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The Art of the Double Entendre: Rossini’s Naughty Little Comedy Wexford
National Opera House
10/16/2026 - & October 21*, 25, 29, 2026
Gioachino Rossini: L’equivoco stravagante
Maria Barakova (Ernestina), Stefan Astakhov (Gamberotto), Gurgen Baveyan (Buralicchio), Sebastian Mach (Ermanno), Kelli‑Ann Masterson (Rosalia), Carlos Natale (Frontino)
Wexford Festival Opera Chorus, Andrew Synnott (chorus master), Wexford Festival Opera Orchestra, Riccardo Bisatti (conductor)
Max Hoehn (stage director), Darko Petrovich (sets), Massimo Carlotto (costumes), Daniele Naldi (lighting)
M. Barakova (© Padraig Grant)
Composed in 1811, when Gioachino Rossini (1792‑1868) was a mere nineteen, L’equivoco stravagante is an amusing, if uneven, comedy whose musical idiom owes more to Domenico Cimarosa (1749‑1801) and Giovanni Paisiello (1740‑1816) than to the Rossini of international renown. Yet what is most remarkable about this early work is not so much its musical precocity as the audacity of its libretto. Gaetano Gasbarri furnished the young composer with a text that combines social satire, intellectual mockery and sexual innuendo with a degree of impudence that proved too much for the authorities of the day.
The opera takes aim at the nouveaux riches, whose ostentatious self‑importance is matched by their ignorance, and at those excessively bookish souls who mistake literary erudition for worldly wisdom. Its erotic ambiguities, meanwhile, are woven into a plot whose successive deceptions are sustained by a veritable profusion of double entendres. The censors were not amused. After three performances in Bologna, the opera was withdrawn, condemned for what was deemed its lewd and vulgar subject matter. Its very ingenuity, however, lay in the subversive subtlety of its language: the text could insinuate what it dared not openly proclaim. The work subsequently languished for more than a century, returning to the modern stage in 1964. Wexford itself presented it in 1968, making this revival a welcome return to a festival that has long cultivated the operatic repertory’s less familiar corners. The present production also uses the original music in a critical edition, rather than the substitutions formerly employed to compensate for gaps in the score.
The plot is as preposterous as its title promises. Gamberotto, once a poor peasant and now a prosperous merchant, has a daughter, Ernestina, whose scholarly inclinations have done little to prepare her for the matrimonial marketplace. Her impoverished admirer Ermanno obtains employment as her tutor, with the connivance of the servants, Rosalia and Frontino. The obstacle to their happiness is Buralicchio, a wealthy, vain and eminently self‑satisfied suitor whom Gamberotto favours as a prospective son‑in‑law.
To rid themselves of this unwelcome rival, Frontino invents an extraordinary tale: Ernestina is really Ernesto, Gamberotto’s son, whom his father supposedly had castrated in the hope of making him a successful opera singer during a period of desperate poverty. When that venture failed, the unfortunate child was dressed as a girl to escape military conscription. Buralicchio, whose vanity is exceeded only by his gullibility, believes the story and begins to discern masculine characteristics in his fiancée. Outraged at having been deceived, he denounces Ernestina as a deserter. Arrest and imprisonment ensue, until the resourceful Ermanno arranges her escape in military uniform. When Gamberotto and his servants subsequently thrash Buralicchio, the latter reveals Frontino’s machinations; explanations are offered, forgiveness granted, and the young lovers duly blessed.
Behind this improbable succession of contrivances lies a remarkably consistent satire of bourgeois mendacity. Almost everybody is lying to somebody: Gamberotto flaunts his new social standing, his household flatters his pretensions, Ermanno disguises his amorous intentions beneath the respectable mantle of a tutor, and Frontino manipulates his employer’s prospective son‑in‑law with a fiction of spectacular audacity. It is an embarrassing bouquet of deceptions, in which social ambition and sexual anxiety are inseparable. The comedy also exposes the precariousness of masculine self‑assurance: Buralicchio’s sense of identity proves so fragile that a rumour is sufficient to make him question what he believes his eyes have seen.
Max Hoehn’s staging wisely avoids the temptation to turn this already extravagant material into an exercise in indiscriminate slapstick. Operatic comedy, particularly in productions north of the Alps, can all too easily succumb to frantic movement and exaggerated mugging, as though laughter had to be manufactured at every available opportunity. Here, the director favours a more measured, traditional approach, allowing the characters’ vanity and absurdity to generate much of the humour themselves. The period sets and costumes are attractive, and Darko Petrovich’s library, with its busts of eminent philosophers, is an inspired setting for Ernestina’s opening aria. As she addresses the great thinkers on her shelves, faces emerge from their busts to answer her questions, turning her intellectual pretensions into a delightful theatrical conceit. Massimo Carlotto’s costumes reinforce the characterization: Buralicchio’s pompous attire advertises his social position, while Ernestina’s trousers beneath her gown suggest the ambiguity on which the plot depends. Her spectacles, meanwhile, neatly establish her bookishness.
Gamberotto’s transformation into an ailing old man with a broken leg adds a measure of old‑fashioned, politically incorrect humour. The device is broad, but it suits a comedy in which practically everyone is prepared to exploit someone else’s weaknesses. Hoehn’s production is particularly successful in the second act, when the absurdity of the central deception begins to yield more substantial comic dividends. The first act, by contrast, occasionally feels overextended, and neither the elaborate machinery of the plot nor the eventual reconciliation entirely escapes the structural weaknesses of Rossini’s youthful work. One might also have welcomed a more adventurous interpretation of the sexual ambiguity. At the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro in 2024, Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier embraced a distinctly queer reading by making Ernestina actually Ernesto. Hoehn retains the character’s female identity, but the production remains entertaining without that additional provocation.
Riccardo Bisatti conducted the Wexford Festival Opera Orchestra with energy and considerable panache. Although the score does not yet display the refinement, melodic abundance and dramatic assurance that would soon distinguish Rossini’s mature comedies, Bisatti ensured that it rarely sounded merely dutiful. The orchestral playing was alert to the music’s changing moods, and the ensembles, in particular, acquired the momentum and rhythmic vitality that the solo numbers sometimes lacked. The second act was consequently more compelling than the first, its comic situations animated by an increasingly assured musical pulse. The duet “Vieni pur, a me t’accosta”, between Ernestina and Buralicchio, was particularly effective. The Wexford Festival Opera Chorus, prepared by Andrew Synnott, contributed capably to the evening’s musical fabric.
The undisputed centre of the performance was Russian mezzo-soprano Maria Barakova, reprising Ernestina, the role she had also sung at Pesaro. Ernestina is a trouser‑role in all but name, a scholarly young woman whose supposed masculine identity becomes the pretext for the opera’s central absurdity. Barakova invested her with an endearing mixture of intellectual earnestness, naïveté and comic self‑absorption, making Frontino’s preposterous invention just plausible enough to sustain the plot. Her acting was as accomplished as her singing, and her vocal command was impressive: the lower register had a warm, smoky richness, the upper notes rang freely, and the coloratura was delivered with pinpoint accuracy. Particularly striking was the final rondo, “Il periglio passò/Se per te lieta torno”, in which technical assurance and theatrical personality converged. If the role does not consistently demand the formidable vocal resources of Rossini’s later heroines, Barakova made it considerably more than an agreeable curiosity. Her performance was a notable improvement even on her already engaging Pesaro interpretation.
German-Russian baritone Stefan Astakhov was ideally cast as Gamberotto, the nouveau riche merchant whose social pretensions conceal a formidable capacity for self‑deception. A gifted comedian with an instinctive sense of timing, the baritone made the character’s pomposity inseparable from his physical infirmity. His Act I aria, “Parla, favella, e poi”, and especially the Act II “Il mio germe, che di Pallade”, were delivered with pointed diction and a welcome appreciation of the text’s insinuations. In a work whose humour depends so heavily on linguistic ambiguity, clarity of enunciation is not a minor virtue but a prerequisite for success. Astakhov understood this perfectly, relishing the verbal barbs without labouring them.
Heard in 2024 as Harlekin in Ariadne auf Naxos in Vicenza and last year in recital in Pesaro, Armenian baritone Gurgen Baveyan was equally persuasive as Buralicchio. Rather than portraying the suitor as simply overconfident, he emphasized his thin skin and wounded vanity, making him a particularly credible specimen of the fool who takes himself seriously. His handsome, dark‑hued voice, with its virile timbre, was an additional asset, although the role offers comparatively little opportunity to display it. One regretted that Rossini had not provided him with more substantial solo material. Baveyan’s stage presence and comic intelligence nevertheless made him one of the audience’s favourites, and his exchanges with Barakova, notably in “Vieni pur, a me t’accosta”, were among the evening’s highlights. His humour never depended on indiscriminate buffoonery; the laughter arose instead from the character’s absolute conviction in his own importance.
Sebastian Mach brought good looks, stage presence and sympathetic acting to Ermanno, the impoverished lover whose vocal writing is among the opera’s most demanding. The Polish tenor negotiated the coloratura passages with technical proficiency and considerable power, but his voice lacked the warmth and Italianate pliancy that would have made the music more idiomatic. The result was more impressive in terms of execution than seductive in sound. Nevertheless, his characterization gave the hapless lover sufficient credibility, and his efforts to rescue Ernestina supplied the plot with a welcome measure of romantic urgency.
Kelli-Ann Masterson and Carlos Natale completed the principal ensemble as Rosalia and Frontino, the servants whose ingenuity sets the intrigue in motion. Masterson was effective in the smaller role, while Natale made a particularly vivid impression as Frontino. Though the part does not offer extensive opportunities for vocal display, his comic verve and sharply defined acting made him memorable. Indeed, the servants’ practical intelligence provides an amusing counterpoint to their employers’ social pretensions: those ostensibly below stairs understand human nature rather better than the people who pay their wages.
It is remarkable that a decade ago, L’equivoco stravagante would have seemed an unlikely proposition outside specialist Rossini circles, whereas this Wexford revival follows the delightful Pesaro production of 2024. The rediscovery is welcome, even if the work’s dramaturgical shortcomings remain apparent. Rossini’s later operas would transform these early experiments into a far more sophisticated theatrical and musical language. Here, the ensembles already reveal the composer he was becoming, while the solo numbers occasionally betray the apprentice still at work.
Hoehn’s production made a persuasive case for the opera’s enduring comic appeal without attempting to disguise its weaknesses. A more radical treatment of Ernestina’s identity might have brought the libretto’s sexual ambiguities closer to the surface, but it is difficult to begrudge a staging that elicited so much laughter while respecting the work’s period setting. With Barakova at its centre, and Astakhov and Baveyan providing superb comic foils, Wexford demonstrated that this scandalous youthful indiscretion was no mere operatic trifle. Its equivocations may be extravagant, but its satire of money, pretension and masculine vanity remains delightfully recognizable.
Ossama el Naggar
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