PhilPaine.com

This sel­dom-per­formed com­ic opera is a bit of a odd­i­ty. It remained unfin­ished by Carl Maria von Weber at his death, and was “com­plet­ed” by a young Gus­tav Mahler (before even his first sym­pho­ny, when he had only achieved suc­cess as a con­duc­tor). The “com­ple­tion” involved scor­ing the bulk of the opera, for Weber had left only a jum­ble of sketch­es, which Mahler had to “decode”, orches­trate, and sup­ple­ment with com­plete new num­bers. The plot is pure sit­com ― fun­ny drunk scenes, mis­tak­en iden­ti­ty, every­thing resolved at a wed­ding. Since half a cen­tu­ry sep­a­rates Weber’s death from Mahler’s recon­struc­tion, the opera has an odd sense of belong­ing in no time peri­od. In that half cen­tu­ry, opera, and indeed all music, had mutat­ed so much that one can nor­mal­ly dis­tin­guish some­thing from Weber’s time from Mahler’s with­out hav­ing heard it before, but Die drei Pin­tos would keep you guess­ing. I’ll have to say, how­ev­er, that while Mahler’s orches­tra­tion gives hints of many fea­tures of his lat­er sym­phonies, mak­ing the piece super­fi­cial­ly more “mod­ern”, it’s Weber’s orig­i­nal melodies that give the work its charm, and they are firm­ly anchored in his own time. The record­ing I have, a Nax­os issue of a live per­for­mance (you can hear thud­ding on the floor-boards), fea­tures Gun­nar Gud­b­jörns­son, Alessan­dro Svab, Bar­bara Zech­meis­ter, and was con­duct­ed by Pao­lo Arriv­abeni. The “pin­tos” referred to are the main char­ac­ter, Don Pin­to, and two peo­ple imper­son­at­ing him… not three hors­es or three beans.