emphasis that was placed upon the originality of a work of art during the nineteenth century. A consequence of this attitude in Rota’s case was the fact that the film score for the first Godfather movie was refused an Oscar nomination because of its reuse of earlier music. In Il Cappello di paglia di Firenze Rota exhibited his customary selfreferentiality and intermixing of musical genres, reusing copious music from his film scores of the 1940s and early 1950s. Some of the themes used in Il Cappello di paglia di Firenze had even been employed by Rota on two previous occasions. Excerpts from the 1952 Fellini romantic comedy Lo Sceicco bianco (‘The White Sheik’), for instance, were redeployed in a very different Fellini film, the neo-realist La Strada (1954), before finding a home in Il Cappello di paglia di Firenze. Given the snobbery about Rota’s music in post-War Italy, the composer was surprised when Il Cappello di paglia di Firenze turned out to be a hit on its first performance in Palermo in 1955. The opera was programmed by Cuccia alongside other works then regarded as curiosities, such as Monteverdi’s Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Florinda and
Mozart’s Il Schauspieldirektor – a bold move at an opera house that liked its repertory works. But Sicilian audiences took to Il Cappello di paglia di Firenze without hesitation. The singer chosen for the role of Fadinard was Nicola Filacuridi, then a highly popular tenor in Italy, particularly wellknown from opera performances on Italian radio and television. The performance was conducted by Jonel Perlea, who had championed Rota’s earlier radio opera I due timidi. This also was based on a play by Labiche and anticipates the musical language of Il Cappello di paglia di Firenze. Rota’s opera was swiftly taken up elsewhere. It featured in the 1957–1958 and 1958–1959 seasons at the Piccolo Scala in Milan, directed by Giorgio Strehler and staged by Francesco Siciliani, and further performances were staged in Genoa in 1966 and Treviso in 1973. The work reached the United States in 1977, when it was performed at the Santa Fe Opera Festival. A critic for Opera magazine wrote: ‘The score is beautifully written, in an idiom that is cheerful, adept and incontinently facetious. Every imaginable musical joke is there, and if you miss it first time, there is no need to worry, as
Above and above right: costume sketches and set designs for the original 1955 production of Il Cappello di paglia di Firenze. The sketches, by Umberto Zimelli and Emma Calderini for the first performance of the opera, are from Fondazione Teatro Massimo (Palermo, Italy) Archive.
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Il Cappello di paglia di Firenze