy of Friedrich Baumfelder's 1874 arrangement of one of the opera's arias ("Oh luce del giorno") and one other fragment. However, the manuscript score of the opera itself had been amongst those confiscated by the Russian army at the end of World War II and taken back to Russia. The Dresden-based oboist Petra Andrejewski discovered the score in a Moscow library and reconstructed the opera for a revival at the Dresden Music Festival on 27 May 2012—the first performance of La casa disabitata in 177 years. The performance was in concert version (Russian authorities would only grant permission to use the manuscript for a single unstaged performance). It took place in the salon of the 17th-century summer palace in Dresden's Großer Garten with Helmut Branny conducting the Dresdner Kapellsolisten.