Pidò was right: playing this unison passage at a rapid pace is no easy feat for four horns (not even for nineteenth-century natural horns, without valves), but as rehearsals continued, the performers gained confidence and the sound was splendid. Did they ever make mistakes? Sure, but who has ever heard a performance of an opera (even Siegfried under James Levine) in which a horn has not emitted a few croaks? You write for horn, you take your lumps.
Ermione is a relatively short opera and does not require cutting to reduce its length. Pirro’s aria (which includes sections for the chorus and all major soloists) is long, but so much action and character development takes place that it is difficult to shorten. A lovely “duettino” for Pilade (friend of Oreste) and Fenicio (adviser to Pirro) may not be essential to the drama, but this scene allows some respite for the prima donna between her gran scena and the explosive scena and duet that brings the opera to a close. Just imagine the reaction of the fine Santa Fe Ermione, Alexandrina Pendatchanska, who again sang the role with distinction at New York City Opera in the spring of 2004, had we proposed to cut the duettino! Composers were sensitive to such matters, and many seemingly superfluous passages in Italian opera serve intensely practical needs.
We did make some cuts in the recitative. In his libretto, Tottola frequently provided short lines for handmaidens, lieutenants, and friends, briefly commenting on the action. He may have thought he was imitating an element of French classical tragedy, but when set to music these asides acquire more importance than they can sustain. After Oreste challenges Pirro to turn over Astianatte, the son of Hector and Andromaca, so that the Greeks can put the boy to death, Andromaca and Ermione comment, “How unhappy I am!” and “How will the ingrate respond?” But before Pirro is allowed to erupt into his aria, Tottola provided further text for two aides, Attalo and Fenicio: “How boldly he expresses himself!” and “Heavens! I anticipate Pirro’s anger, I turn cold and am confused!” We eliminated or abbreviated similar passages, carefully adjusting the sequence of chords so that harmonic continuity was preserved.
Working with the stage director Jonathan Miller on Ermione was stimulating and challenging. But why, many asked, did he and his designer, Isabella Bywater, not only dress the characters in mid-nineteenth century costumes but specifically clothe the Trojans as defeated Confederate soldiers and the Greeks as victorious Yankees? What was the point of turning a story of the aftermath of the Trojan War into one visually invoking the American Civil War, while not changing a word of the libretto? For dramas set in classical Greece, Miller believed that modern audiences are too easily distanced from events on stage. The mythic qualities and formal austerity of the Oresteia or Oedipus Rex, however, are different from the dramatic intensity of Ermione. For Miller, the setting allowed an American audience to get closer to these tormented characters. Gone with the Wind, The Little Foxes, Ermione: it is not an unlikely combination. Oreste’s troubled entrance as an ambassador from one Northern general to another, for example, with his aide-de-camp Pilade trying to keep him focused on his task, gives these characters immediacy. Is the transposition necessary? Hardly. Would the setting have been equally relevant to a Czech audience in Prague? Surely not, although the same could be said about most theatrical productions. Did it create moments that were historically implausible? Only if a viewer insisted on interpreting every detail in terms of the Civil War.
Rather than insisting upon the historical moment, Miller successfully offered suggestion and understatement. Every personal interchange among characters and most details of the dramaturgy followed precisely Rossini’s indications (although the Southern belles, not traditionally known for their prowess as hunters, appeared without bows and arrows). This was in no sense a “radical staging,” alienating us from the work to comment critically on it.10 It was a conventional staging, attentive to the dramatic values of Rossini and aware of the underlying traditions of French classical tragedy. Indeed, Miller boasted that he was surely the only person in the world who had staged not only Ermione but also Andromaque (with the Old Vic). Still, approaches to staging remain among the thorniest issues in performing Italian opera, and another summer 2000 production, Le Siège de Corinthe, as we shall see, posed this problem in a far more outrageous manner.
RIGOLETTO AND THE PHOTOCOPIER
Butter or ice? It was over twenty years ago, in March 1983, that Riccardo Muti conducted the first performances of the critical edition of Rigoletto—the first volume to appear in The Works of Giuseppe Verdi—at the Vienna Staatsoper.11 Much of that week is impressed in my memory, although I remain unable to recall whether the sculpture of the hunchback that served as a centerpiece for the after-theater reception was carved from butter or ice.
It is not the only imponderable about those performances. More perplexing is why this event took place in Vienna at all, a city that treats Italian opera with the studied scorn due a former colonial culture. Verdi was all right, as long as his tunes were passed from one hurdy-gurdy to another, but in the temple of great art only Otello and Falstaff were admissible. The common public, with its debased taste, might need to be humored by allowing childish melodramas to be produced, but the less energy put into the process, the better. A critical edition of Rigoletto? Only an intellectual half-wit would devote himself to such a project, unless he were the dupe of voracious music publishers eager to make money on works long out of copyright. In fact, I was accused publicly of being both a half-wit and a dupe at a conference in which the new edition of Rigoletto was presented. Over a coffee mit Schlag in a Viennese café, Rudolf Stephan, who was to become director of the Arnold Schönberg edition, chided me for wasting my time on Italian opera.
Muti prepared the performance with care, and the Rigoletto (Renato Bruson) and the Gilda (Edita Gruberova) were excellent. The orchestra played with elegance, and many details corrected in the new edition emerged with convincing clarity. The production, while not particularly interesting, was free from scandal. Many individuals inside and outside the theater, however, wanted the project to fail, for it was widely considered to be the brainchild of Lorin Maazel, then director of the Staatsoper, who had political problems in Vienna’s complex society. Maazel’s own reaction to the political turmoil was philosophical: during intermission on opening night he compared himself to Mahler, whose shabby treatment by the Viennese is legendary.
Unfortunately the performance was severely marred by the tenor, or rather by a succession of tenors. The originally scheduled Duke of Mantua withdrew several weeks into the rehearsal period. His replacement fell ill and had to bow out altogether after the dress rehearsal, leaving this new production without a Duke. Rather than postponing the opening, Muti chose a tenor then in Vienna who he thought would respond to intensive coaching and whom he might teach the most important elements of the new edition overnight.
He was wrong. The late Franco Bonisolli was one of those Italian tenors with good lungs, a strong sound, but little musical intelligence. He knew just fine how to sing the role of the Duke, thank you, and he was perfectly willing to perform it—on his own terms. I cannot imagine the nature of those coachings between Muti and Bonisolli, to which no one had access, but in the performance Bonisolli was appalling. His Duke was vocally coarse, dramatically vulgar, and indifferent to this production’s efforts to rediscover and interpret Verdi’s original text and music. Add to that his outrage that Muti wanted him to sing the music as written, which meant in particular that he was not permitted to sing and sustain a high b at the conclusion of “La donna è mobile” in the third act. Muti wanted the aria treated as a popular tune, a feather in the breeze, not an excuse for tenor high jinks. That particular battle Muti won, but to no avail, for Bonisolli found many ways to express his distaste for the proceedings. His outrageous behavior with Maddalena conveyed nothing of the eroticism of Verdi’s quartet, but invoked the spirit of the burlesque hall. When the Duke is finally allowed a pianissimo high b as he makes his exit from the opera intoning “La donna è mobile” offstage, Boni
solli bellowed the note at full volume and sat on it. And sat. And sat. He couldn’t see either Bruson’s anxiety as he stared impatiently at the sack that is supposed to contain the Duke’s body or Muti’s furious glares. Many in the audience understood this gesture of defiance and there were pockets of nervous laughter. During the curtain calls, Bonisolli received a solid round of boos, at which point he ostentatiously thrust his rear end at the public. The Viennese press scoffed at what they took to be Maazel’s discomfiture.
In all the turmoil, who could remember that serious artistic aims were at stake, that scholars and performers alike, convinced that Rigoletto was a work of art deserving a better fate than it had been accorded, were attempting to revisit this staple of the repertory? As the first series of performances based on the first critical edition published in The Works of Giuseppe Verdi, it was anything but an auspicious occasion. But it woke an entire generation of Verdi scholars—all of whom in one way or another were to collaborate over the next decades with this major editorial project of the University of Chicago Press and Casa Ricordi—to the realities of the operatic world. And as the hunchback in butter was consumed (or the hunchback in ice melted), we vowed to continue our efforts.
Music publishers are in business to make money by selling printed music and renting performance materials to theaters and concert organizations. If they don’t make money, as any good economist could predict, they go out of business. If a publishing house reprints and sells nineteenth- or early twentieth-century scores and parts, its costs are few. The less work it does, the higher its profits. If Kalmus sells a vocal score purporting to be Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia in which some 50 percent of the music is not from that opera, caveat emptor.12 A publishing house will invest in preparing a new edition, on the other hand, only if it both believes the edition to be necessary and hopes to earn a reasonable return on its investment. Casa Ricordi, now BMG Ricordi, Italy’s premier music publisher since 1808, has traditionally sold vocal scores and some orchestral scores, while renting performance materials. But producing a full orchestral score of Bellini’s La straniera or Donizetti’s Adelia will never be commercially viable. That is why Ricordi has entered into agreements with private and public institutions—the University of Chicago Press, the Fondazione Rossini, the cities of Bergamo and Catania—to produce critical editions of the works of this repertory. Ricordi opens its archives to these institutions and their scholars, then works closely with them in the preparation of new scores, of which it distributes performing materials. Rental fees and royalties from licensing performance rights (in countries offering limited protection for critical editions) are shared with the editors and with co-publishers, which reinvest them in future projects. While hardly a perfect system, it has proved viable for some twenty-five years.
Economic judgments are made all the time in performing Italian opera. Does a theater hire an expensive tenor or does it use local talent? If it hires an expensive tenor, does it skimp on the soprano and baritone? Does it create a new production or dust off sets warehoused two decades ago? And how does one decide between several desiderata? If 95 percent of the public can’t tell what musical edition is being used, but everyone is pleased when just a little more gold paint is applied to the set, how do you spend your limited resources?
Many opera houses therefore decide to forgo the new editions, particularly of repertory operas for which there is a serviceable score in circulation. Having invested in Ermione during the summer of 2000, Santa Fe determined that Rigoletto would be performed with materials already in hand. And so, one might think, the fruits of the research and editorial work that resulted in the critical edition of Rigoletto did not reach audiences in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. But that is not quite accurate. In Rigoletto there are significant corrections in the notes, rhythms, text, and dynamics in the parts of Gilda, Rigoletto, and the Duke. New vocal scores have been in print for more than a decade, and many singers have studied them. Peculiar contradictions can result. In a fascinating Rigoletto in Los Angeles during the winter of 2000, which did not officially use the new edition, the Duke of Mantua became “Duke,” a Hollywood mogul, and the opening festivities took place around his swimming pool in Beverly Hills, following the preview of Duke’s new movie (Vendetta). Whatever one may have thought of the staging (I liked it), Gilda and the Duke incorporated the many corrections of the new score, while Rigoletto sang the old notes, many of them wrong.
In Santa Fe all principal singers adopted the corrected readings. More important, the conscientious conductor, Richard Buckley, was determined to incorporate as many corrections as possible. Between my rehearsals for Ermione and his for Rigoletto, we went over the score page by page, and I shared with him the corrections I could remember. I had neither the time nor the energy to check every symbol in the old Ricordi score against the critical edition. So, we fixed dynamic levels in the Prelude; we made sure the flute and clarinet played their last note before “Questa, o quella,” where the old Ricordi edition carelessly omitted the resolutions; we got the rhythm right after the “Perigordino,” ignoring a wrongly interpolated measure of rest; we differentiated between accents and diminuendo hairpins in the accompaniment for “Veglia, o donna, questo fiore” and the orchestral introduction to “La donna è mobile.”
Among the most striking corrections in the critical edition is the restoration to their original form of several elements in the storm and trio of the last act, during which Gilda enters the inn and is murdered by Sparafucile. These include Verdi’s markings for thunder, lightning, and storm noises, as well as his original choral parts. The old Ricordi scores eliminated most of the former, which used a notation Verdi invented for the purpose, and simplified the latter (a men’s chorus backstage, “a bocca chiusa,” that is, humming). To get the choral entries right in Santa Fe, the photocopier went into operation, so that the chorus actually learned this section of Rigoletto from the new edition.
For Verdi’s storm effects there was to be no metal sheet to strike for thunder and no traditional wind machine. Instead, the finest new electronics were at Santa Fe’s disposal. Thunder, lightning bolts, rain, wind: all were carefully synthesized and timed to coincide precisely with Verdi’s markings. Yet when the sound effects were unveiled at the piano dress rehearsal, they were a disaster: too loud, too soft, now on, now off, and badly coordinated with the score. The men’s chorus was inaudible from behind a sound-deadening wall. By the final dress rehearsal most of this had been worked out. Volume and timing of the electronics were better regulated, and the chorus was placed in the orchestra pit, from where they could be heard.
When opening night came, we were confident that the storm effects would function correctly. What we failed to take into account was the weather. Although Santa Fe’s theater is now covered, so that well-dressed patrons are no longer drenched during a sudden downpour (a regular feature of earlier operagoing in Santa Fe), the theater remains open along its sides to stunning mountain views. It is also open to the sounds of nature, which on opening night of Rigoletto included a spectacular storm. Murmurs of thunder began with the Prelude and returned, on cue, for the beginning of the storm and trio in the third act. The counterpoint between actual thunder and electronic thunder was a bonus Verdi had not envisioned.
Other additions to Verdi’s score raised more complicated issues. Richard Buckley is a second-generation conductor. His father, the late Emerson Buckley, was the guiding light of the Greater Miami Opera for many years and a long-time favorite conductor for Luciano Pavarotti. The younger Buckley, while friendly to the new Verdi editions, also knows his performing traditions. He is bothered neither by inserted high notes nor by an occasional ornamental flourish, and so the Duke sang an unwritten high b at the end of “La donna è mobile” and Rigoletto leaped to the stratosphere for “All’onda, all’onda.” As will be seen in chapter 9, I do not reject interpolated high notes in principle, but there is one traditional singer’s modification in Rigoletto that I find offensive, for it rui
ns a musical effect that Verdi calculated with care. The fine Rigoletto, Kim Josephson, sang this very interpolation during the dress rehearsal of the opera.
The moment comes just before the jester attacks the cabaletta of his second-act duet with Gilda, “Sì, vendetta, tremenda vendetta.” Monterone has crossed the stage between guards. Observing the portrait of the Duke, he muses bitterly: “Since you have escaped my calls for revenge, you will apparently live happily, o Duke!” Rigoletto, his sobbing daughter beside him, calls after Monterone: “Old man, you are wrong, you will have an avenger.” Verdi wrote the roles of Monterone and Rigoletto as mirror images. The strains of Monterone’s curse and of Rigoletto’s fearful “That old man cursed me” ring through the opera, beginning with the first measures of the prelude. Time and again they involve simple declamation on middle c, a comfortable note in the upper middle of a baritone’s tessitura. In the second act, then, Monterone emphasizes this middle c and the key of C minor in the phrase he addresses to the Duke’s portrait, imitating precisely Rigoletto’s angry dismissal of the courtiers. Rigoletto returns to this c to proclaim himself Monterone’s avenger, after which the music shifts abruptly, in a harmonically unexpected manner, to the key of A major for “Sì, vendetta, tremenda vendetta” (example 1.2). Generations of Rigolettos have shown off their upper register by altering the final C of “un vindice avrai” to E, a minor third higher. But that gesture completely changes the sense of the music, for this e functions as a dominant degree to the new tonic (A major). Verdi’s stark declamation and sudden attack are made to seem harmonically consequential, with a link across the rests between the sections, in a way he never intended.13
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