How to stage the operas of Verdi was certainly at the heart of the controversies that surrounded the Verdi Festival in Parma, a year-long centennial celebration. The festival made many important choices. It used critical editions when they were available, putting in the hands of performers the best possible texts while leaving the artists ample freedom to interpret the written signs. New editions of Un ballo in maschera and Macbeth (in its 1865 revision) were presented, essentially complete. For the first time since 1853, Italian audiences could hear La traviata as Verdi originally conceived it, before his 1854 revisions produced the version normally performed today. The festival brought to Parma a wonderful new orchestra and chorus. Rather than join the general lament about the lack of fine Verdi singers, it sought to develop new talent and use the best of these young voices in its productions.
Probably most controversial, however, was the festival’s decision to employ important stage directors from France, Russia, and Germany, the kind of directors who believed in directorial invention, so-called Regietheater, precisely the kind of directors to whom Alex Ross objected. While there are many who share Ross’s view, I am uncomfortable with such absolutism. During the course of the Verdi year I saw productions ranging from a highly conservative La traviata, to a Macbeth that took place in what often appeared to be an insane asylum, to the by-now-legendary Un ballo in maschera directed by Calixto Bieto, moved to Franco’s Spain, with the conspirators in its opening scene sitting on toilets, like so many mobsters in a Godfather movie. Was any of these productions an “ideal” setting for an opera? No. I have stopped believing that the concept has much meaning.
My impression of Rigoletto is determined by all the productions I have seen, all the recordings I have heard, all the Verdi letters I have examined, all the musical sources I have studied, all the books I have read. Almost every time I see another Rigoletto there is something new to add to that impression. Ross would leave us no choice but to hate Jonathan Miller’s infamous English National Opera Rigoletto set in Little Italy, with “La donna è mobile” emerging from a jukebox. And what would he have said about Bruce Beresford’s Hollywood setting for Los Angeles Opera in 2000, mentioned in chapter 1, where “Duke” is a film producer and the initial party takes place around his swimming pool in southern California, after Duke (during the instrumental prologue) has screened a preview of his new film, Vendetta.
At the Parma Verdi Festival, Henning Brockhaus directed a Rigoletto that was highly sexualized in both its first and last acts. But the greatest scorn of the Parmese loggionisti was reserved for the scene in Rigoletto’s house. It took place in Gilda’s bedroom, a confined space high above stage level. Gilda’s bed was a crib with adjustable sides, and she carried a teddy bear. Was this literalization of how Rigoletto had infantalized his daughter necessary? Did Verdi specify it? The answer is obviously no to both questions. And yet Patrizia Cioffi was eerily effective in this setting, her almost childlike singing of “Caro nome” frightening in its doomed innocence. Those images will haunt me, even when I am watching a more traditional production.
The anger of the Parma loggionisti reached its greatest intensity several months later, when they were faced with Dominique Pitoiset’s staging of Macbeth. The reaction was all the more outrageous because this was Pitoiset’s second production in Parma that year. The first, an inventive staging of Shakespeare’s The Tempest at the Teatro Farnese, was received with prolonged applause. Indeed, while Pitoiset’s Macbeth was being seen at the Verdi Festival, across town three Shakespearean plays were being presented on alternate nights in brilliant, outrageously radical productions by the Lithuanian director Eimuntas Nikrosius, while rapt theatergoers remained glued to their seats for four to five hours before exploding in standing ovations.
Pitoiset’s Macbeth was tame in comparison. Indeed, despite his imaginative use of the stage and the strange and unsettling images that dominated much of the action, Pitoiset was deeply respectful of musical values. Never was a character asked to move unnecessarily while singing; never were members of an ensemble spread out so that they could not hear one another and watch the conductor; never did the chorus lose its compactness of sound. While I did not find Pitoiset’s work everywhere convincing, I was frequently transfixed by his images. Nowhere was this more true than at the beginning of the third act, where the witches prepare for their second encounter with Macbeth. In both the 1847 and the 1865 versions of Macbeth, the third act opens with a chorus for the witches, the musical equivalent of the Shakespearian “Double, double, toil and trouble, / Fire burn and cauldron bubble.” In 1847, Macbeth entered immediately thereafter, and the scene continued with the three apparitions. In 1865, writing for a Parisian audience (even though all of Verdi’s revisions were made exclusively in Italian), the composer inserted a new ballet in three sections, just before Macbeth’s entrance. During this ballet, whose music is anything but typical Parisian fare, Hecate descends among the witches. More in dramatic pantomime than in anything resembling classical ballet, she instructs the witches how they should behave during their forthcoming encounter with Macbeth.
Verdi was very much concerned about how to present “fantastic” images in his opera, and he discussed the problem at length in letters written both in 1847 and in 1865, often invoking scenic effects from the London stage. So, on the subject of the appearance of Banquo’s ghost during the finale to the second act, he wrote to the Florentine impresario on 22 December 1846:
Note that Banquo’s ghost must make his entrance from underground; it must be the same actor that played Banquo in Act I. He must be wearing an ashen veil, but quite thin and fine, and just barely visible; and Banquo must have ruffled hair and various wounds visible on his neck.
I’ve gotten all of these ideas from London, where this tragedy has been produced continually for over 200 years.8
Verdi also invoked practices of the Parisian boulevard theaters: “magic lanterns” and the “fantasmagoria” were very much on his mind.9
The Parma production in autumn 2001 of the 1865 Macbeth was anything but traditional. The witches in the third act were clothed all in black, in ankle-length dresses with ruffs on the sleeves and around the hem. Each of them carried a black purse. During the chorus in which “aerial spirits” are supposed to descend in order to bolster Macbeth’s flagging courage, they moved those purses back and forth rhythmically in a gesture that was at once mesmerizing and absurd, drawing guffaws and obscene comments from the loggione. But those comments were nothing compared to the ruckus that accompanied the ballet, where these Mary-Poppins-like creatures gathered around what appeared to be a big soup kettle at the beginning of the scene. After their initial chorus they sat down on neat rows of chairs, and soon began to watch a powerfully disturbing movie, which employed scenes from the second World War, bombs being dropped from low-flying aircraft, flame-throwers and tanks, goose-stepping troops, desperate lines of refugees. All of this was timed with Verdi’s ballet score in a way that seemed almost choreographed, rhythms of the music and rhythms of the visual images in uncanny synchronization.
The loggione was furious. “If we wanted a movie, we’d have gone to the movies,” someone screamed. “Shame” shouted others. “And you call this a Verdi festival” exclaimed still another. Most significant was the cry, “What does this have to do with Macbeth?” Other patrons responded to these provocations: “Who’s paying you?” they yelled back. “If you don’t like it, go home,” a man sitting in front of me boomed. Evelino Pidò and his musicians, dancers, singers, and extras continued about their business, although the noise sometimes made it impossible to hear any music.
“What does this have to do with Macbeth?” Well, how should one stage this scene? With nineteenth-century dancers in tutus assuming classical ballet poses? Should one summarily cut the entire ballet, as do most opera houses?10 Parma’s solution began with stylized movements, as the dancers drank some of the potion from the cauldron / soup kettle, threw off their reserve (and some of their clot
hes), and fell into a disturbed sleep, during which the movie was shown. From the end of the first dance and throughout the second, images of war were projected, while the dancers slept. What is Macbeth about? Well, it is certainly about war. It is certainly about refugees. The fourth and last act, after all, opens with one of Verdi’s most distinguished choruses, added in 1865, Scottish refugees singing “Patria oppressa.”11 During this chorus and the ensuing aria for Macduff, the characters invoke the murders, executions, and casualties inflicted by Macbeth’s soldiers. That the witches, who are about to predict the future, should be watching these cinematic images of war is hardly alien to the spirit of the opera.
This whole cinematic scene of death and destruction was prepared before the events in the United States of 11 September 2001. Seeing it in that context was chilling. Even more chilling for me and many others in the audience was the news, received just forty-five minutes before the curtain was raised on this production of Macbeth on 7 October, that the American bombing of Afghanistan had begun. Among the many other images from this staging that will remain with me was one from the very end, during the victory hymn. As those celebrations continued, a group of three—a father, mother, and child—gathered around the kind of large, floor-standing radio typical of the 1930s and 1940s, as if following the events of the war. And at the very end, as the victorious soldiers of Macduff and Malcolm, the Bards, and the Scottish people concluded their hymn, the child picked up a knife, walked to center stage and held it aloft, blade in the air, a new generation and a renewed cycle of violence. The gesture was in stark contrast to the victory hymn that filled the theater.
Was this an ideal Macbeth? Of course not. There were many aspects of the staging that I did not like and others that I did not understand. Yet it was a Macbeth both musically splendid and dramaturgically bracing. Whose Macbeth was it? It was Verdi’s Macbeth, filtered through a modern dramaturgical sensibility, just as every note of music we hear in the theater or on recordings is filtered through a modern musical sensibility. It is basically dishonest to pretend that a performance or a staging of an opera can be anything else. Still, one needs to acknowledge that neither Verdi nor any other nineteenth-century Italian composer could have imagined the emergence during the twentieth century of interventionist stage directors and so-called “radical” stagings. Resistance to this approach has been fierce, particularly in the United States and Italy. But what should the relationship of a modern staging of an Italian opera be to historical models? Are there limits to directorial intervention that it is imprudent to cross? Is there a point at which it no longer is meaningful to refer to a performance of “Verdi’s Macbeth,” even if the words and music of the score are being respected?
NINETEENTH-CENTURY STAGING AND SET DESIGN
At the principal scholarly conference in honor of the Verdi centennial, which took place in Parma, New York, and New Haven early in 2001, I talked about a number of the issues to which this book is dedicated, drawing examples from the new critical edition of Un ballo in maschera, which was about to have its first performance under the direction of Valéry Gergiev.12 After my reflections on the way we approached modifications in the libretto due to censorship, accommodated Verdi’s banda sul palco and offstage string orchestra in the final scene, and handled several “traditional” abuses stemming from practices of singers and choral directors that make a mockery of Verdi’s score,13 a passionate music lover spoke up: “That’s all well and good, and I’m sure scholars are doing the best they can, but it hardly matters: Verdi’s operas are being destroyed by ridiculous stagings.” It came as no surprise that his primary example was the Bieto Ballo, which he had seen in Barcelona. He could barely contain his anger at the toilets in the first scene, Ulrica’s den as a brothel in the second, homosexual rape and murder at the beginning of the second act, and the sadistic treatment of Oscar by Samuel and Tom in the third-act quintet (the head of the page was forcibly held underwater when he/she wasn’t actually singing). And he concluded: “Why don’t you scholars forbid theaters from using your work, which seeks to serve Verdi’s art, when they betray him in such an outrageous manner?”
I tried to explain that even if all the scholars responsible for the critical edition of Verdi’s operas agreed that it was our collective responsibility to censor the use theaters made of our editions (and it seems unlikely that any such agreement could be forged), it would be an impossible task. Not even Verdi, despite strong efforts, could stop theaters from doing as they liked with his operas. As early as 20 May 1847 the composer asked his Milanese editor, Giovanni Ricordi, to insert into rental contracts with theaters a clause forbidding them to make “any changes in the score, any mutilation, to lower or to raise the key,” and the like, with punitive financial consequences for failing to live up to these obligations.14 As far as we can tell, however, theaters signed the contracts and then proceeded to do exactly as they wished, without any serious interference from Milan.
It is reasonable to ask, however, whether critical editions of an opera might not do more to provide information about the original staging of an opera. Indeed, editions of the operas of Rossini, Donizetti, and Verdi, just like those of Mozart and Berlioz, have been criticized because they publish the score of an opera, its text and music in all known versions, but only those stage directions and scenic indications provided in the composer’s autograph manuscript and printed or manuscript versions of the libretto, or those discussed by the composer and librettist in their letters. Rarely do they provide an account of the sometimes massive documentation that survives concerning staging, scenography, production books, and costume designs; nor do they reproduce or edit such material.15 By doing so, these editions explicitly separate into constitutent parts something that was born as a unity of music, text, staging, and visual design. This separation of music and text from its realization onstage has often been justified on a purely practical level. Those producing critical editions of operas are largely musicians and musicologists, not experts in the history of art and theater. The practical problems of coordinating the work of scholars in diverse fields are daunting for an enterprise as poorly supported financially as the critical editing of opera. It takes years to produce the volumes dedicated only to the music and text of an opera; to add the visual and scenic dimension would multiply the problems. Scholars with specific knowledge of staging, however, are encouraged to step in: Casa Ricordi has published several volumes in a series of Disposizioni sceniche (production books) for Italian operas from the second half of the nineteenth century, filled with illustrations, instructions for blocking the movements of the singers and chorus, and reflections on staging and sets.16 The Fondazione Rossini has done similar work.17
Despite Wagnerian rhetoric, the idea of opera as Gesamtkunstwerk, a coordination and integration of all the arts, was hardly invented by the German master, but the relative importance of the various elements that constitute an opera (and related musical-theatrical forms) has changed significantly over time. There are whole repertories whose meaning is inextricably tied to their original physical productions: the theatrical constructions of Inigo Jones for English masques at the turn of the seventeenth century; the stage machinery introduced into the Italian Baroque theater by masters of illusion such as Vincenzo Torelli; the scenic wonders arranged by Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni for French classical opera, including the onstage volcanic eruptions that attracted most of the public’s attention when Jean-Philippe Rameau produced Les Indes galantes at the Paris Opéra in 1735. We cannot contemplate reviving works born under such circumstances without acknowledging the physical marvels of the original productions. That does not mean that a modern effort to stage a Ben Jonson masque, an opera by Cesti, or a French opéraballet must reproduce the stage designs and stagecraft of Jones, Torelli, or Servendoni, but neither can their work be dismissed as tangential to the fundamental aesthetic meaning of the work.
However much attention Verdi may have lavished on visual detail in his operas, no one studying
or performing Italian opera has ever suggested that nineteenth-century staging and set design should dominate our view of the aesthetic character of the operas of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, or Verdi. Indeed, thirty years ago there was little knowledge of, or interest in, the surviving documentation. Despite occasional incursions and provocations from directors such as Luchino Visconti, Giorgio Strehler, or Luca Ronconi, most performances of the basic Italian repertory—particularly in Italy itself—were safe and predictable. They told the story (sometimes well, sometimes poorly), and they presented it in recognizable, basically naturalistic settings. Just as musicians lived under the illusion that the scores from which they were performing had roots in a continuous tradition that transmitted accurate and authentic texts, so too did audiences believe that the essential conventions of staging and set design had been passed down from generation to generation. Often they had been, and modifications were introduced within a carefully circumscribed framework, dependent on the histrionic abilities of a particular singer (like Maria Callas). This attitude toward staging remains largely pervasive today in Italy, and continues to influence performances of this repertory in other places, especially the United States. The ire of the Parma loggione during the 2001 Verdi Festival simply translated this conviction into boorish misbehavior.
It should come as no surprise that Tom Sutcliffe, in Believing in Opera, his impressive and passionate survey of contemporary operatic staging, has almost nothing to say about the repertory I’m addressing in this book. Indeed, directors widely considered to have done some of the most important work in Italy over the past thirty years—Luca Ronconi, Pier Luigi Pizzi, or the late Jean-Pierre Ponnelle—rate no more than a passing, often scornful, reference. For the staging of operas by Bellini and Donizetti in our time, whether in Italy or anywhere else, the only substantive comment made by Sutcliffe in 464 pages is: “[Robert Carsen’s] approach to Bellini’s La straniera for Wexford in 1987 was darkly stormy and romantic with fervent but vital acting and singing from its young stars.”18 Rossini does not fare much better. Of the operas of Verdi through the early 1860s, two works escape the general neglect, works that have attracted particular interest among bolder directors and designers either for their intensity (Rigoletto) or their unusual and ambiguous tone (Un ballo in maschera). For La traviata, however, the only things Sutcliffe finds noteworthy are that Jonathan Miller’s staging for Kent Opera in the early 1980s “had a sense of Victorian photographs about it” and that Richard Eyre’s Traviata at Covent Garden in 1994 “was conservative” and a “wasted opportunit[y].”19
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