La Serva Padrona

In 1754, a small pamphlet war erupted in France over the question of whether Italian opera was inherently superior to French opera, a controversy that became known as the Querelle des Bouffons, the war of the clowns.  Specifically, the elaborate full-length operas of Jean-Philippe Rameau were being compared to the two-act chamber opera La Serva Padrona by Giovanni Pergolesi, which had premiered in 1733 and was revived in Paris in 1752.  La Serva Padrona (The Maid as Mistress) has just two singing roles and a handful of instrumental parts.  It can be given in a small room and lasts about 45 minutes.

Why all this fuss over a little operatic intermezzo?  Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his sometime ally Baron von Grimm used the contrast between these two operatic worlds as a covert way to mount a political critique of the French monarchy.  But why did they pick this work as their battering ram against the absolute power of Louis XV?  I believe it's because the heroine, Serpina, is such a breath of fresh air.  Yet she is nothing new.  Her type, the soubrette, typically a saucy servant girl, descends from Columbina in commedia del arte, and stage roles like Dorina in Moliere's Tartuffe. In classical opera, the soubrette is so well defined that the term denotes a specific vocal range and quality.  Mozart wrote a dozen such roles, including both Suzanna and Barberina in Le Nozze di Figaro.

In La Serva Padrona we find her atomic avatar, Serpina, engaged in one-on-one combat with her tyrannical boss.  In her first aria from the second act, A Serpina Penserete, Serpina has dressed her fellow servant, the mute Vespone, as a furious soldier whom she says she is about to marry.  She addresses her employer Umberto with feigned tenderness and vulnerability, alternating  this with mocking asides.


A Serpina penserete
Qualche volta, e qualche di'
E direte: Ah! poverina,
Cara un tempo ella mi fu.
(Ei mi par che gia' pian piano
S'incomincia a intenerir.)

S'io poi fui impertinente,
Mi perdoni: malamente
Mi guidai: lo vedo, si'.
(Ei mi stringe per la mano,
Meglio il fatto non puo gir.)

You'll think of Serpina
sometime, some day,
and you'll say "Oh, poor little one!
Once, she was dear to me."
(It seems that, bit by bit,
he's starting to soften up.)

If I was impertinent,
please forgive me;
I behaved badly, I see that.
(Now he takes my hand--
It doesn't get any better than this!

(my translation)

This is both romantic and comic.  Serpina explicitly inverts her social and sexual role relation with Umberto, as the opera's title promises, drawing the spectator into a complicity that implies a tinge of submission.  We sense that her wily guidance will ultimately save the pompous Umberto.  This is not role reversal as perversity; it's closer to a template for companionable marriage. 

But for Rousseau and his allies, Serpina is yet more symbolic as a subverter of absolute authority.  Long after this war of clowns is done she will re-appear, far from the operatic stage, treading corpses, bare breasted, waving a flag.  And once again, majestically immobilized, lifting a torch at the mouth of a great harbor.