Strangers in a Strange Land, Part 1

Now, after that international lineup, how many Italian bel canto operas can you name that specifically feature a Canadian amidst an otherwise English cast of characters? Rossini did this in his very first opera, the 1810 La Cambiale de Matrimonio. Mr. Slook, an eccentric, rich Canadian -- depicted as a monied hayseed -- has contracted to marry (sight unseen) Fanny, the daughter of an English merchant named Tobias Mill. The action is set entirely in England. Mr. Slook arrives, intent upon fulfilling the terms of the cambiale; while Fanny's true love, Edward Milford, is just as intent to scare him away. It's a Catch-22 situation: when Slook tries to renege on the contract in response to Milford's behavior, Mills threatens him to a duel for breach of promise. The opera ends happily when Slook makes Milford his heir and scuttles back to his comfortable backwoods without an English bride.

Surely Rossini must have been familiar with Cimarosa's 1792 Il Matrimonio Segreto which, set in Bologna, features an English suitor, Count Robinson, whose Englishness is mostly a matter of visual propriety and respectability, as with our Mister Astley. However, when I saw this performed by Glimmerglass Opera in a production by Jonathan Miller, the bass playing Count Robinson had been instructed to round his Os, in effect singing in Italian with a British accent -- a delightful touch that continued to break up the house well into Act II, employed with a light hand and yet with utterly deadpan comic timing. (Of course, Blonde, in Mozart's 1782 Die Entführung aus dem Serail is also a proper English girl -- "Ich bin eine Engländerin...!" she scolds the lascivious Osmin, for presuming she is not his slave...but her role is performed entirely in unaccented German.)

Accents as well as ethnic surnames play a strong part in Weill's Street Scene, already previously visited in several of my other Suite articles. The central family, the Maurrants, are presumably assimilated Irish-Americans; Frank Maurrant slips into saying "me" for "my" several times, betraying his ancestry. Other tenants' origins are much more obvious, from the Olsens' family ties to "Schweden" to Lippo Fiorentino's jovial announcement, "Who wantsa da ice-cream cone?" that sets off the neighbors' paean to that all-American fixture, the corner drugstore. Street Scene is surely one of the few operas to include an immigrant character with a heavy Jewish accent: the elderly Abraham Kaplan, who rants to whoever

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