Don Checco

Don Checco
Opera by Nicola De Giosa
Don Checco Cerifoglio, the opera's protagonist
Librettist	Almerindo Spadetta
Language	Italian
Premiere	11 July 1850 (1850-07-11) Teatro Nuovo, Naples

Don Checco is an opera in two acts composed by Nicola De Giosa to a libretto by Almerindo Spadetta. It premiered on 11 July 1850 at the Teatro Nuovo in Naples. Don Checco was De Giosa's masterpiece and one of the last great successes in the history of Neapolitan opera buffa.

Set in a village inn near Naples, the opera's story has the usual elements of the Neapolitan opera buffa genre—young lovers in difficulty, deceptions, mistaken identities, and a happy ending. Its protagonist and a guest at the inn is Don Checco Cerifoglio, an elderly gentleman deep in debt and fleeing the bailiff of the mysterious Count de Ridolfi. The opera had an initial run of 98 performances at the Teatro Nuovo and was regularly produced in numerous opera houses in Italy and abroad over the next four decades. After years of neglect, it was revived in 2014 in a co-production by the Teatro San Carlo in Naples and the Festival della Valle d'Itria in Martina Franca.

Don Checco was De Giosa's fifth opera. Almerindo Spadetta, a lawyer by training and prolific librettist by vocation, had also written the libretto for De Giosa's second opera Elvina, an opera semiseria which premiered in Naples in 1845. In Don Checco, as in most Neapolitan opere buffe of the period, the lead characters' spoken dialogue and arias were in Neapolitan dialect. The success or failure of the work often depended on the skill of the basso buffo singing the lead who would improvise many of his lines, sometimes addressing the audience directly. De Giosa's Don Checco was Raffaele Casaccia, a veteran of Neapolitan opera houses famed for his comic interpretations. Two of the other key basso buffo roles, Bartolaccio and Succhiello (Don Checco's main antagonists), were taken by Giuseppe Fioravanti and his son Valentino. Like Casaccia, they were both staples on the roster of the Teatro Nuovo in Naples. Music historian Sebastian Werr has pointed out that the impoverished Don Checco, who initially obtains free room and board at the inn through deception but ultimately has his debts forgiven, can be seen as fulfilling a fantasy of the Teatro Nuovo's audiences. They were mostly from the Neapolitan middle and lower-middle classes and barely scraping a living themselves. According to Werr, the finale, Don Checco's paean to indebtedness, is also an affirmation of the notion, "often seen as characteristically Neapolitan, that a certain brazenness is necessary to getting by in life."