Don Chisciotte della Mancia

The Contessa, the Duchessa, Don Calafrone and Don Platone are passing the time with games, hunting, culinary pleasures and other forms of merrymaking. The men take pleasure in their roles of competing wooers currying favour from the women who in turn enjoy discountenancing their adorers with erotic squabbling. The chamber maid Carmosina and the housekeeper Cardolella are amused by the playfulness of their masters. Don Chisciotte and his page Sancio Pansa burst in on this atmosphere of sophisticated boredom. The insane knight who lives in a dream world and is unable to distinguish between dream and reality is on the search for new adventures and for his beloved Dulcinea. The nobility take advantage of Don Chisciotte’s confusion for their own fun and distraction; they taunt and ridicule the outcast through acting out his adventures in the form of a farce. Don Chisciotte is a willing victim and joins in the vulgar entertainment; his sense of mission and his belief in courtly behaviour, honesty and humanity are stronger than any form of humiliation. He continues his travels with his page in search of new adventures. He leaves behind the nobility who remain unaware of their meaningless and empty existence. The alterations made by Henze and Di Leva to Paisiello’s original work go far beyond mere adaptation. They added recitatives and arias, altered the dramatic structure, changeed the order of events and supplemented the dialogue. Their intention was to give Paisiello’s opera buffa with its deep-seated roots in the 18th century a different slant. In this new version of the well-known story, two spheres encounter one another representing two social classes – the vacuous existence of the “genteel” society on the one hand contrasting with simple people and their grand dreams, utopias and a never-ending belief in humanity on the other hand. It cannot be missed that Henze and Di Leva sympathise with the latter group. 

"It was originally my own idea to make an arrangement of the score of Paisiello’s comic opera Don Chisciotte for the local wind band for the first Cantiere. This daring project was to have been the chief attraction of the first festival year and was to be performed in an open air setting in the huge square, the Piazza Grande. In October 1975, I made a rare visit to the rehearsal of the wind band and immediately realised that these amateur musicians were never going to be capable of learning Paisiello’s music within a period of eight months. They were out of practice and lacked the necessary stamina to play their constantly out-of-tune wind and brass instruments (which they also never practised) for a continuous period of at least two hours. What was I going to do? I neither wished nor would be able to dispense with the participation of the wind band which was the only active musical group in existence in Montepulciano. I hit on the solution of arranging the Don Chisciotte arias and ensembles for a small group of professionals with substantial help from my former pupil Henning Brauel. This was also in retrospect a mistake, as the delicate tone of the chamber ensemble was rendered almost inaudible due to the strong wind which swept across the square during both performances (this would continue to cause us problems in subsequent years). The wind band, whose sound could not even be drowned out by a hurricane, was allotted the “sinfonia” and the frequent brief interludes interspersed throughout the noble adventures of Don Quixote."