After moving to Italy as an unknown young composer, Giacomo Meyerbeer enjoyed a fast growing success, which led La Scala to commission the opening opera of its 1820 season to the newborn star.

In Milan, Meyerbeer had to meet the company’s requests, and collaborate with librettist Felice Romani. Furthermore the two had to write the libretto and the score for a company that had already been employed for the whole season. The result was an opera semiseria, Margherita d'Anjou, featuring both tragedy and comedy in a somewhat confusing manner.

Margherita is Queen Margaret, wife of Henry VI and known from Shakespeare’s plays, but the source of the libretto is a French tragedy by Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt, which already contained a mixture of reality and invented stories about the War of the Roses. In this opera, the leading soprano in the title role competes for the love of the tenor, the Duke of Lavarenne, with his legitimate wife, the mezzo Isaura.

Because of 19th century morality, no happy ending with her passionate lover was possible for the Queen, as Lavarenne returns to his wife who also sings the great aria starting the final concertato in an unconventional distribution of roles. This was due to the presence of two prima donnas in the company, who were scheduled to sing leading roles in the repertory operas featured later on in the season.

The opera enjoyed a great success, but after Meyerbeer’s works fell out of the repertory it has received very little attention. A 2002 concert performance by Opera Rara is documented on CD, while a staged performance scheduled in Leipzig in 2005 did not take place. Thus, the Festival della Valle d’Itria must be credited as the first venue for a staged performance in modern times.

The Palazzo Ducale, where most performances take place in Martina Franca, is an open air venue and as such does not offer supertitles for the audience to follow the text. For this particular staging, this turned out to be a happy circumstance, as the stage director, Alessandro Talevi, confronted with the mixture of tragedy and comedy in the libretto, decided to create a completely different plot. In the newly created story, Margherita is a top stylist and fashion icon. The first act takes place during London Fashion Week, where the Duke of Gloucester is a fashion journalist trying to kidnap Margherita’s son and Carlo Belmonte, a designer that had been fired by Margherita. Lavarenne, who is the presenter of the men’s collection, meets his wife Isaura disguised as a male model, while the buffo character Michele Gaumotte is cast as a TV producer.

The second act opens on a spa in Scotland where Margherita seeks refuge from the paparazzi. Isaura joins her with a letter from Lavarenne. After some more attempts by Gloucester to kidnap the child, the two women are reached by Lavarenne himself, who reunites with his wife.

The new plot had little to do with the original one, but the director developed it coherently, and, especially with the aid of the program notes and forgetting about the libretto one could follow the action on stage relatively easily.

The vocal score is written for early nineteenth century singers, especially skilled in Rossini’s style. The cast was uneven: soprano Giulia De Blasis was a compelling Margherita, while tenor Anton Rositskiy, who, as Lavarenne, had to master a quite demanding tessitura, sometimes had problems at the top. Mezzo Gaia Petrone as Isaura was arguably the best on stage: she could sing touchingly and highlight the naive side of the character, and was impressive in the final rondò ‘Oh ciel qual mai contrasto’ followed by her final aria. Bass Laurence Meikle as Carlo sang with style, but with limited volume of voice. More convincing were basses Bastian Thomas Kohl as Riccardo Duke di Gloucester and especially Marco Filippo Romano in the buffo role of Gamautte.

In the pit, Maestro Fabio Luisi conducted with great care, producing a complex palette of colors especially at the opening of the second act, when the chorus of Piacenza’s Teatro Municipale gave an outstanding contribution with the peasants’ chorus.