Asecret appointment exists between past generations and our own," Walter Benjamin wrote. "Our arrival on earth was expected." At pivotal moments, the philosopher argued, voices from the past reach out to us with prophetic force, escaping oblivion as a result. The past is not a fixed, eternal image; it is shaped by present concerns.
A few years back, Will Crutchfield, the artistic director of the Teatro Nuovo opera company, happened upon the name of Carolina Uccelli, a Florentine composer, singer, and poet who lived from 1810 to 1858. Her opera "Anna di Resburgo" had its premiere in Naples, in 1835, and then dropped from sight. The idea that a woman had gained a foothold in the otherwise all-male world of Italian operatic composition intrigued Crutchfield, and he got hold of the score. Convinced that it merited a second chance, he brought it to Teatro Nuovo. A pair of performances last month, at Montclair State University and at Jazz at Lincoln Center, proved him emphatically right. "Anna' is a formidable achievement for a composer in her mid-twenties. It feels like the slightly overstuffed but hugely promising early work of a major voice. The fact that Uccelli never completed another opera shows the extent to which musical history is influenced by forces that have little to do with innate talent.
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