The Italian Girl in London

The Italian Girl in London (L'italiana in Londra) is one of eight comic operas, termed intermezzi, which Domenico Cimarosa wrote between 1777 and 1784 for the Teatro Valle, a handsome neo-classical Roman theatre built in 1726, which still stands today.

Intermezzi grew out of small-scale comic pieces which were inserted for light relief between the acts of weightier opera seria works, chiefly in Naples and Venice. They usually had only two singers, perhaps with the addition of actors. Typically characters were drawn from what was supposed to be real life, but servants were often pitted against their betters with a fair sprinkling of satire. Cimarosa's Roman intermezzi, which established his reputation, were two-act operas, in contrast to the usual three-act form of the opera buffa, and were carefully tailored to the modest forces available at the Teatro Valle.

This was Cimarosa's fourth collaboration with the comic specialist librettist, the Roman abbot Giuseppe Petrosellini (1727–after 1797), whose work with many of the most successful composers of his day, including Piccinni, Anfossi, Salieri and probably Mozart, for whom he is supposed to have provided the libretto for La finta giardiniera, was later to culminate in Il barbiere di Siviglia for Paisiello in 1782. As with other significant librettists of the day, Petrosellini developed a genre which had been established by Goldoni, moving away from the tradition of repetitive sequences of arias so that the dramatic texture is more naturally broken up with ensembles and expanded finales. It was this latter feature which Cimarosa was to make especially effective in his comic operas and the two lengthy multi-part finales are one of the most appealing features of L'italiana. Petrosellini was adept at inventing attractive comic situations, frequently involving disguise, and he had a sure sense of pace and stagecraft.

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