Il pesceballo

"Il pesceballo", (The Fish-Ball) is a 19th-century American pasticcio opera in one act featuring the music of Bellini, Donizetti, Mozart, and Rossini, with a spoof Italian libretto by Francis James Child, which makes use of some of grand opera's most popular arias.

Francis James Child was a Harvard English professor and opera lover, and the text was originally inspired by an incident which occurred to a colleague of his. One evening Martin Lane was trying to make his way to Cambridge, MA, from Boston. He discovered that he had only 25 cents, which was not enough for both supper and the fare needed to get to Cambridge. As he was very tired and hungry, he stopped at a local diner and asked for half of a serving of macaroni. After he had recounted the story to his friends, he wrote a comic ballad, called the "Lay of the One Fishball". A fishball was a fried New England concoction made of potatoes and fish stock, and usually eaten for breakfast. The ballad became very popular with Harvard students, and inspired Child's opera.

Performance history

It was first performed in a benefit concert for the Sanitary Commission, an organization that treated ill and wounded soldiers. In 1864, it was revived for several more benefit performances, this time to aid Unionists in East Tennessee. All the productions were amateur productions, for the humor of the opera is aimed at literati and intellectuals.

The primary sources for the reconstruction of Il pesceballo are the published libretto by Francis James Child, and the recitatives and chorus parts penned by John Knowles Paine, which were discovered by Dr. Mary Ellen Brown. Dr. Brown employed Dr. Eric Knechtges to organize and transcribe this work for a performance at Indiana University.

Roles

External links

* [http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=NGIRAAAAYAAJ&dq=Il+pesceballo+&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=ZMVzxZygUW&sig=zzCh6DbA_INiQDXs-7EFblLzmXQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA55,M1 Il pesceballo, opera in one act] History and libretto