That model no longer seems adequate. First of all, far more operas from the first two decades of the nineteenth century than had been realized, both serious and semiserious, employ secco recitative, and some of these works are being performed with increased frequency today, especially Rossini’s Tancredi of 1813, La gazza ladra of 1817, and Bianca e Falliero of 1819. To them can be added most of the comic operas written throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, but also many serious or semiserious operas, including Meyerbeer’s Il crociato in Egitto of 1824 and works by Donizetti (Il furioso all’isola di San Domingo and Torquato Tasso, both of 1833), by Pacini (Il barone di Dolsheim of 1818, La vestale of 1823, and Gli Arabi nelle Gallile of 1827), and by Mercadante (Elisa e Claudio of 1821). All these operas, furthermore, were first performed in major northern theaters: the Teatro alla Scala of Milan and the Teatro La Fenice of Venice, or—in the case of Donizetti—the Teatro Valle of Rome. Indeed, it was only at the Neapolitan Teatro San Carlo that secco recitative essentially disappeared during the 1810s: elsewhere in Italy it was widely used throughout the 1820s for serious operas and even into the 1830s for semiserious operas.
The practice of Italian theaters in the first decades of the nineteenth century, however, was considerably different from that of the eighteenth. Major eighteenth-century theaters in Italy, and elsewhere in Europe, tended to have two harpsichords in the orchestra, divided spatially, each with its attendant violoncello and double bass “al cembalo.” In a musical-dramatic context in which the bulk of secco recitative was substantial in comparison with the length of the closed musical numbers, with most dramatic exposition and action taking place within that recitative, the interaction of this continuo group with the singers had to be intimate. When musical direction was provided by a “conductor” seated at one of the harpsichords, as it was during much of the eighteenth century, that instrument was likely to be placed toward the middle of the ensemble, with a second instrument positioned to one side. Toward the end of the century, when direction was generally entrusted to the principal violinist, who “conducted” with his violin in hand, the harpsichords were placed at the two extremes of the orchestra, near the stage.89 Why two harpsichords? The motivation is best expressed in a letter of 1773 by Pasquale Cafaro, director of the royal chapel in Naples, reacting to the suggestion that the Teatro San Carlo give up its second harpsichord: “The second cembalo, violoncello, and double bass, in that position, are absolutely necessary to assist the singers, at those moments when they find themselves far from the first [continuo group], to ensure that the singers will not stray from the straight path of perfect intonation.”90 But neither the number nor the character of the keyboard instruments would survive into the nineteenth century.
The shifts from two keyboard instruments to one and from the harpsichord to the piano were, according to Meucci, related phenomena.91 Despite the ambiguities that result from a single Italian word (cembalo) used for both the harpsichord and the piano, by the end of the eighteenth century the harpsichord was essentially a relic of an earlier age. The increased sonority of the piano, its dynamic range, its greater reliability in tuning, not to mention changing fashion, all contributed to the disappearance of the harpsichord from Italian theaters. The same factors reduced the need for a pair of keyboard instruments, and the gradual decrease in the proportion of secco recitative in an opera (even in an opera buffa), with respect to the concerted numbers, had a similar effect. Probably by the turn of the nineteenth century, but certainly by 1810, every important theater in Italy, and most smaller theaters too, had replaced their two harpsichords with a single piano (obviously of the kind manufactured early in the nineteenth century) to accompany secco recitative, normally joined by a violoncello and a double bass. This continuo ensemble maintained a role in Italian opera at least throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. There is every reason to believe that such an ensemble was still in use at La Scala when Verdi’s only opera employing secco recitative, Un giorno di regno, a melodramma giocoso, had its premiere on 5 September 1840.92
Already in 1982 the Rossini Opera Festival, for its first production of Tancredi, began to experiment with using a continuo ensemble of this kind for the accompaniment of secco recitative. As Adriano Cavicchi explained in the program booklet for those performances, recitative accompaniment in Rossini’s time was realized by the use of three players: “a ‘cembalo,’ actually a fortepiano, a violoncello ‘al cembalo,’ which played a chordal elaboration of the harmony, and a double bass ‘al cembalo,’ which held the bass note of the harmony.”93 There are very few indications of precisely what these players did, but there are warnings as to what they should not do. As always, such warnings need to be read with caution. Giuseppe Scaramelli in 1811, for example, primarily concerned with reining in abuses, wrote:
Let it also be observed that there are keyboard players and cellists who, when playing recitative, love to indulge in ample preambles and florid interpolations, just about the most insufferable thing imaginable, which it would be well to prohibit, instructing them that they must play with precision only the harmonies, with the correct notes of the chords, together with the double bass, and nothing else.94
Similar injunctions appear in the 1876 Trattato di Violoncello by Giacomo Quarenghi, who is describing a practice that “is practically forgotten, but since even today there are those who want to re-hear masterpieces of the past, it is necessary to say something about accompanying secco recitative” (which he calls “Recitativi Parlanti”). Like Scaramelli sixty-five years earlier, Quarenghi is largely concerned with curbing abuses:
Do not disturb the singer with ornaments of little scales or flourishes, and use them only if the singer goes flat, in order to help him return to the opportune notes. [...] Accompany sweetly and choose characteristic notes of the chord. Finally, don’t try to be a master who tries to dominate the singer, but a friend who supports him.95
So much protesting suggests that keyboard players and cellists did indeed decorate their parts, and there is no reason why modern musicians could not do the same, as long as they stay within the constantly changing boundaries of “good taste.”
Indeed, another way of accompanying secco recitative is documented in England, with no keyboard instrument at all; instead, the violoncello and double bass alone accompanied the recitative. This practice was associated with the cellist Robert Lindley and the double bass player Dragonetti, both of whom appeared with the Italian opera orchestra in London during the 1820s and 1830s. An example of their practice from Mozart’s Don Giovanni was transcribed by William Smith Rockstro in the original Grove’s Dictionary, reprinted in The New Grove Dictionary (1980), and included in Grove Music Online.96 Grove Music Online quotes Rockstro’s original comment, which is neutral, even encouraging toward the musical proclivities of these “two old friends”: “The general style of their accompaniment was exceedingly simple, consisting only of plain chords, played arpeggiando; but occasionally the two old friends would launch out into passages as those shown in the following example [see example 12.8]; Dragonetti playing the large notes, and Lindley the small ones.” Compare the snippy attitude of Nicholas Gatty in the fifth edition of Grove’s Dictionary (1954), quoted in The New Grove Dictionary (1980):
EXAMPLE 12.8. WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART, DON GIOVANNI, RECITATIVO (ATTO II, SCENA XI), AS PERFORMED BY WILLIAM LINDLEY AND DOMENICO DRAGONETTI, MM. 36–38.
It is recorded that Lindley often embellished his share by the introduction of figures and ornamental passages; but, however ingenious this may have been, it was entirely at variance with the effect intended by the composer, which was simply to give support to the vocal line and to conjoin the modulations of the music. An example of this treatment is here shown as a curiosity.
The same example follows. By 2004, Gatty’s commentary is gone and Rockstro’s attitude is allowed to stand. It is a potent example of the way in which attitudes toward historical performance practice have changed over time.
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sp; Would that the matter might end there, but it does not. If theaters had given up the harpsichord in favor of the piano by the early nineteenth century, when did the harpsichord reappear as the instrument of choice for secco recitatives in the operas of Mozart? During the 1930s, for example, Fritz Busch, working at the Glyndebourne Festival in England, always used a piano for the Mozart operas, and apparently so did Hans Rosbaud at Aix-en-Provence as late as 1954.97 But in a recording made at the Salzburg Festival in 1937, Bruno Walter performs Mozart with a harpsichord.98 Perhaps of even greater importance, when Stravinsky composed his neoclassical The Rake’s Progress (first performed at the Teatro La Fenice of Venice on 11 September 1951), with its many evocations of Mozart, the instrument he chose for his secco recitatives was the harpsichord (even though the printed score indicates “or piano”). By the 1960s, as the early-music movement began to establish itself strongly, the harpsichord again became the instrument of choice for theaters. Not only had the public become more used to its sound, but more instruments were being constructed. It had become perfectly obvious that using a typical eighteenth-century instrument was appropriate.
The movement that led to the performance of Mozart’s music with harpsichord-accompanied secco recitatives, however, also led to similar performances of Rossini’s music. Despite the Pesaro example, that mode of performance still prevails in most opera houses today. Thus, while the widespread acceptance of the harpsichord in the modern theater owes much to those who have worked diligently to develop a historically informed performance practice and even to employ older instruments or modern recreations of them, this particular practice was pressed upon a repertory—nineteenth-century Italian opera—where the harpsichord had no historical justification whatsoever. Yet efforts to reclaim the more modern piano (or, rather, the fortepiano) for nineteenth-century Italian opera are thought of as “musicological.” It is only one of the many paradoxes we face when thinking about instruments, old and new, in history and in the opera house.
13
FROM THE SCORE TO THE STAGE
Lyric Opera of Chicago celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2004 –5. As a prelude to the year, John von Rhein, music critic of the Chicago Tribune since 1977, looked back over the seasons he had witnessed and came up with lists of five “top Lyric productions” and five “top Lyric misses.” His favorites consisted largely of rarely performed operas that had been beautifully and sometimes controversially staged, including Britten’s Billy Budd, Handel’s Alcina, Janáček’s Jenufa, Strauss’s Capriccio, and Wagner’s Tannhäuser. There was not one nineteenth-century Italian opera on the list. Among the “misses” were two world premieres, Penderecki’s 1978 Paradise Lost (on which the company almost foundered) and Anthony Davis’s well-meant but poorly realized Amistad, as well as three operas by Verdi: Macbeth, Rigoletto, and Un ballo in maschera.1 About David Alden’s 1999 Macbeth, von Rhein wrote: “Campy, creepy American Eurotrash that shed more light on the director’s sensibility than it did on poor Verdi’s.” Christopher Alden’s 2000 Rigoletto (the Aldens are twins) fared no better: “Director Alden’s screed on male-chauvinist oppression of women, set in a 19th Century Italian men’s club, certainly had dramatic ideas. Too bad they weren’t Verdi’s.” Had von Rhein been a critic in New York, he would probably have added to his least-favorite list Francesca Zambello’s much-criticized 1992 Lucia di Lammermoor at the Metropolitan Opera.2 As far as I can tell, von Rhein has never shown a prejudice against Italian opera; nor, I suspect, would he say that most Verdi operas (let alone those of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti) have been badly cast by Lyric. No, the issue is a more basic one: how should a modern theater stage a nineteenth-century Italian opera?
An important part of the audience for Italian opera in the United States and Italy tends to be exceptionally conservative when it comes to the staging of works they know and love. There are others in attendance with an appetite for more adventurous productions, to be sure, of the kind readily accepted in stagings of Wagner or Handel operas, not to mention the plays of Shakespeare or Goldoni. But a hard-core constituency wants nothing to interfere with the pleasures—musical, dramaturgical, and emotional—it associates with the works, pleasures reinforced by listening to the same recordings over and over. For this constituency, stage directors are an unfortunate necessity, and should limit their interventions to directing traffic, as they largely did in the nineteenth century. The emotion and the drama are in the music, and anything that seeks to provide another perspective on the work is a distraction. There are many music critics and scholars who agree. Writing in the New Yorker during the Verdi centennial, Alex Ross suggested that Verdi’s operas resist radical staging:
The greatness of Verdi is a simple thing. A solitary man, he found a way of speaking to limitless crowds, and his method was to sink himself completely into his characters. He never composed music for music’s sake; every note has a precise dramatic function. The most astounding scenes in his work are those in which all the voices come together in a visceral mass—like a human wave that could carry anything before it.3
Pierluigi Petrobelli draws a contrast with Wagner. The operas of the German composer allow for more directorial intervention because they are “based on myth and legend” and their “dramatic rhythm allows for an overtly abstract realization of the plots.” Those of Verdi do not, because “the drama is based on the complex conflicts between individuals, and even more often on conflicts within the individuals. Here the risk—in superimposing on an already complex presentation of conflicts, other meanings, other interpretations—is greater; the result is often a blurred, if not obscure picture.”4
Yet the staging of Italian opera continues to challenge directors, and no single approach is likely to provide consistently satisfactory results. In this chapter I will explore several of its facets.
STAGING VERDI’S CENTENNIAL
In February 1816, immediately after the premiere of Il barbiere di Siviglia, Gioachino Rossini wrote from Rome to his mother in Bologna:
Last night my opera went on stage, and it was solemnly booed. What madness, what extraordinary things happen in this crazy country. Despite this, I can tell you that the music is very beautiful, and already there are bets about what will happen tonight, at the second performance, when it will be possible to hear the music, which did not happen last night, since from the beginning until the end there was nothing but an immense buzzing that accompanied the spectacle.5
I wish I could report that audience behavior in Italy had improved since 1816, but I fear that the celebrations in 2001 for the hundredth anniversary of Verdi’s death brought out the worst tendencies of some members of the public. That Riccardo Muti had to address the loggionisti at La Scala during a performance of Il trovatore, urging them not to turn the Verdi celebrations into a circus, seems astonishing to opera lovers elsewhere.6 It is not that members of an audience do not have the right to express their opinions at the end of an evening, by applauding, remaining silent, or even booing. But it is hard to defend the Italian custom of trying to interrupt a performance by shouting insults at the artists.
The La Scala festivities were only the most prominent in a host of events honoring Italy’s most beloved composer. Many were little more than routine homages, destined to be forgotten almost before they occurred; some had more substance. Certainly we have more access to information about Verdi than could even have been imagined a decade ago. From any computer linked to the internet it was possible in 2001 to access a Web site for the Italian national committee organized to supervise and coordinate centennial celebrations. There, at your fingertips, was a vast amount of biographical information, historical data about each opera, complete librettos, images, lists of current performances and casts from around the world, bibliography, trivia, even an online store to purchase Verdi trinkets and candies (the licorice was horrid, although the little containers were charmingly decorated with scenes from the operas).
The Verdi centennial also brought with it a host of
exhibitions related to the composer and his works. The Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani of Parma and its stalwart director, Pierluigi Petrobelli, trotted around the globe with a show dedicated to Verdian stagecraft and set design, which brought together early stage designs for Verdi’s operas, including performances he himself supervised. The exhibit had its poignant side: in some cases these beautifully executed reproductions of set designs were prepared from originals lost in the devastating fire that had destroyed the Teatro La Fenice in Venice on 29 January 1996.
Seeing these set designs side by side teaches us how the nineteenth century approached certain theatrical problems. I wish set designers for Chicago Lyric Opera’s mostly splendid Otello in September 2001, for example, had had a chance to see these drawings. It might have helped them appreciate the importance of performing the second act of Otello on a split stage, with two playing areas fully visible to the audience: one where the bulk of the action takes place, the other where Desdemona receives the homage of the people of Cyprus.7 Lyric’s setting instead presented the scene in the context of a unit-set, a front playing area and five floors of balconies and doors. In the second act, then, Desdemona (Renée Fleming) and the chorus were on the ground floor, behind a barrier of carved wood, their movements invisible from anywhere in the theater. To ensure that something of Verdi’s effect might emerge, the director had Ms. Fleming ascend to the second floor, from whence she threw coins that clattered noisily at the feet of her assembled admirers. The libretto says “ella porge una borsa ai marinai” (she hands a purse to the sailors), a more restrained and noble gesture.
Divas and Scholars Page 59