Divas and Scholars

by Philip Gossett

  All of this is implicit in Verdi’s score, although many details throughout the disposizione scenica are useful in filling out the sparse stage directions.43

  As the century went on, the disposizioni sceniche grew longer and more elaborate. The book for the 1858 Un ballo in maschera fills 38 pages; those for Boito’s Mefistofele (published in 1877), the 1881 revision of Simon Boccanegra, and the 1887 Otello, 109, 58, and 111 pages, respectively. All three were prepared by Giulio Ricordi on the basis of stagings at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala. In the disposizione scenica for Otello, the level of detail is staggering, indicating each movement during a dialogue, commenting on motivation, tone, and facial expression. So, for example, the instructions for the painful duet between Otello and Desdemona in the third act, “Dio ti giocondi, o sposo,” are printed on more than four crammed pages (58–62). When the disbelieving Desdemona, trying to make light of Otello’s remarks about the handkerchief, says, “Tu di me ti fai gioco, / Storni così l’inchiesta di Cassio; astuzia è questa / Del tuo pensier” (You are making fun of me in order to turn away my question about Cassio; that shows the cleverness of your thinking), there is no stage direction in either the libretto or musical score. The disposizione scenica, using two diagrams, provides more elaborate detail:

  To her, there is no reason for Otello’s tremendous rage; it is not justified... a smile breaks on Desdemona’s lips, and, almost playfully, she crosses to the left, in front of Otello, saying: Tu di me ti fai gioco; Otello stands still for a moment, amazed, staring at her. Desdemona turns to him and, continuing as above, says to him: Astuzia è questa del tuo pensier. (Here the actress has an opportunity to play a good scene of contrast: but be careful, while bringing out this contrast between fear, first, and later, charming cunning, not to exaggerate it, thus bordering on the comic!)44

  This is a different level of interpretation, an accumulation of details that provides a more intrusive level of instruction than we have witnessed before. Furthermore, the volume announces itself from the beginning as seeking an almost tyrannical control over future productions (recall Verdi’s own “the mise en scène should stay the same” for Giovanni de Guzman). In Giulio Ricordi’s words:

  It is absolutely necessary for the artists to study precisely the messa in scena and to conform to it: just as Directors and Impresarios should not permit any changes in the costumes: these were carefully studied and copied from pictures of the period and there is no reason why they should be modified according to the whim of this or that artist.45

  The desire to consider the staging and visual appearance as integral to the opera could not be clearer. As Hepokoski has pointed out, of course, “Ricordi himself owned the commerical rights to these things: his urgings were anything but disinterested”; others have expressed similar cautions concerning the motivation behind the publication of the disposizioni sceniche.46 Nonetheless, there can be little doubt that Verdi was enthusiastic about these manuals and that they provide us with a unique window into the original production of several of the most significant new operas performed in Italy between the mid-1850s and the early 1890s. The question is, what should stage directors and performers do with all this information?

  Sets and Costumes

  With the opening of the Salle Le Peletier in Paris in 1821, ever greater attention was paid to settings. Painted canvas backdrops, together with painted flats that could be brought in from the wings, dominated operatic design throughout the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, but during the 1820s many of these scenic elements remained “generic” prison scenes, castles, country houses, or mountainous regions: the same elements could reappear with modifications from one opera to the next.47 With the renovation of the repertory toward the end of the decade, with the four Rossini French works for the Opéra and Auber’s La Muette de Portici, there was a much greater effort to introduce original designs. By the 1830s and 1840s, the amazing physical productions at the Paris Opéra, with their rich and elaborate settings, were frequently mentioned by travelers. Donizetti’s remarks on the 1835 production of Halévy’s La Juive are well known:

  I saw La Juive at the grand Opéra... and I say “saw” because there was no pleasing music [musica popolare]. Illusion reaches its highest point... You would swear that it was all real. Real silver and almost real cardinals. Armory of the King real, military costumes, chain mail, lances etc. real; and those that were false were copied from real ones and cost 1500 francs apiece, the chain mail of the extras. Too much reality... the last scene too horrible and more horrible for the illusion.

  At Constance! A Hebrew woman, for having a relationship with a Christian, is thrown together with her father into a cauldron of boiling oil. Before arriving at that point one passes through a thousand stupidities, but everything is rich and everything is magnificent, and so you let it all pass.48

  An extensive collection of drawings, prints, and miniature models for sets, as well as costume designs, is housed at the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, fully documenting Parisian practice. Thanks to the French illustrated press, furthermore, which followed closely the lyric theaters, reproductions of stage sets and costumes from Paris circulated all over Europe.49 The search for historical accuracy and “local color” was particularly important. That the set designer Cicéri prepared for Guillaume Tell by traveling to Switzerland, as we have seen, reflects this tendency.

  Italian composers from Rossini through Verdi also paid close attention to set design, and their letters reflect this involvement. The concerted effort of a group of Italian scholars, including Mercedes Viale Ferrero, Elena Povoledo, Maria Ida Biggi, and Olga Jesurum, has transformed our understanding of the surviving materials over the past twenty years. Some sources have long been known, especially the hand-colored engravings and lithographs of the painted backdrops prepared by Alessandro Sanquirico, principal scenic designer for La Scala from 1817 through his retirement in 1832. These images, classical in conception and design but gradually developing that specificity of subject matter, emotional involvement, and intense color that would characterize Romantic scene painting, circulated widely and helped suggest models for other theaters to emulate.50 They range in style from the cool, perfectly symmetrical courtroom hall in which Ninetta, the serving girl accused of household theft, is condemned to death in Rossini’s La gazza ladra (colored in blues and grays), first performed at La Scala on 31 May 1817, to the spectacular exploding Vesuvius (yet another volcano) in Sanquirico’s set for the concluding scene of Pacini’s L’ultimo giorno di Pompei. The premiere of this opera was in Naples at the Teatro San Carlo on 19 November 1825, but it was revived at La Scala—using Sanquirico’s sets—on 16 August 1827, with red fire and smoke filling the picture and bodies scattered hither and yon.51 Not that “generic” sets ceased to play a role in Italian opera. According to the composer himself, Verdi’s Nabucco at La Scala in 1842 was still performed, at least in part, with recycled sets.52 But the tendency in Italy was for the set designer to produce original drawings for each new opera.

  At the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra in Paris, for example, there exist some two hundred sketches by Giuseppe Borsato, the set painter responsible for scenography at the Teatro La Fenice of Venice during Rossini’s active career there (from the 1813 Tancredi through the 1823 Semiramide). Contemporary reviews refer constantly—and quite correctly—to the high quality of his work. After the premiere of Tancredi, the Giornale dipartimentale dell’Adriatico declared on 9 February 1813 that “all praise would be inadequate to the magnificence, the truth, the magic of the decorations by the famous Sig. Giuseppe Borsato [...], such is the refinement of his work, the spatial distribution, the exquisite colors with which his productions are ever more replete.”53 A reviewer of the Semiramide premiere a decade later reported that “the poet, composer, singers, and painter had the honor of being repeatedly called out on stage [for applause].”54 But most of the Borsato drawings preserved in Paris are not identified with specific operas or ballets, so that it had seemed impossible
to evaluate the designs in the context of the stage works for which they were prepared. Thanks to the splendid detective work of Maria Ida Biggi, most of these drawings have now been matched to specific operas, so that we have access to the original drawings for sets pertaining to several works by Rossini created or revised for the Teatro La Fenice: Tancredi (1813), Sigismondo (1815), Maometto II (1822), and Semiramide (1823).55 Elena Povoledo describes Borsato as an artist trained in the Neoclassical tradition but open to an “imaginary exotic world” deriving from the recent Napoleonic campaigns in Africa, a “repertory of new architectonic models, an alternative to the Greek ideal.”56

  Study of iconographical sources for the Rossini operas was advanced notably in 2000 by the publication of Rossini sulla scena dell’Ottocento, which offers reproductions and bibliographical details for a large group of drawings, prints, and costume designs from Italian collections pertaining to the Rossini operas.57 The images range from 1812 through 1899, although most reflect productions from the 1810s to the 1830s, when Rossini’s operas dominated the theaters. They testify to a consistent approach to stage design, based on painted backdrops, until the end of the century, although many details in the realization of these images reflect changing cultural patterns. The beauty of their design demonstrates why contemporary reviewers so often pay homage to the scenic wonders accomplished by set painters such as Sanquirico and Borsato.58

  Verdi’s concern for the physical rendering of his later works has been documented extensively, but even during the 1840s there is ample evidence that he paid heed to the visual aspect of his operas. In Attila, for example, he was particularly preoccupied about the staging of the Prologue. The opening scene shows the city of Aquileia, destroyed by Attila and the Huns; the second scene begins in the early morning with a furious storm in a Rio Alto in the Adriatic lagoon, inhabited only by hermits, with a simple church dedicated to St. James.59 As the storm ceases, the sun rises, and a group of refugees from Aquileia arrives by boat, vowing to construct a new city. In the final music of the Prologue, Foresto (the tenor) leads the chorus in a patently Risorgimental hymn, first lamenting the loss of Aquileia (“Cara patria, già madre e reina,” Dear homeland, once mother and queen), then concluding with a strophe that announces the founding of the city of Venice: “Ma dall’alghe di questi marosi, / Qual risorta fenice novella, / Rivivrai più superba, più bella / Della terra, dell’onde stupor!” (But from the algae of these waves, as a new phoenix arising, you will live again, prouder, more beautiful, wonder of the earth and of the sea!). It is difficult to imagine a more direct reference to the audience at the Teatro La Fenice within an opera that had its premiere on 17 March 1846, just two years before the 1848 revolutionary uprisings. Verdi’s efforts to ensure an appropriate staging for this scene emerges from a letter that the impresario for the season at the Teatro La Fenice, Alessandro Lanari, wrote on 29 September 1845 to the “Presidente agli Spettaccoli” of the theater (presumably Giuseppe Berti). In it Lanari quotes from a Verdi letter that has not survived: “What I really want to be sublime is the second setting (at scene 6), the birth of the city of Venice. Let the sunrise be particularly well done, since I intend to express it in the music.”60 That is precisely what Verdi does, offering a tone picture that owes much to music he had heard in Milan, Le Désert of Félicien David.61

  Equally interesting is a letter Verdi wrote on 11 February 1846, during the staging of Attila. The composer sought to embody on the stage of the Teatro La Fenice at the end of act 1 of his opera a scene from a Raphael fresco at the Vatican. Here Leo the Great, Bishop of Rome in the fifth century, stops the advance of the Huns and their leader at the gates of the city, while apparitions of St. Peter and St. Paul with drawn swords fill the sky. Verdi specifically requested that his friend, Vincenzo Luccardi, a Roman sculptor, give him details about Attila’s appearance:

  I know that in the Vatican, either in the tapestries or in the Raphael frescoes, there must be the meeting of Attila with Saint Leo. I need a description of the figure of Attila: draw me a few strokes with your pen, then explain to me with words and numbers the colors of his outfit: I particularly need information about his hairstyle. If you will do this favor for me, I will give you my saintly benediction.62

  This effort to develop a scenic situation in tandem with a well-known painting is striking. A modern American audience might compare the effect with the first-act finale of Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, where Georges Seurat’s La Grande Jatte takes shape before our eyes as the act comes to an end.

  For Macbeth in Florence, Verdi went further. He took responsibility for having costume designs prepared, as he told the impresario Alessandro Lanari on 21 January 1847, a month and a half before the premiere, adding, “You can be certain that they will be well made: because I had several of them sent from London, I’ve had eminent scholars do research on the epoch and costumes, and then they will be looked over by [Francesco] Hayez and the other members of the commission.”63 Verdi was particularly concerned about the physical rendering of the appearance of the apparitions and the procession of kings in the third act, and he made several suggestions for the premiere and for later performances, some of them based on his experience in London. To the librettist Salvadore Cammarano, responsible for mounting the reprise of Macbeth at the Teatro San Carlo of Naples in 1848, he wrote:

  In the third act the apparitions of the kings (I’ve seen it done in London) must take place behind an opening in the scenery, with a fine, ashen veil in front of it. The kings should not be phantoms, but eight men of flesh and blood: the surface over which they pass must resemble a mound, and they must be seen clearly to ascend and descend. The scene must be completely dark, especially when the cauldron disappears, and luminous only where the kings pass.64

  In 1865 he offered suggestions to his French publisher, Léon Escudier, about another possible solution for this scene, involving a machine in the shape of a wheel that would move the kings into and out of view without their having to walk, a solution Verdi considered “more fantastical” (più fantastico).65

  No set designs from the original Macbeth have come to light, but there are sketches by Bertoja for the revival on 26 December 1847 at the Teatro La Fenice to open the following carnival season. Ricordi published five costume designs (figurini) by Roberto Foscosi in several issues of the Gazzetta musicale di Milano during November and December of that same 1847, but it is not clear whether they corresponded to costumes actually used in Florence.66 Iconographical documents, both set and costume designs, related to the production of the revised version of Macbeth at the Théâtre-Lyrique in 1865 are found in Paris, and they show strong similarities to surviving Italian designs.67

  Not only the Venetian Bertoja, but many other set and costume designers working directly with Verdi through the 1860s (or involved in contemporary productions) are coming into focus. So, for example, the career of Alessandro Prampolini is becoming better known: he contributed one splendid set for the premiere of Il trovatore (the scene for the gardens in the palace of Aliaferia, the second setting of act 1) and worked on sets for the revival of Simon Boccanegra in Reggio Emilia in 1857, directed by Verdi.68 Since the 1985 exhibition of his set designs for the Teatro alla Scala, where he directed scenography from 1849 through 1867, Filippo Peroni has fared better.69 According to Olga Jesurum, he “restored dignity and autonomy to scenography, through a coherent interpretation, finally in tandem with other parts of the theatrical spectacle.” 70 The original sets for La forza del destino, first performed in St. Petersburg on 10 November 1862, were designed by Andreas Leonhard Roller, a key figure in the city’s theatrical life for almost forty years, whose sketches and drawings are preserved in its Theater and Music Museum.71 The richness of these surviving sources could hardly have been imagined thirty years ago.

  STAGECRAFT AND HISTORY

  If we supplement this historical documentation concerning the staging of Italian and French opera from the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century
with knowledge derived from studies of theatrical gesture and movement in the prose theater, it becomes possible to present the operas of Rossini or Verdi in a way that not merely is historically informed but invokes the staging practices of the period. I am emphatically not claiming that such a presentation would be “authentic.” As James Hepokoski has expressed it,

  To revive the original staging of Otello is not finally to see Otello as it was meant to be; it is first and foremost to participate in a commentary on twentieth-century staging, for we cannot escape taking the measure of the 1887 staging against a vast backdrop of later practice of which the first Italian audiences had no inkling. In order to see Otello—or indeed any opera—externally as it was, we are obliged to gaze at it through what it has become.72

  I have been tangentially involved with two experimental efforts to invoke nineteenth-century stagings: a production of the St. Petersburg version of La forza del destino (1862) at the University of California at Irvine in 1980, and another of Verdi’s Ernani at the Teatro Comunale of Modena in 1984. The former, directed by Clayton Garrison (with the participation of Andrew Porter), drew on actual stage designs and a published disposizione scenica; the latter, directed by Gianfranco De Bosio, employed contemporaneous set designs but had to fall back on standard techniques of stage movement employed in Italy during the 1840s.

  Porter has recounted his experiences in 1980 at Irvine and at a 1984 production in Seattle, which he himself directed.73 Sets in the Irvine production were based on designs prepared by Carlo Ferrario for the opera’s revival at La Scala in 1869, but did not use the painted backdrops adopted at that time.74 Instead, the Irvine team constructed three-dimensional sets, but ones that could be moved quickly about the stage.75 The Seattle production, on the other hand, employed a facsimile of the Ferrario sets “bought from a Roman warehouse a few decades earlier, all painted in perspective canvas.”76 Not only was the result visually beautiful, it also made it possible to change settings instantaneously.