ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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The unloved forest is the title of the first opera released in Spain, composed by Filippo Piccinini. It is an innovation for the stage music in Spain with the introduction of the rective stile, as it was not known before. While the new style had no significance and was not consecrated. It premiered at the Alcázar de Madrid in 1627. The stage was carried out by the Italian painter Cosimo Lotti and his assistant Pietro Francesco Gandolfi, who were brought to Spain by the Duke of Pastrana at the request of the Condeo-Duke of Olivares. The score is not preserved.

The stage made an impression for its visual effects.

The forest without love
Pastoral ecloga in seven scenes with composed music Bernardo Monanni, secretary of the embassy, in collaboration with Filippo Piccinini for a text by Félix Lope de Vega. The music is lost and only its text is preserved. It was premiered in Madrid, in the large hall of the Alcázar on December 18, 1627. '

The unloved forest is considered the first opera represented in Spain by two fundamentally confirming and emphasizing sources:

1. The Florentine diplomatic correspondence, where Shirley B. Whitaker discovered documents that dated the time of its premiere.
2. Lope de Vega's dedication to his text, as reflected in El laurel de Apollo, with other rhymes, (Madrid, 1630).

However, it was composed and produced by Italians. Shortly after his arrival at the court of Philip IV in Madrid in 1626, the stage designer Cosimo Lotti had started planning a short work with machines (called La comediata di Machine) in the hope of impressing the king, and continuing the company in which he was being supported by Secretary Bernardo Monanni and other members of the staff of the Tuscany embassy. Lope, in the preface of the unloved jungle, gives us an idea of the sophistication and refinement that Lotti adds to the scene already established by Fontana:

Interchangeable wallpapers

The scale of the visual show that was being developed for the interpretation of this work can be seen if the stage is analyzed. The beauty of the poetic verses, which Lope had made with so much careful, would be eclipsed in the face of the monumental setting, which put in motion a very sophisticated machinery: scenarios with mobile frames that gave rise to a visual perspective with which it was obtained a depth of space, the effects of sea waves and moving fish created by portable decorations, an illuminated lighthouse that marked the location of the port and the city at the other end of the stage, where there were castles that fired salvae with their cannons, the famous carriage in which Venus, the goddess of love was walking over two, floating in the air (Cupid, and in the rest of the sea). The scene had a recreated lighting with the original means that could be available in the