Wexford Festival Opera

23, 26, 29 October, 1 November

The Italian composer Nino Rota is best known for his film scores – he wrote over 140. Almost all of the music for Federico Fellini’s films from 1951 to 1979 was written or chosen by Rota, his music for The Godfather films being perhaps the best known.  The characteristics of his film music, which upholds the supremacy of melody and employs a tonality free of harmonic complexity, gave continuity to Fellini’s fragmentary style and are apparent in Rota’s other works. His musical instinct and unshakeable belief in the immediacy of music as a means of communication were paramount, and he was unconcerned that his musical idiom was considered unfashionable.

'The Florentine Straw Hat’ (Il Cappello di paglia di Firenze) is the most popular of his operas and his description of it as a ‘farsa musicale’ is apt. The story is based on a famous nineteenth century French farce, Chapeau de paille d’Italie (‘The Italian Straw Hat’), and Rota decided to use this non-modernist humorous story as the basis for a work in the tradition of Italian comic opera, changing its title to ‘The Florentine Straw Hat’. A nervous young bridegroom is out riding before his wedding when his horse eats a straw hat belonging to a lady dallying with her lover. She is now compromised unless she can return home with a duplicate of the ruined hat, and so the bridegroom has to help her whilst allaying the suspicions of his own fiancée and her family, as the time of his wedding draws ever closer.
 

Farsa musicale in four acts.
Libretto by Nino Rota and Ernesta Rinaldi after Eugene Labiche and Marc  Michel.
Composed in 1955.
First performed at Teatro Massimo, Palermo, Sicily; 21 April 1955.
Sung in Italian.