La Serva padrona (The Servant as Mistress)

Giovanni Pergolesi (1710 - 1736)
Intermezzo in two parts. 1733.
Libretto by Gennaro Antonio Federico, after the play by Jacopo Angello Nelli.
First performance at the Teatro S Bartlomeo, Naples, on 5th September 1733.

Uberto, planning to go out, complains that he has waited hours for his chocolate. His criticisms levelled at Serpina are amply repaid. He tries to send Vespone out to find him a wife, and Serpina proclaims her own eligibility, while Uberto would be glad to be rid of her. In the second part Serpina tries to win Uberto's sympathy by her account of her coming marriage to a tyrannical army officer, Vespone, bribed by a promise of continued employment and now in disguise. Uberto is induced to take the place of the gallant captain and marry Serpina himself.

La serva padrona (The Servant as Mistress) played an important part in the operatic quarrels in Paris between supporters of the traditional French opera of Lully and Rameau and those who supported the simpler more modern art of Italy, exemplified in Pergolesi's opera, when it was staged in Paris, not for the first time, in 1752. The disagreement, the so-called Querelle des Bouffons (Quarrel of the Actors) continued for the next two years, with Rousseau a keen supporter of the Italian against the French. Pergolesi's opera is modest in its proportions, both vocally and instrumentally. As an intermezzo its two parts were intended for performance between the acts of a more serious work. It makes use of three of the stock characters of the Italian commedia dell'arte.