Search - Gioacchino Zarrelli, Luca Salsi, Simon Mayr :: Giovanni Simone Mayr: Verter

An Entertaining Who Wrote It ?

James S. Eisenberg | 04/03/2008

(4 out of 5 stars)

"The interesting thing about this work is that nobody knows who actually wrote it. The editors of the current edition attribute it to Mayr because his name is written in the surviving non-autograph manuscript, while others believe that it is by his contemporary Pucitta because there is a published libretto with HIS name in it. (Bongiovanni confuses the issue by putting Pucitta's dates next to Mayr's name on the back cover.) I lean toward Pucitta. Mayr's characteristic obbligato writing for winds is almost totally missing from this score, and in any case he had already produced another satirical work based on WERTHER (LABINO E CARLOTTA, 1799). It really doesn't matter. Whoever wrote it, the music is really wonderful. A gentle satire on Goethe's famous work, it is a fine example of late eighteenth century comic opera.

The tunes are great and the orchestration is superb.

Wildbad casts can be uneven, but in this instance the singers are uniformly good. The live performance is very well recorded."