EXAMPLE 1.2. GIUSEPPE VERDI, RIGOLETTO, SCENA E DUETTO (N. 10), MM. 192–196.
The day before the Rigoletto premiere, at lunch in the Tesuque Market Café (a hangout for Hollywood stars who buy multimillion-dollar villas in the hills), I expressed my reservations about this interpolation to Buckley, who listened carefully. I did not expect anything to change as the result of that conversation: singers need to be left alone in the days between dress rehearsal and opening night, and told how wonderful they are. So I was surprised on opening night to hear this spot corrected: Josephson held firm on the c before attacking “Sì, vendetta, tremenda vendetta.” I wish I could say that I was satisfied, but I wasn’t. He sang the note hesitantly, uncertain, as if he didn’t quite understand the point. In performing Italian opera, it is not enough to sing the right notes: they must be sung with authority, even in the mountains of New Mexico.
LE SIÈGE DE CORINTHE AND THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE
Although the Rossini Opera Festival on the shores of the Adriatic employs the new critical editions of the works of Rossini prepared by the Fondazione Rossini, life in the theater is more complex than the principles scholars invoke. And choosing an edition is only one of the decisions to be made when performing Italian opera. Even the so-called home of “practical musicology,” as Pesaro in its golden years used to be called, can become a battleground for differing visions of theater, incompatible musical opinions, and the conflicts that inevitably emerge when strong personalities (singers, conductors, directors, even scholars) clash. Two of the three productions at Pesaro in August 2000 were deeply contested; the third was a blessed example of what happens when all the gears mesh.
The festival opened with the first Pesaro performance of Le Siège de Corinthe, Rossini’s earliest French opera, which had its premiere at the Paris Opéra in 1826. It was based, in turn, on one of Rossini’s finest Neapolitan operas, Maometto II, prepared in 1820. There had been legendary performances of the latter in Pesaro in 1986 and 1993, an elegant production by Pier Luigi Pizzi, with Cecilia Gasdia as the heroine, Anna (Venetian in Maometto II), and Sam Ramey, then Michele Pertusi, as her beloved who turns out to be the Turkish sultan Maometto II. While the Neapolitan premiere of Maometto II shared the doubtful reception there of Ermione, Rossini was determined not to leave this work’s reputation to posterity. He revised it for Venice in 1823, then recast it as a battle between Greeks and Turks for Paris. With Le Siège de Corinthe, Italian vocal style and operatic forms entered forcibly into the temple of French culture; the resulting clash and reconciliation laid the groundwork for French grand opera.14
There is no acceptable, let alone critical, edition of Le Siège de Corinthe. Indeed, until Maometto II is published, it will be impossible to approach Rossini’s first French opera responsibly. The directors of the Rossini Festival were indifferent: having produced Guillaume Tell in 1995 (using the edition of the Fondazione Rossini), then Moïse in 1997 (using a nineteenth-century score that was functional but of questionable authority), they were determined also to undertake Le Siège de Corinthe. As in the case of Moïse, the festival adopted an orchestral score issued by Rossini’s French publisher, Troupenas. Scholars at the Fondazione tried to explain, to no avail, that the Troupenas score of Siège was a mess, with errors and inconsistencies, major confusions about the order and content of pieces, and dramaturgical absurdities. At the end, for example, the male Greek defenders of Corinth are all dead, yet they manage to sing from offstage “O patrie,” in a conclusion that merges incoherently several versions of the final measures. Only by sorting out the performance history will it be possible to produce a coherent text, as was accomplished with Guillaume Tell, an edition on which Elizabeth Bartlet labored for many years.15
The conductor, Maurizio Benini, found himself facing error-filled materials with nothing but instinct to guide him. To make matters worse, the Troupenas orchestral score often differed from the Troupenas vocal score. The cavatina, or opening aria, for Maometto in Maometto II, for example, is a showstopper. Rossini organized his opera so that there would be few opportunities for audience applause until this entrance of the hero/villain. The opera’s introductory ensemble is followed by Anna’s cavatina, which is short and in a single section: while it is beautiful, it is definitely not showy. After that cavatina the opera continues with one of the longest and most splendid ensembles in all Italian opera, the terzettone (Rossini’s unusual name employs the Italian suffix -one, meaning “great big”), but its orchestral conclusion modulates to a new key, robbing the audience of whatever opportunity they might have had to applaud.16 Now the chorus of Turks and their Sultan enter, and Maometto sings his fabulous solo with a blockbuster conclusion. In Pizzi’s production the effect was startling, with the young and dashing Sam Ramey, his chest bared to the delight of a host of swooning admirers, perilously perched high on the outstretched hands of his warriors.
In Maometto II the piece consists of a chorus, a cantabile (“Sorgete”), in which Maometto exhorts his followers to battle, a tempo di mezzo (a transitional section, featuring the chorus), and the cabaletta (a quicker final section, whose main period is repeated, giving the singer a chance to introduce ornamentation), in which Maometto promises with their help to conquer the universe. In Le Siège de Corinthe the same piece is presented in the Troupenas orchestral score with the chorus, a new recitative, the tempo di mezzo, and the cabaletta (the cantabile is omitted). The vocal score agrees with the orchestral score, but it also has the cantabile. Benini and his Mahomet, Michele Pertusi, decided to include the cantabile. While the music is appealing, the result is a historically incorrect conflation of two versions. But their incompatibility goes further. Not only do the new recitative and the old cantabile cover exactly the same dramatic ground, but the recitative ends on a chord (a dominant seventh) that resolves naturally to the key of the tempo di mezzo (D minor). As one intelligent nineteenth-century edition specified, “if you want to sing the cantabile, you have to omit the preceding recitative.”17 Instead, Pesaro heard them both.
Such issues, though, rapidly faded away in comparison with the directorial hijinks that surrounded this production. They tell me that Massimo Castri is one of Italy’s most significant directors of prose theater, which only suggests how badly people of talent can go wrong. It was Castri’s first attempt at operatic staging. Other Italian theatrical wizards (Luchino Visconti, Giorgio Strehler, Luca Ronconi, and Dario Fo) have made the transition brilliantly. Instead of trying to learn how opera and theater differ, however, Castri expressed his scorn for the lyric theater. What do you mean he couldn’t cut music here, shift scenes there, add material wherever it suited his whim, just as he did in prose theater? What is this music stuff that interfered with his notion of theatrical time? Furthermore, why couldn’t these singers behave like actors? And how dare Ruth Ann Swenson, the beautiful Pamyra, complain that she couldn’t sing while Castri chain-smoked his way through rehearsals?
Worse, he made up his mind (and told the newspapers) that Le Siège de Corinthe could not be taken seriously, and that Rossini’s music was an ironic response to the plot. So much for the European commitment to the plight of Greeks fighting for their freedom against Turks during the 1820s, the background against which Rossini’s opera was written and received. Castri instead decided to provide what he termed an ironic staging. It began by employing a steeply raked (that is, sloping) stage, covered with thick artificial grass, over which in act 1 were strewn bright white Corinthian capitals (only capitals) that seemed made from styrofoam. In act 2 these capitals were replaced by nineteenth-century divans in red brocade with gold fringe for the Turkish maidens (who began the act by giggling as they smoked their hookahs). In act 3 the divans gave way to grave markers, which at Pamyra’s suicide sank into the earth while comic-book lightning was projected on the bare cyclorama around the back of the stage: shazam! The wounded Greeks were dressed as Byronic heroes, wearing top hats into battle; the Turks as Victorian orientalist caricatures, the men wearing r
ed fezzes and handlebar mustachios.
With the set at such a perilous rake, no singer could do anything but seek out a stable position and remain stationary, so stage movement between protagonists was almost nonexistent. Only perversity or hostility could have imposed this stage on an opera in which a formal divertissement, with several elaborate dances, takes up about a third of the second act. The potentially witty action invented by the choreographer, in which six Pamyras and six Maomettos pantomimed a scene of courtship on six red divans, became tiresome, for the dancers had nowhere to go. No wonder that Mauro Bigonzetti choreographed only two of the three dance movements, then left town. Pamyra and Mahomet were supposed to watch these events on a divan upstage, while drinking Turkish coffee, and so they did on opening night, looking for all the world like an opera buffa couple, Fiorilla and Selim in Il Turco in Italia. But after Castri departed (stage directors are not obliged to remain at a theater after the show has opened), Ruth Ann Swenson informed Michele Pertusi, five minutes before the beginning of act 2 at the second performance, that she planned to exit as soon the “ballet” began. He could follow or remain in solitary splendor. Off they went.
So little happened on stage that the foolishness of what did happen became even more apparent. The chorus of Greek women implored God’s help wearing frilly dresses and twirling parasols. And the Turkishwomen demonstrated their victory by waving around those same parasols, presumably the spoils of war. In the chorus that opened the second act, Ismène begged the heavens to assist Pamyra and “dry her tears.” This handmaiden then ostentatiously minced around during Pamyra’s aria and her duet with Mahomet drying her own tears with a big handkerchief (shades of Otello). The end of the second act pits the Greeks against the Turks, but Castri kept the Greeks off-stage, so no one in the audience could have any idea what was happening. And after Pamyra exhorts the Greek women to die by their own hands rather than surrender, Castri had the ladies carried away by the soldiers, as if reenacting the rape of the Sabine women.
The problem with staging an Italian/ French opera of the primo Ottocento as a mockery of itself is that for an Italian audience it produces nothing but confusion, while for an Anglo-American audience it suggests the accomplishment of two geniuses of the English theater, Gilbert and Sullivan. Their Savoy operas are conceived as send-ups of Italian opera. They are more than parodies, of course, because Gilbert was a brilliant writer and Sullivan knew how to clothe his verses with music that brought forth their wit or gave them deeper expression. But who could parody act 2 of Verdi’s Ernani, in which old Silva hides Ernani behind one of the portraits of his ancestors, better than Gilbert and Sullivan in Ruddigore? Who has ever laughed more deliciously at Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore than the authors of The Sorcerer, whose Doctor Dulcamara figure, J. Wellington Wells, “a dealer in magic and spells,” sells his wares surrounded by a demonic troupe imported from Der Freischütz, via English Christmas pantomimes. Who has ever parodied an Italian opera chorus better than the Savoyards, witness the response of H.M.S. Pinafore’s Ralph Rackstraw to his supportive followers: “I know the value of a kindly chorus ... but choruses yield little consolation.” And there are the maidens, parasols twirling and fresh as the morning dew, making their way to the inaccessible pirates’ lair in The Pirates of Penzance to the strains of “Climbing over rocky mountain, tripping rivulet and fountain.” To treat Le Siège de Corinthe ironically in the wake of Gilbert and Sullivan runs the risk of confusing the parodied with the parody. Instead of Castri’s parasols serving as a commentary on Rossini’s opera, they seemed an importation from Pirates. In the best of circumstances, English and American audiences need to suppress their memories of the Savoy operas in order to give Italian opera its due. Castri’s Siège de Corinthe was pablum by comparison.
RUMMAGING IN A TRUNK FOR LA SCALA DI SETA
The five one-act operas Rossini wrote before he was twenty-one years old (known as farse, as we have seen) were all prepared for the Venetian Teatro San Moisè, a small opera house that specialized in this kind of spectacle. It was a wonderful place for young composers to develop their skills in a venue less demanding than the major opera houses in northern Italy—La Scala or the Teatro La Fenice of Venice. For many years Rossini’s autograph manuscript of La scala di seta, one of the best of his farse, was presumed lost. In fact, it had been acquired by a Swedish musician and naval officer, Rudolf Nydahl, who assembled an extraordinary collection of musical manuscripts. After his death in 1973, this collection became accessible to scholars, and the Fondazione Rossini eventually learned that among its treasures was the autograph of La scala di seta. It is a lovely document, with every note in the hand of the composer. Using this manuscript as his principal source, Anders Wiklund—a Swedish scholar—prepared the critical edition of La scala di seta for the Fondazione. A provisional version of his score was first performed at the Rossini Opera Festival during the summer of 1988; the opera was actually published by the Fondazione three years later.18
La scala di seta had practically no performing history in the nineteenth century, for one-act operas did not circulate widely. After the spring season of 1812 at the San Moisè, where it was performed twelve times, the farsa was revived in even smaller theaters: Senigaglia in 1813, Siena in 1818, Lisbon in 1825.19 For none of these revivals do printed librettos survive, so we have no further information about them. While Ricordi published a vocal score in 1852, only in the twentieth century did the farsa begin to be seen with regularity. There was never any question about its structure, although that structure was not always respected in modern performances. For several years an inauthentic overture (a potpourri of Rossini themes from other operas) circulated side by side with the original. At least one conductor, Herbert Handt, stretched Rossini’s one act into two by bringing down the curtain after the quartet, taking an intermission, and opening the “second act” with this pseudo-overture.20 Once the autograph of the opera was rediscovered, any lingering doubts about the overture disappeared, and it became possible to marvel at all the delicious details Rossini strewed with youthful abandon throughout this superb score.
In its earlier production of La scala di seta, first performed in 1988, the Rossini Festival performed this farsa very well. The set by Emanuele Luzzati and Santuzza Calì was beautiful to see, a backdrop that gave the impression of stained glass. The staging of Maurizio Scaparro was elegant, emphasizing more the Romantic elements of Rossini’s score than the comic ones, but perfectly willing to revel in the latter. (None of us will forget a very young Cecilia Bartoli in the part of Lucilla, singing her “aria di sorbetto” from behind a translucent screen while tearing the clothes off the young man she had determined to conquer.) It was wonderful to find in La scala di seta a perfectly constructed theatrical mechanism, not too long, not too short, each element falling precisely into place.
After a production, however successful, has been seen several times, it is time to move on, and in the summer of 2000 the festival called upon director Luca de Filippo and designer Bruno Garofalo to devise a new staging of La scala di seta. Although de Filippo, like Castri, was new to the lyric stage, he felt no need to undermine the work he was directing. He brought to it, however, a sensibility influenced by his own theatrical lineage as the son of one of the giants of twentieth-century Italian theater, Eduardo de Filippo, playwright and director of Neapolitan comic theater. It comes as no surprise, then, that Luca de Filippo chose to emphasize the farcical elements of the work.
A few details may immediately determine the character of an operatic staging. In La scala di seta, for example, the curtain opens on the apartment of the heroine (Giulia) in the home of her tutor (Dormont). She has remained closed in her apartment all day with her secret husband (Dorvil), but she is plagued by her servant (Germano) and her cousin (Lucilla). Both have been sent by her tutor, who wants to discuss the marriage he is arranging between Giulia and a wealthy suitor (Blansac). According to the printed libretto, after Giulia chases Germano and Lucilla away, she op
ens the door to a small side room, where Dorvil has been hiding. The de Filippo staging, instead, had Dorvil emerge from a large but narrow clothes closet, where he presumably had been stifling during the first scene. At his entrance, then, our tenor hero was already made to seem ridiculous. Also according to the libretto, Dorvil gains access to Giulia’s apartment by means of the silken ladder of the title, which Giulia keeps folded in a dresser drawer, then attaches to a balcony on the other side of a glass door (which gave rise to the stained glass of the earlier Pesaro production). De Filippo turned each element into an opportunity for broad comedy. Instead of using a balcony, Dorvil entered and exited through a high window, access to which required Giulia to shove a heavy table across stage, on top of which she precariously balanced a chair. The gossamer silken ladder became a contraption of slats and thick cord, which she extracted from a trapdoor in the center of the stage like a magician producing strings of colored cloth from his hat, and then tossed through the high window; it landed with a resounding thud.
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