A Canadian in Italy at the End of the Enlightenment: Rossini’s La cambiale di matrimonio

The Italians may have been among the first to discover Canada, but it must be said that it took them a very long time to discover Canadians.For several centuries, it would seem, travel agencies provided would-be tourists with only one-way tickets to Canada, and if the French and the English, who were fighting for its possession, could at least benefit from the reports that their governors in North America were routinely filing with their parent governments, the Italians had to rely on old chronicles, occasional reports to the Vatican provided by a few Italian clergymen in Canada (such as Father Bressani)!and, at a later stage, a few popular novels by the likes of Chateaubriand and Fenimore Cooper.? It is not surprising, therefore, that one of the first Canadians to reach, as it were, Italy was a fictional character by the unlikely name of Slook.He showed up in Italy for the first time in 1790 in a comedy by Camillo Federici (the pseudonym of Giovan Battista Viassolo).3The comedy which featured him as the protagonist, La cambiale di matrimonio, must have been popular in its day, for it convinced Slook to start an operatic career.And so in 1807, Federici's five-act comedy was reduced to a farcical one-act libretto by Giuseppe Checcherini, and Slook travelled to Rome to appear in an opera by Carlo Coccia, II matrimonio per lettera di cambio.Unfortunately, it was a flop.4Undaunted and confident in himself, Mr. Slook awaited a better occasion.SO Being a businessman, he knew that in order to succeed one must take risks.So in 1810 he trusted the Marchese Cavalli, when the latter had been stood up by a German composer, and decided to gamble on the talents of an eighteen-year old boy, the son of a trumpet player.The two of them travelled to Venice, where Gaetano Rossi had refashioned the twenty-year old play in a new libretto, and Rossini and Slook met.They obviously liked each other for, a few days later, the score was ready and, on November 3, La cambiale di matrimonio was performed.It was a success.Rossini was paid over 200 Liras and, as a dutiful son, he sent the money to his mother.On the envelope he wrote: Alla Signora Rossini, madre del famoso maestro Gioacchino Rossini, Via Maggiore 240 Bologna?Always a man of great common sense, Slook took his success with equanimity.Completely at ease with Rossinis music, in 1811, he travelled to Trieste and Padua; then, in 1816, to Barcelona; in 1814-15, to Cremona; then back to Trieste, in 1822.In 1834 and 1837, he went to Vienna, where he became known as Der Brautigam von Canada, the bridegroom from Canada.'For some reason, at this stage in his career, he started travelling less often; the new century, however, brought him a new lease on life.He again visited the major Italian theatres and, in 1937, he returned to Vienna; he even went to New York for the first time.Now a respectable international figure, he made it to Brussels in 1957.As it often happens, however, no one is a prophet in his own country.If it were not for the foresight of a group of students in British Columbia, who staged La cambiale in 1959 in Vancouver, and provided him with a welcome return ticket to his country, he never would have made it back.8His prospects are not bad.It is true that his original creator is not faring all too well these days: Federici's works, in thirteen volumes, were last published in Florence and Milan in 1827.A nine-volume MR

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