My family has put up with me all these years, pushed, prodded, rolled their eyes, and given me loving support. Suzanne, who has been with me from the start and has always kept her faith in this project, even when I seemed to be losing it, subjected the entire manuscript to her rigorous editorial control and tried to make sure that most of the time I was writing in a way that nonmusicians could follow. As children, David and Jeffrey were kind enough to pretend they were interested, and it has been one of the great pleasures of my life to see that, as adults, they really are. It is to my biggest supporter, though, my father, that I dedicate this book. Since accepting the fact that I was going to be a musicologist, whether he liked it or not, he and his wonderful wife, Jean, have always been at my side. May this book express in some way my love and appreciation.
Philip Gossett
Chicago, 2005
PROLOGUE
1
MARE O MONTI: TWO SUMMER FESTIVALS
Every summer Italians find themselves engaged in delicate negotiations on which the happiness of a family depends: Should they spend their vacation at the seaside or in the mountains, mare o monti? Some believe in the virtues of clean air and brisk walks on carefully marked paths far above the heat and humidity of an Italian August. Some prefer sea breezes, swimming in the Mediterranean (less polluted than a decade ago), and quiet rest under an umbrella in one of the symmetrically arranged beach chairs that line Italy’s shores. If papà loves the mountain scenery, mammà looks forward to joining her friends at the sea; if thirteen-year old Emma expects to hit the trail before daybreak, eighteen-year old Massimo wants only to ogle the procession of teenage beauties in ever briefer bathing attire on their endless walks for his benefit, up and down the hot Adriatic sands. There is no hope of resolving this dispute, only various degrees of compromise. A mountain refuge with an all-night discothèque will help control Massimo’s hormones, while a beach resort with tennis courts will allow Emma to keep in shape. And a range of cultural activities can provide sufficient distraction for all concerned.
Tourism supports the economy of large parts of Italy, not to mention the United States. Since cultural tourism broadens the appeal of a vacation destination, many summer festivals are located in places that compete for tourist dollars. The resulting transformations in local institutions do not win universal approval. Ask long-time residents of Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, what they think about the hordes of visitors pouring into their town for the summer Opera Festival, about brand-name chains replacing local stores, about restaurants with international cuisine transforming a dining community once known for regional specialties. The increased cost of real estate in Santa Fe has forced many locals to seek homes in Albuquerque, some sixty miles south. The situation isn’t much different in Pesaro, an Italian beach resort where a three-to-four-month summer season provides resources that sustain the region and its workers for an entire year. But the international clientele of the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro each August has also brought shops devoted to designer clothes by Versace and Max Mara, expensive leather goods, and restaurants earning Michelin stars. Local businesses can no longer sustain themselves on the main street, where rents keep rising, and trattorias that used to serve the local population find it harder and harder to survive.
Each festival has a particular repertory niche.1 Since 1957, Santa Fe, while offering a broad range of opera, has emphasized the works of Richard Strauss and contemporary music. Since 1980, the younger festival in Pesaro has celebrated the works of a native son, Gioachino Rossini, born in the Adriatic city in 1792. Young artist programs in both festivals help ensure the liveliness of the community, and stars of future seasons often begin their careers as apprentices. The early success of each festival was due to the presence of significant artistic figures. Igor Stravinsky became a central participant in the making of the Santa Fe Opera, where The Rake’s Progress was featured in the first festival in 1957. Maurizio Pollini and Claudio Abbado played defining roles in Pesaro. Pollini conducted La donna del lago in 1981, a landmark production in the revival of interest in the Rossini serious operas. Abbado, in what is widely viewed as one of the great musical events in Italy of the past half century, unveiled in 1984 the modern premiere of the reconstructed Il viaggio a Reims, written for the coronation of Charles X in 1825 and long believed to be lost. Both festivals, dogged by their past successes and frequently accused of having lost their way, are urged to reinvent themselves year after year.
The renovated Santa Fe opera house sits on a hill, high above the surrounding landscape, open to the skies on both sides and—when the set permits—through the back of the stage. As with all outdoor theaters, acoustics require careful attention, but the sound is usually glorious and stage designers have access to the latest technology. There is ample room for operas to be performed in repertory. In contrast, although for several years Pesaro tried to alternate two or three operas at the thousand-seat Teatro Rossini—a traditional Italian theater built in the mid-1810s and inaugurated by Rossini himself with a revival of La gazza ladra in 1818—the experience was nerve-wracking. Parts of the set often slept under the stars; fortunately there is little rain in Pesaro during August. The Rossini Opera Festival soon added the Sala Pedrotti, a concert hall in the Conservatory with excellent acoustics and a stage that can accommodate a simple set. In the absence of an orchestra pit, players sit at the level of the audience, exactly the way Italian orchestras performed during the first half of the nineteenth century. Finally, the festival commandeered an indoor sports arena, cleverly transformed. While particularly appropriate for monumental operas, it served equally well for comedies in the hands of imaginative directors and designers, until what is widely regarded as real-estate speculation forced its closing after the season of 2005.
During the summer of 2000 I worked in both Santa Fe and Pesaro. Five nineteenth-century Italian operas were on the boards: in Santa Fe Rossini’s Ermione and Verdi’s Rigoletto; in Pesaro three operas by Rossini: Le Siège de Corinthe, La scala di seta, and La Cenerentola. I participated directly in some productions, advised informally for others, and watched from the sidelines for the rest. This introductory chapter suggests some of the problems we faced in bringing these works before the public. The issues and questions that arose in these particular productions are representative of those that recur in opera houses throughout the world when facing this repertory. No one should take my remarks as being particularly critical of a specific institution: in every opera house or festival highly successful productions rub shoulders with questionable ones, but even within productions that succeed, many issues require further reflection. My examples, in short, are intended to make clear why all of us—scholars, performers, and audiences—need to think harder about what it means to perform Italian opera.
ERMIONE FINALLY SEES THE LIGHT OF DAY
An expectant and knowledgeable public gathered at the Teatro Rossini of Pesaro during the summer of 1987 to witness the first staged performance of Ermione since the spring of 1819. This was one of nine serious operas written by Rossini for Naples between 1815 and 1822, but unlike other Neapolitan works (Otello, Armida, or Zelmira), Ermione was almost entirely unknown. After its unsuccessful premiere on 27 March 1819, and six additional performances that season, the opera disappeared.2 Except for a fleeting reference to its failure to please, no written records document this inaugural season. Withdrawing the score from the Neapolitan impresario Domenico Barbaja, Rossini is alleged to have said, “You’ll see it again sooner or later, and perhaps then the Neapolitan public will recognize its mistake.”3 Although he tried to resurrect individual numbers in other operatic contexts, he basically put Ermione away. Asked whether he would allow a French translation, he responded, “No, it is my little Italian Guillaume Tell, and it will not see the light of day until after my death.”4 We can’t be sure, of course, that he actually said any of these things, but none of them is implausible.
Scholars who had performe
d Ermione over and over in their imaginations were convinced that it was one of Rossini’s most important serious operas. The long-standing claim that it was “all recitative and declamation,” words Ferdinand Hiller attributed to Rossini in 1855, seemed absurd.5 There are important scenes of dramatic recitative, accompanied by the orchestra, and intense moments of impassioned declamation, to be sure, but the score abounds in beautiful melody and artfully devised florid passages. Furthermore, the librettist, Andrea Leone Tottola, treats the opera’s literary source, Racine’s Andromaque, with both respect and appropriate freedom. The principal characters are the unhappy children of the Greek heroes of the Trojan War: Pirro, son of Achilles; Oreste, son of Agamemnon; and Ermione, daughter of Menelaus and Helen of Troy; as well as Andromaca, the widow of the Trojan leader, Hector. All four protagonists are locked into an impossible chain of love and hate that leads inevitably to the death of Pirro, the destruction of both Ermione and Andromaca, and the despair of Oreste. In Ermione herself, furthermore, Rossini created one of the most complex characters in the bel canto repertory.
Nonetheless, the 1987 performances of Ermione in Pesaro received a chorus of boos, the worst reception of any opera ever performed at the festival. I had to restrain myself from joining the chorus. There were many fine things about this Ermione. Marilyn Horne was a superb Andromaca, a relatively small but significant part. As always she turned up for the first rehearsal with the entire role memorized, ornamentation in place, and a fine sense of her character and its relationship to the dramaturgy of the whole. The tenors performing Oreste and Pirro were stalwarts of the Rossini renaissance of the 1980s, Rockwell Blake (known affectionately throughout the operatic world as “Rocky”) and Chris Merritt, both of whom were well received.
But even those three stars could not prevail within a production that worked against the opera and the singers, a conductor who seemed utterly lost, and a prima donna who didn’t belong there. Roberto De Simone, famous for his reinterpretations of the popular dramatic traditions of Naples, was well regarded as an operatic stage director, and his 1985 Pesaro production of Rossini’s farsa, Il signor Bruschino, had been a delight, even if the Gallic wit of the original was transformed into Neapolitan slapstick. For Ermione, however, he invented a stage that severely restricted the space available to singers for entrances, exits, and movement. It hardly mattered, since the prima donna was basically motionless all evening, with two principal gestures: lifting her left arm and pointing a menacing finger to the left, and lifting her right arm and pointing a menacing finger to the right. One can sympathize with the reluctance of stage directors to impose Greek togas on a modern audience, but De Simone’s setting in the Naples of 1819, the post-Napoleonic Bourbon reign in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, had little resonance with the story of Ermione.
Still, De Simone’s inoffensive staging would not itself have aroused public ire. That was reserved for the conductor and the prima donna. I knew the production was in trouble from the first orchestral reading, which I attended with the provisional critical edition in hand, in case errors had slipped into our score that required immediate attention.6 Errors, after all, translate into wasted rehearsal time, a serious matter, given the expense involved. But it soon became apparent that Gustav Kuhn had arrived at this reading without knowing the music.7 A man of considerable talent and instinct, Kuhn must have assumed he would learn the opera during rehearsals. He began the reading with Ermione’s unusual sinfonia, beating time mechanically, while its series of atypical tempo and meter changes, its use of an off-stage chorus, its complex orchestration, and its structural abnormalities began to unfold. Perhaps realizing how badly he had miscalculated, he appeared uncomfortable, even terrified. And so the rehearsal period went. Rather than providing musical leadership, Kuhn strove to catch up with the rehearsal accompanists and singers, most of whom had been hard at work for months. He never succeeded.
Even this, however painful, could have been forgiven were it not for Montserrat Caballé’s difficulties with the title role. Blame must be shared. How could the management of the festival not have known that Caballé no longer had the vocal skills or the histrionic ability to perform this challenging part? How could Caballé have accepted the role at that point in her career? In her prime she was a singer of great gifts, breathtaking pianissimi, elegant coloratura, fine musicianship. By the late 1980s she had become a caricature of herself. Often she caricatured the operas in which she appeared: during Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims in London in 1992, she compensated for her inability to sing the role of Madama Cortese by playing the buffoon, mugging and throwing apples at the conductor, Carlo Rizzi. But what could she do with Ermione? Physical ills had restricted her range of movement. Most of all, she could not sing the music and did not seem to understand that it mattered.
It is normal for singers to make small adjustments to help them negotiate passages they find particularly difficult (nineteenth-century musicians called these adjustments puntature).8 It is quite another thing for a singer to omit or rewrite to the point of unintelligibility large portions of a score. At the climax of Ermione’s “gran scena,” she dispatches the love-sick Oreste to kill Pirro at the altar, where he is exchanging marriage vows with Andromaca. Caballé mortally weakened Rossini’s melodies by radically simplifying them, then by altering the notes at the climactic moment of the melodic line. Why? Simply, as she told me directly, because she found it harder to sing the phrase Rossini had written. In Ermione’s final duet with Oreste, where she berates the confused son of Agamemnon for not understanding that she continues to love the man he has murdered, Ermione is supposed to repeat obsessively, six times, a pattern of four sixteenth notes (with the text “hide yourself from the eyes of living beings, murderer, traitor”); then she must leap fortissimo to a high b, one of the highest notes she is asked to sing anywhere in the opera, precisely on the powerful syllable “[tradi]-tor” [traitor]. Caballé reduced the passage to one fleeting four-note pattern, then let loose with a resounding high b, as if that were all her fans had come to hear. Having decimated the musical content of the part, she presented herself before the booing public with a copy of the score, pointing to it as if to assert, “I have sung what Rossini wrote.”
ERMIONE MEETS ROBERT E. LEE
Subsequent productions of Ermione have been more successful, including notable revivals in Rome in 1991 and Glyndebourne in 1995 (a fine staging by Graham Vick, with Sir Andrew Davis conducting). The decision by Santa Fe Opera to produce Ermione during the summer of 2000 was a new direction for the theater, which had never been particularly interested in this repertory. As rehearsals proceeded, however, buzz developed around the project, and more and more people (even the founding director of Santa Fe Opera and Strauss champion, John Crosby, no admirer of bel canto opera) made their way into the Tusuque public school, where a mock-up of the stage had been constructed. As in Glyndebourne, Ermione was well received by public and critics (excluding a New York Times observer, whose vocabulary to describe Rossini’s style was limited to “chirpy”).9
Yet even in a production where all the pieces fall into place, many controversial decisions need to be taken, affecting music, drama, stage setting, and costumes. The public sees a finished product, but every staging of an Italian opera embodies a series of responses to difficult questions. The opera was performed from the critical edition prepared by Patricia Brauner and myself. But the conductor, Evelino Pidò, who had led an earlier set of performances in Rome, was perplexed by one change between the provisional critical edition he had used in 1991 (before the edition was actually published) and the published critical edition he now had before him. In the chorus that introduces Ermione in the second scene of the opera, an orchestral figure recurs several times. It had been played in the provisional edition by a flute, two oboes, and two clarinets, in octaves, fortissimo, then echoed by a single clarinet, piano; in the printed score the same figure was assigned to four horns in unison, echoed by one solo horn (example 1.1). Not only d
id Pidò want to know why this had been changed, he was quite reasonably concerned about the ability of four horns to play this figure in unison.
EXAMPLE 1.1. GIOACHINO ROSSINI, ERMIONE, CORO (N. 2), MM. 1–11.
The question was fully justified. In Rossini’s own manuscript for this chorus, which we will refer to as his “autograph manuscript” or simply as his “autograph,” the version for four horns was physically altered by the composer himself to that for flute, oboes, and clarinets. If Rossini himself modified the passage, why did we want to return to the version he seems to have canceled? The truth is that Brauner and I had at first misunderstood the history of this passage. Seeing the composer’s correction, we imagined that he made the change because the passage was too challenging for four horns. But we were wrong. The autograph of this chorus is not with the remainder of Ermione in the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra in Paris, but in Pesaro in the collection of the Fondazione Rossini, with autograph materials for Le Siège de Corinthe and the Italian opera on which it is based, Maometto II. Convinced that Ermione would never be revived, Rossini inserted this chorus into Le Siège de Corinthe in 1826, providing a text in French, writing a new orchestral introduction, and modifying the orchestration of this figure. He made this modification not because the original passage was too difficult to play but because the dramatic situation had changed. In Le Siège de Corinthe, “L’hymen lui donne” is sung by Ismène and the chorus of Turkish women at the beginning of a divertissement (with choruses and ballet), inviting the Greek Pamyra to enjoy the fruits of love by entering into marriage with the Turkish sultan Mahomet. “Dall’Oriente l’astro del giorno,” the same chorus in Ermione, is sung by Cleone and a chorus of Spartan women, armed with bows and arrows, who invite the sorrowing Ermione to join the hunt. That Rossini would use four horns for a hunting chorus, and replace them when the Greek huntresses became Turkish maidens in a divertissement, is perfectly comprehensible. When completing our research into Ermione in order to publish the critical edition, furthermore, we examined all surviving manuscript copies of the opera: every one of them had the version with four horns.
Divas and Scholars Page 3