About the work
Comic opera in three acts by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, with a libretto by Giuseppe Pizzolato and Luigi Sugana after Carlo Goldoni’s comedy "I rusteghi" (1760), written in Venetian dialect (hence "quatro" rather than "quattro"). The German version premiered at the Munich Hoftheater on 19 March 1906; the Italian premiere followed only in 1914, in Milan.
Plot
In eighteenth-century Venice, four gruff, domineering husbands keep their wives shut away from society. Lunardo betroths his daughter Lucieta to Filipeto, the son of his friend Maurizio, without the two ever having met. During carnival, the women secretly arrange for the young couple to meet; when the ruse is discovered, the men are furious. Only when Felice confronts them with their own tyranny do they relent, and the comedy ends with a reconciled engagement celebration.
Cultural significance
The opera is one of three early Munich successes that made Wolf-Ferrari internationally known, and is regarded as his most Goldoni-steeped work – a revival of Venetian comic tradition for the twentieth-century operatic stage.