Haydn: Il segreto di Susanna – La notte di un nevrastenico

The cigarette: a “seductive lover” or the revealing trace of a secret affair? This is the central question around which Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s Intermezzo in un atto revolves. Finely orchestrated and first performed in December 1909 at the Munich Court Theatre, the plot of this farce can be quickly summarized: a man detects the smell of tobacco in his home and immediately suspects the presence of an “intruding smoker,” as well as a rival in love. Only at the end does his wife confess that she herself has been secretly smoking. Thus, the supposed drama of jealousy quite literally dissolves “into smoke.”



“I smoke cigars and do not believe in God,” admits the “emancipated” German writer and feminist Louise Aston in the mid-19th century. It is hard to say which of the two was more scandalous— even in the era of the Belle Époque.



A neurasthenic declares war on noise. In Nino Rota’s short opera, a “nervously fragile” man in search of silence books a hotel room along with the two adjoining rooms in order to sleep undisturbed—only to find no peace at all. In this 1959 farce, the composer—who rose to fame in the 1950s and 1960s with his film scores for Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti—gives Italian opera buffa a new guise. Once again, much ado about nothing, but with plenty of amusement in return.