Teatro Nuovo will perform Mozart and Rossini works that helped bring Italian opera to America

Teatro Nuovo will present “Il Don Giovanni” and “Il Turco in Italia” in Montclair and New York.

The New York-based performance ensemble Teatro Nuovo is very successful at staging historically informed performances of 19th-century Italian Bel Canto operas, also known as the ottocento in Italian. Although historically informed performances are not everyone’s cup of tea, their productions are consistently inspiring and done con slancio — an Italian musical term that translates to “with enthusiasm.”

Their 2026 Bel Canto season, a celebration of America’s 250th anniversary, celebrates a landmark project that brought Italian opera to The United States, 200 years ago. In 1825 and 1826, a travelling European company, led by the Spanish tenor Manuel García, presented 79 performances of nine Italian operas in New York. Americans fell in love with the Italian art form, forever altering the cultural fabric of the country.

Teatro Nuovo will stage two operas that were performed at that time: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Il Don Giovanni,” adapted by its original librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, and Giacomo Rossini’s madcap comedy “Il Turco in Italia.” Performances, featuring the Teatro Nuovo Chorus and Orchestra, will take place July 11-12 at The Kasser Theater at Montclair State University, and July 15-16 at The Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York.

Musicologist Will Crutchfield, who is Teatro Nuovo’s general and artistic director, regularly came across García — who had found great fame in Europe before 1825 — in literature.

“I actually can’t remember when I first knew about the tour, because it turns up in so many histories that I must have seen an account back when I was first getting interested in opera,” Crutchfield says. “But I definitely focused new attention on it when we were launching Teatro Nuovo in 2018, because of an unusually informative article in the New York press at the time. The writer was familiar with opera from time spent in Europe and was explaining how it works, for readers here.”

He says the article gave one of the most explicit descriptions of shared leadership-style conducting by a violinist and a keyboard player, which Teatro Nuovo often uses, and will use for “Il Turco”: The orchestra will be led by associate artistic directors Elisa Citterio (Primo Violino e Capo d’Orchestra) and Derrick Goff (Maestro al Cembalo).

SIMON PAULY

RICARDO JOSÉ RIVERA

For “Il Don Giovanni,” Geoffrey Loff (Maestro al Cembalo e Direttore) will lead the orchestra from the keyboard, as Mozart did himself. Baritone Ricardo José Rivera will sing the title role, making his fourth appearance with the company.

A key feature of the company’s house style is to do things exactly as they were done in 19th-century Italy. This includes the placement of the orchestra — a 50-member ensemble playing period instruments from around the world — at audience level, and the use of a historical setup for the musicians.

Teatro Nuovo has staged 13 operas to date. This will be the first one by Mozart. The Austrian composer, who died in 1791 at 35, is not typically included in the Bel Canto school, which thrived in Italy from 1810 to 1845. Crutchfield takes an unusual viewpoint on this.

“Mozart was working in an Italian tradition that had no sharp dividing lines in the 17 years separating his early death from Rossini’s first opera,” he wrote in program notes. “They should have been working side by side. And what we see in documents of performing style in the 1780s looks exactly like an early draft of Rossini’s vocal writing.”

When it comes to staging not-so-rare works such as “Don Giovanni,” Crutchfield gives them fresh interpretations, as will be done with Da Ponte’s 1826 version. Mozart’s celebrated librettist had emigrated from Italy to America in 1805, and by 1825 he was in his late 70s and teaching Italian literature at Columbia University. His version for García’s New York shows fashioned parts of original texts — the Prague premiere (1787) and the revised Vienna edition (1788) — into a faster-moving “drama buffo” instead of the “drama giocoso” he had originally written. His son Luigi prepared an English translation, which will be used in the projected surtitles.

Inspired by the Don Juan legend, the opera is a masterly mix of drama and comedy. Without giving away too much, it will generally be lighter in mood and sprightlier in tone “though of course the amazing music Mozart wrote for the supernatural element is still there, and that will never seem ‘light,’ ” Crutchfield says.

WILL CRUTCHFIELD

This will not be the humorless variety that turns it into a tiresome morality tale, especially because the epilogue will be cut and the opera will end with Don Giovanni’s death.

In the original Prague and Vienna librettos, in the last scene, Don Giovanni’s servant Leporello watches his master get dragged off to hell by the ghost-statue of the Commendatore, as a final act of retribution. Then Leporello shrugs it off and joins the cast in a comedic ensemble scene that reflects on Don Giovanni’s fate: The wicked always get their due. The upbeat ending inspires debate because some think the tone undercuts the opera’s dramatic and terrifying climax. Others find the message too moralistic.

Crutchfield says Da Ponte probably cut the epilogue not to make a statement, but rather because by 1826, its inclusion had increasingly fallen out of favor in European productions. Nowadays most productions restore it, although Crutchfield, when he is a concertgoer, prefers it without. “The music of the final fugue is great,” he says, “but I have always felt impatient with the long ensemble, as an audience member.”

In addition to “Don Giovanni,” the García shows also included one opera by Zingarelli, two by García himself and five by Rossini, one of which was “Il Turco” (1814). Like many Italian operas of the early 19th century, it faded from the repertoire in the decades following its premiere.

“We chose ‘Il Turco’ partly because it has been less often heard in modern New York than the other Rossini titles from the tour (‘Otello,’ ‘Tancredi’ and ‘La Cenerentola’), and partly because it has nice connections to ‘Don Giovanni’ and Da Ponte,” Crutchfield says.

“Il Turco” is Rossini’s most Mozartian work, greatly influenced by “Così fan tutte,” an opera buffa from 1790 that was also written with Da Ponte. The numerous parallels are intentional: It was staged at La Scala in Milan before “Il Turco” opened, and Rossini and his librettist Felice Romani went to see it.

“There is the character of the Poet in ‘Il Turco’ who arranges the story in real time and manipulates the characters into disguises etc.,” says Crutchfield. “This was almost certainly influenced by Da Ponte’s Don Alfonso in ‘Così fan tutte,’ which was actually in rehearsal at La Scala while Rossini and his librettist were at work in Milan. The original Fiorilla was the Fiordiligi of that show — even her name could be an echo.”

SOLOMAN HOWARD

KRESLEY FIGUEROA

Hans Tashjian will sing the poet Prosdocimo; Kresley Figueroa will sing the heroine Donna Fiorilla; and Vincent Graña will sing Selim, the visiting Turk.

Crutchfield also points to overlapping themes in “Don Giovanni.” “Don Giovanni and Donna Fiorilla are both characters who are irresistible to the opposite sex and very liberal about having multiple lovers,” he says. “Giovanni can’t stop himself, and winds up going to hell. Fiorilla does stop herself when she sees trouble coming, and winds up going back to respectable married life. So they are variations on an age-old theme.”

Rossini’s comic operas were considered supreme examples of the buffa style that dominated the Bel Canto era. At the “Il Turco” premiere, audiences were expecting a fun sequel to “L’Italiana in Algeri,” a madcap comedy that had a successful 1813 debut. But it flopped.

García’s production similarly misfired. It only ran four times out of the 79 shows that took place at the Park Theatre, near City Hall. Fiorilla was supposed to be sung by García’s daughter Maria, but she pulled out after impulsively marrying Eugène Malibran, a French merchant. A last minute replacement was hired; all of her arias were cut, and the score was padded with music from Rossini’s “La Cenerentola.”

For these kinds of re-creations, Crutchfield follows a blueprint of what the production probably was like, based on old performance styles. He then fills in the details with his own ideas. What makes the true Teatro Nuovo style? It’s hard to say exactly, but one thing for sure is that it will be performed in the most accurate way possible and will present the old composers in the best light.

Bel Canto’s vocal style demands a high level of virtuosity and technical preparation. Voices are highly trained and feature a wide range of color and expressivity. Teatro Nuovo maintains a robust Resident Artist training program that develops these kinds of specialized voices. Every year, career-bound young singers participate in an immersive, six-week training program. They will be on hand as understudies and chorus members in both productions.

Hypothetically, would Crutchfield make room on the roster for international Bel Canto superstars looking to make a cameo? He doesn’t seem to care whether someone is famous or not, but rather that they share Teatro Nuovo’s philosophy that individual expression works best when everyone shares the same basic musical style and technique.

“We put a lot of emphasis on a unified approach to period style — that is our niche in the opera world, because we see benefits to reviving classic Bel Canto training and vocalism,” he says. “So we cast singers who are either alums of our own training program, or who are interested enough to join it in the season of their debut with us. The way we present this material is geared to fully developed singers as well as still-developing ones, so we feel it’s a valuable experience even when the new singer is an already-established artist.

“The freedoms of Bel Canto allow each singer a lot of individuality of expression and interpretation, which we love, and we find it all the more effective when individuality is channeled through a stylistic language shared by all.”

Teatro Nuovo will present “Il Don Giovanni” at The Kasser Theater at Montclair State University, July 11 at 3 p.m., and The Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, July 15 at 7:30 p.m. Teatro Nuovo will also present “Il Turco in Italia” at The Kasser Theater, July 12 at 3 p.m., and The Rose Theater, July 16 at 7:30 p.m. Visit teatronuovo.org.

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