Music

According to the rule of thumb, a composer’s first operas should be discarded. In Mozart’s case, the first dozen operas penned by the prolific prodigy languish in total obscurity. On Saturday night at La Jolla’s Sherwood Hall, the Pacific Chamber Opera hopes to liberate from musicological limbo “Lunatics and Lovers,” Mozart’s eighth opera, a frothy opera bouffe he composed at the ripe age of 18.

According to the production’s musical director, Martin Wright, while the work is not as sophisticated as Mozart’s later operas, it contains embryonic facets of the composer’s sophisticated mature operas. “There’s a lot of ‘Don Giovanni’ in this piece. I think it’s interesting that Mozart calls them both a dramma giocoso.”

“Of course, that’s a contradiction of terms,” interjected stage director William Roesch. “It means a jocular, funny drama.” Fortunately, director and conductor have sorted out the work’s contradictions and complications--including three pairs of lovers all enamored of the wrong parties--for the local debut of this musical rarity.

The opera, which Mozart titled “La finta giardiniera,” has followed a circuitous evolution, from its premiere as an Italian comic opera at Munich’s 1775 carnival festivities, to its appearance eight years later in Dresden as a German language Singspiel, to its recent English translation by American educator Richard Pearlman. Director of the opera theater at the Eastman School of Music, Pearlman has seen his contemporary adaptation of the opera given both in New York and at Santa Barbara’s Music Academy of the West.

Pearlman’s lively adaptation gave Roesch his inspiration for this production’s setting: “Since the translation is very cheeky and quite contemporary--although it’s not filled with slang--I could not envision those words coming out of an 18th-Century period. So I tried to locate another period that would duplicate the moral duplicity and hypocrisy that existed in the 18th Century. I settled on the Edwardian period, not Edwardian England of course, because these are all wild and crazy Italians.”

Roesch described Italy in the first decade of the 20th Century as “a terribly excessive, opulent, over-indulgent period--it seemed to fit the opera.”

While the translation of the title Mozart gave the opera is roughly, “The Feigned Gardener’s Girl,” Pearlman’s catchy contemporary title refers to a section in the middle of the opera where the two leading lovers temporarily go insane.

“It’s a very gentle kind of madness, more pastoral in nature,” Roesch explained. “The lovers think they’re gods and goddesses on Mt. Olympus, so you’re not getting into Donizetti or Bellini lunacy.”

According to Roesch, digging out the plot to “Lunatics and Lovers” was a major task. “The biggest dramatic challenge is that there is no book--just a score and the libretto. There’s no plot that you can refer to, as you would to Beaumarchais’ play ‘The Marriage of Figaro,’ where you have a good story line,” said Roesch, a local stage director known for his work at the Old Globe Theatre.

Wright, who is better known locally as San Diego Opera’s chorus master, explained that he has reduced the lengthy three-act opera to two acts and has made several judicious cuts. Soprano Carolyn Whyte will sing the leading female role. “It’s a demanding part,” Wright noted. “She has to be a Countess (Almaviva, the heroine of Mozart’s ‘Marriage of Figaro’) with spunk.”

Tenor Joe Carson will sing Belfiore, the leading male role, opposite Whyte’s Violante.

Other singers in the production include Patricia Minton-Smith, Betzi McLean, Anita Colet and Max Chodos. The 18-piece orchestra will be made up of members of the San Diego Symphony. After Saturday’s opening, the opera will be repeated Sunday, Thursday and June 13 and 14; each performance is at Sherwood Hall.