Carolina Uccelli was born to a noble Florentine family in 1810, and earned a reputation in private circles for her compositions and keyboard improvisations while still in her teens. For a brief time in her early twenties, she aspired to break convention by pursuing a public career as a theater composer. This was frowned upon for aristocrats and simply unheard-of for women. “To get as far as she did in the man’s world of Italian theater composition, she had to be remarkable,” said TN’s General Director Will Crutchfield in announcing the season, “and it turns out that she had the gifts to stand beside the best of her contemporaries.” Anna di Resburgo was performed in 1835 in both the main theaters of Naples, the jointly-managed Teatro del Fondo and San Carlo, by an all-star cast including the first Lucia and the first Nabucco (Fanny Tacchinardi-Persiani and Giorgio Ronconi). “It is a gem, a Romantic thriller with a compelling dramatic through-line and gorgeous vocal opportunities,” said Crutchfield.

Unfortunately for Uccelli, the opera was overshadowed by the premiere of another Scottish story (Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor) by the same company in the same season. The barriers to acceptance for a female composer were already high, as we know from extensive correspondence between Uccelli and the Naples impresario, and after Anna she retreated from the theater and concentrated on chamber composition. “We missed out on a talent that might have gone on to produce masterpieces,” said Crutchfield, “but luckily the score survived–in one precious manuscript copy–and it can speak for itself two centuries later.”

The cast of TN’s acclaimed 2023 Poliuto (“an evening of wonderful, dramatic, and unexaggerated singing” according to Robert Levine in Classics Today) returns to embody the three principal roles: soprano Chelsea Lehnea as Anna, tenor Santiago Ballerini as her exiled husband Edemondo, and baritone Ricardo José Rivera as the usurper Norcesto. They are joined by soprano Elisse Albian and tenor Lucas Levy, both alums of TN’s renowned training program, as Etelia and Olfredo.

Musical direction is shared by keyboardist Lucy Tucker Yates, returning to the role she filled in Maometto Secondo in 2022, and violinist Elisa Citterio, making her TN debut. Yates, who is also the company’s Director of Language Studies, was recently appointed Italian instructor to the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Program. Citterio, following a 15-year career in the first violins of La Scala (Milan), has established herself as a star of the period-instrument movement, and served as music director of Toronto’s renowned Tafelmusik ensemble from 2017 to 2021.