by Alex Ross
Verdi’s writing for voice is a camera that zooms in on a person’s soul. Consider the moment in Act II of La traviata when Violetta, the wayward woman, leaves her lover, Alfredo. Alfredo believes that she is merely going into the garden, but he will soon receive a letter from her saying that she is gone forever. “I will always be here, near you, among the flowers,” Violetta says to him. “Love me, Alfredo, as much as I love you. Goodbye!” Amami, Alfredo, quant’io t’amo. When a great soprano unfurls these phrases—I am listening to Callas live at La Scala, in 1955—you hear so much you can hardly take it all in. You hear what Alfredo hears, the frantic talk of an overwrought lover: “I love you even though I am going into the garden.” You hear what Violetta cannot bring herself to say out loud: “I am leaving you, but will always love you.” And you hear premonitions of her deathbed plea, at the end of the opera: “Remember the one who loved you so.”
This matrix of meaning is contained in a simple tune that you already know even if you have never seen an opera: a twice-heard phrase that curves steeply down the notes of the F-major scale, followed by a reach up to a high B-flat and a more gradual, winding descent to the lower F. Beneath the voice, strings play throbbing tremolo chords. Verdi’s operas often pivot on such curt, charged phrases, which singers are expected to make into epiphanies. The composer hounded his librettists to find the right words for these passages; he wanted banner headlines of emotion. When Francesco Piave, his favorite collaborator before Boito, was working on Macbeth, Verdi issued this command: “USE FEW WORDS … FEW WORDS … FEW BUT SIGNIFICANT.” So significant was “Amami, Alfredo” in Verdi’s mind that he made the melody the main theme of the opera’s prelude, even though its only appearance in the opera proper is in these eighteen bars of Act II. There is no more impressive demonstration of Verdi’s lightning art: the audience hardly knows what hit it.
Callas’s execution of “Amami, Alfredo” on the 1955 set is among the most stunning pieces of Verdi singing on record. In the tense passage leading up to the outburst, the soprano adopts a breathless, fretful tone, communicating Violetta’s initially panicked response to the situation—vocal babbling, the Verdi scholar Julian Budden calls it. Then, with the trembling of the strings, she seems to flip a switch, her voice burning hugely from within. When she reaches up to the A and the B-flat, she claws at the notes, practically tears them off the page, although her tone retains a desperate beauty. Her delivery is so unnervingly vehement—here is what Björk, in her discussion of Callas, called the “mr”—that it risks anticlimax. Where can the opera possibly go from here? When you listen again, you understand: Violetta’s spirit is broken, and from now on she will sing as if she were already dead.
Such fearless pushing to the limit is exactly what Verdi demanded from his singers. John Rosselli quotes a letter that Verdi wrote to the librettist Salvadore Cammarano on the subject of casting the role of Lady Macbeth:
Tadolini is a fine figure of a woman, and I should like Lady Macbeth to look ugly and evil. Tadolini sings to perfection; and I would rather that Lady didn’t sing at all. Tadolini has a wonderful voice, clear, limpid, and strong; and I would rather that Lady’s voice were rough, hollow, stifled. Tadolini’s voice has something angelic in it. Lady’s should have something devilish.
Even if Verdi was overstating for effect, he was declaring his preference for dramatically committed singers over technically finished ones—or, ideally, for well-trained singers who are willing to sacrifice beauty in the name of drama. Callas, experienced in Wagner as well as Donizetti, had no trouble blindsiding her audience with an abrupt surge of tone.
If a crisis in Verdi singing now exists, the reason may be that vocal training is far more professionalized, routinized, and specialized than it was fifty or a hundred years ago. To study archival recordings is to realize how idiosyncratic and free-spirited the art used to be. On the EMI label there is a classic compilation titled Les Introuvables du chant Verdien, which is almost guaranteed to transform even the huskiest young fan into a tiresome old opera queen who complains that no one can sing Verdi anymore. At the same time, these recordings demonstrate that there never was a single Verdi style. Frida Leider delivers penetrating Verdi in German; Francesco Tamagno, the original Otello, sings in what sounds like a slight French accent (presumably an Italian dialect); Nellie Melba croons mercilessly. What the golden-age singers had in common was a way of seeming to reach the limit and then pushing over it. Caruso would swell his voice tremendously at moments where it ought to have given out; Rosa Ponselle would sustain a line over supernatural spans of time, so that the music acquired the steady glow of moonlight. Their feats seem physically unrepeatable: no one has lungs like that now.
Yet the crisis is not simply the result of some obscure genetic decline. The sense of freedom that you find on the old recordings is related to the fact that the stars of a century ago generally did not have to contend with star conductors. Even as these recordings were being made, Mahler and Toscanini were imposing new forms of discipline, and, although the rise of the international maestro undoubtedly led to sizable improvements in the opera house, it may also have contributed to the decline of Italian style. Conductors of the past few decades have tended to resist the constant adjustments of tempo—ritenuto, rallentando, stretto, and other ways of varying the pace—that Italian singing requires. Ironically, as Verdi’s intellectual stock rose, conductors sought to highlight the symphonic unity of his scores, to the detriment of vocal individuality.
In 2001, I stopped in at La Scala to see how Verdi was faring in the opera capital. I found the Neapolitan maestro Riccardo Muti—who had led the company since 1986—conducting Un ballo with a fiery diligence that seemed more appropriate to, say, Stravinsky’s Oedipus. In the middle of the formation was the young tenor Salvatore Licitra, who sang with a certain authentic swagger. When Licitra tried to linger over a possible epiphany, you could feel Muti tugging him onward, like a parent marching a child past a candy store. The performance was engrossing, but it felt like a succession of vocal highlights inserted into an orchestral narrative.
Despite the parlous state of Verdi performance, gifted singers are still able to create memorable portrayals under the right conditions. In 2006, the Romanian diva Angela Gheorghiu sang La traviata at the Met, and when she arrived at “Amami, Alfredo” she chose not to indulge in a vocal explosion à la Callas—perhaps because such an explosion didn’t really lie within her abilities. Instead, as the strings launched into their tremolo, she assumed a cool façade, proceeding toward her lover in statuesque fashion, painting the vocal line in sustained, majestic strokes. Instead of baring all, this Violetta raised her defenses against the world, to protect her shattered heart. Gheorghiu was not a perfect Violetta for the Met—she often sounded underpowered against the full orchestra—but she succeeded in placing her imprint on the role. Peter G. Davis, writing in New York magazine, characterized Gheorghiu aptly as “a dark-haired, impeccably gowned lady of the camellias with a sad cameo face, dangerous fragility, and an air that commands attention without hogging the scene.”
Three years later, the American singer Sondra Radvanovsky came to the Met to undertake the taxing role of Leonora, in Trovatore. She brought to bear a richly colored, lightly tremulous soprano, reminiscent of Old World voices of yore. The high notes didn’t always fall squarely on pitch, but they sailed through the house, and, more important, they were joined together in a strongly flowing musical line. She sounded weaker in the lower register, where some of Leonora’s most wrenching music lies. “Tacea la notte placida,” the aria in which Leonora unveils her doomed passion for the troubadour Manrico, flickered out rather than smoldered in the bottom range. Yet, in all, Radvanovsky had more oomph than several others who had lately tried the part. She sang “D’amor sull’ali rosee,” her second big aria, at a daringly slow tempo, embodying a woman lost in a dreamworld of unattainable love. The conductor, Gianandrea Noseda, encouraged rather than curtailed her exploration of the part.
/> The age of legends always seems distant, and yet it has a way of catching up to you as time goes by. Although I’m a relatively young operagoer, in the early 1990s I was able to hear one portrayal that has already passed into operatic history: the Otello of Placido Domingo, who whipped up storms of rage and anguish in his superbly flexible, colorful voice, and ended on a devastating whisper of “bacio.” To imagine what Verdi might have thought of Domingo’s achievement is to enter into the realm of the counterfactual, but everything we know of the composer’s opinions on singing and acting suggests that Domingo would have satisfied him thoroughly.
If singers and conductors tend to be too studious in their approach to Verdi, today’s directors too often treat the composer with a license bordering on contempt. In 2001, the critic Matthew Gurewitsch asked several leading directors to articulate their visions of Verdi, and he received some eyebrow-raising replies. Francesca Zambello, who once set Aida in a nuclear-winter landscape, said, “If I have to think of a work of Verdi that moved me on stage, that’s going to be pretty hard.” Christopher Alden, who created a Rigoletto with bouts of transvestism and public sex, said, “You have to throw cold water on an audience. You have to wake them up, poke holes into the operas so that the inner life will flow out.” Mark Lamos, whose Rigoletto also featured a graphic orgy, said, “To be blunt, I find Verdi’s operas about as stageworthy as his Requiem.”
With their outlandish coincidences and hyperventilating exits, Verdi’s plots do seem silly at first glance. Il trovatore is the most notorious example, possessing a plot so improbable that it inspired two great parodies—Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance and the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera. The short version is this: a Spanish Gypsy tries to avenge her mother’s death at the hands of a count by throwing the count’s infant son, Manrico, into the fire, but, in her excitement, she grabs the wrong baby and incinerates her own son instead. Actually, this all happens before the curtain rises; the opera ends with the count’s other son ordering Manrico’s execution without knowing of the family connection. The tragedy of Leonora is that she does not go back to sleep when she hears this particular troubadour playing outside her window.
Then again, most entertainment appears silly when it is viewed from a distance. Nothing in Verdi is any more implausible than the events of the average Shakespeare play, or, for that matter, of the average Hollywood action picture. The difference is that the conventions of the latter are widely accepted these days, so that if, say, Matt Damon rides a unicycle the wrong way down the Autobahn and kills a squad of Uzbek thugs with a package of Twizzlers, the audience cheers rather than guffaws. The loopier things get, the better. Opera is no different. Verdi didn’t seize on the lurid matter of Trovatore because he found it believable; rather, he relished the extremity of the situation, which required his characters to behave in extreme ways. His beloved maledictions, vendettas, and forces of destiny add plausibility rather than take it away; they make the violent accents of operatic singing seem like a natural reaction under the circumstances.
In other words, stories that seem ridiculous are on a deeper level truthful. The same cannot be said of the scenarios that many modern directors have devised. They tend to display precisely the faults they have assigned to Verdi: the work is too often stilted and cryptic, as if obeying some extraterrestrial social code. In 2000, the Met put on a Trovatore so monumentally opaque that the director, Graham Vick, later removed his name from it, in the spirit of the “Allen Smithee” movies that periodically come out of Hollywood. That affair was mild in comparison with what regularly appears on European stages. For some reason, Un ballo in maschera seems especially prone to manhandling. In 2001, the Spanish director Calixto Bieto placed the opera in Franco’s Spain, leading off with a scene of conspirators sitting on toilets. A 2008 staging in Erfurt featured the ruins of the World Trade Center, a cast of Elvis impersonators, naked elderly people in Mickey Mouse masks, and a woman dressed as Hitler.
Director-dominated opera is known as Regietheater, or director-theater, and it is telling that the word exists only in German. Regietheater came into fashion partly as a way of evading the unsavory side of the legacy of Wagner, in particular the sick stagecraft of Nazism. When the Bayreuth Festival reopened, in 1951, Wieland Wagner, the composer’s grandson, unveiled a Parsifal in which all the old medieval clutter had been cleared away, leaving a play of light and bodies on an almost empty stage. In the same theater, in 1976, Patrice Chereau introduced a radical reimagining of the Ring; the curtain rose on what appeared to be a hydroelectric dam, setting in motion a critique of industrial civilization. In my European travels, I have seen a Tristan in which most of the action unfolded inside a pulsating pink cube; a Ring whose Wotan expressed his desperation by feeding papers into a shredder; and a Parsifal where the climactic transfiguration of the Grail Temple was accompanied by film footage of decomposing rabbits. Somehow, Wagner retains his identity even when all hell is breaking loose onstage. His music can serve as a hypnotic soundtrack for any set of images, from Valkyries in traditional getups to the Vietnam air raid of Apocalypse Now.
Verdi, on the other hand, is minutely site-specific. His arching phrases imply a certain mode of address, his rhythms a certain way of stalking to and fro. Indeed, for the later operas, Verdi’s publisher created staging manuals that indicate exactly how the scenic action should follow the music. Verdi characters are defined by and against their social worlds, and if Violetta is singing against a featureless brick wall her insoluble dilemma probably won’t come through. Above all, Verdi’s art of dramatic irony depends for its effect on a veneer of ordinariness. In the climactic masked-ball scene of Un ballo, in the long minutes before Riccardo is fatally stabbed, dance music heightens the suspense, and, in one of the composer’s most ferocious strokes, it keeps playing for a little while after the attack; as the staging manual explains, news of the murder has yet to reach musicians in other parts of the palace. Such nuances probably won’t register if the opera has been moved to Iraq or outer space. Too many productions are masked balls from the outset, so you never know when anyone is putting on a disguise.
Yet the Regietheater approach to Verdi has intelligent defenders. The eminent opera scholar Philip Gossett, in his book Divas and Scholars, notes that Verdi seldom hesitated to move his operas from one era to another when the censors raised objections. Rigoletto migrated from the court of King Francis I to that of the Gonzagas in Mantua; Un ballo, from late-eighteenth-century Sweden to late-seventeenth-century Boston, with an aborted stopover in twelfth-century Florence. Realism in the conventional sense bored this composer; he once said, “Copying the truth may be a good thing, but inventing the truth is better, much better.” If we are so concerned with Verdi’s intentions, why are we hung up on realistic values that didn’t concern him? Gossett further points out that the “traditional” approach, which these days comes freighted with opulent decor, can sabotage the rapid scene changes to which Verdi was accustomed. The composer might have exploded in frustration if he had known that Franco Zeffirelli’s Traviata at the Met would require a break of several minutes between the two scenes of Act II, where, in a masterly transition, Violetta’s break with Alfredo gives way to a frolicsome party.
Gossett chides several music critics, the present writer among them, for advocating an excessively slavish devotion to the libretto. In the original version of this essay, published in The New Yorker in 2001, I overstated the case against radical direction, failing to admit that a drastic change of setting can sometimes bring potent insights. Gossett cites Jonathan Miller’s 1982 production of Rigoletto at the English National Opera, which relocated the work to New York, with Mafia dons taking the place of Renaissance dukes. In a preamble to the production, Miller observes that Verdi’s opera is itself guilty of anachronisms: the waltzing strains of “La donna è mobile” bear no resemblance to dances of the Renaissance period. In a way, such music makes more sense in Miller’s ingenious Mafia scenario. Even more importa
nt, the Mafia’s social code is not far removed from that of the Gonzagas: we have no trouble believing that a strongman is mortally afraid of exposing his daughter to his bosses, or that a hit job has gone horribly, grotesquely awry. During the protracted debate with the censors over the scenario of Rigoletto, Verdi commented that the action might take place in any number of places and periods so long as the Duke’s underlings live in fear of their ruler. Miller’s conception certainly passes that test.
The German director Peter Konwitschny made an even bolder intervention in a 2004 staging of Don Carlos at the Vienna State Opera—a presentation without cuts, in the form that the composer first offered the work to the Paris Opéra. (TDK released a DVD of one of the Vienna performances, with Bertrand de Billy conducting.) For the most part, the performers appear in period costumes, albeit within cold minimalist walls, but several times the historical boundaries are exploded. Konwitschny’s most arresting gesture comes in the second scene of Act III, when Philip presides over a burning of heretics. Suddenly, we are in the present day, and at the Vienna State Opera; the king and his entourage are attending a gala premiere. In-house television cameras take us to the palatial staircase of the Staatsoper lobby, where a slick TV host is jabbering in several languages (“Guten Abend, Europa! Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! … Bonsoir, mesdames et messieurs! … And here he is, the Grand Inquisitor!”). When the heretics are dragged in, their muted screams mingle with the march music and celebratory chorus that greet Philip as he walks down the red carpet toward the stage. The auto-da-fé becomes a modern media spectacle, heightening Verdi’s critique of the iconography of political and religious power. This is no condescending attempt at bringing Verdi “up to date”; rather, Konwitschny shows the degree to which we are still living in Verdi’s world.