Divas and Scholars

by Philip Gossett

  As for the disposizioni sceniche, Porter remarks, “the production books need not necessarily be followed in every particular nowadays, but drawing on them in certain structural aspects may well help to provide a clearer and more effective musical execution of the scores.”77 One of his examples involves Don Alvaro’s leap to his death at the end of the 1862 version. Among the inaccessible cliffs surrounding the playing area, the disposizione scenica specifies that there are rocks and a natural arch:

  At one point the rocks rise a little higher than the practicable bridge behind it. Here one places an exact replica of Alvaro, hidden from the audience behind the raised part. Alvaro rushes across the bridge and when he gets to that point he pushes the dummy over so that it crashes down on to the stage with considerable effect; your tenor of the evening seems to have landed with a huge thud.78

  Paying attention to the original blocking also helps achieve appropriate musical balances, as in the ensemble during the scene in the Inn that opens act 2, which involves Leonora (who must remain unseen by her brother, Don Carlo, himself disguised as a student), an offstage procession of pilgrims, and an onstage chorus with other soloists. “The stage book makes it clear how to achieve this by placing Leonora behind both the chorus and the four soloists, but well elevated so that she sings over the ensemble as an independent voice, very audible and dominant but at the same time, because she is behind them, unnoticed by them.”79 No one claims this is the only way to achieve the desired result, but Porter is correct in pointing out that the disposizione scenica helps identify and resolve such problems.

  From Modena in 1984, De Bosio relates a similar set of experiences for Ernani. Having had the opportunity to present an Aida following the original disposizione scenica, De Bosio attempted a similar operation for the earlier Ernani, for which no production book existed.80 The theater in Modena originally intended to adopt scenic designs from several different midnineteenth-century artists, but then discovered a complete set of drawings by a single artist from Faenza, Romolo Liverani, prepared for a performance in his native city on 30 June 1844, just a few months after the Venetian premiere (9 March). The painted backdrops in Modena were copied directly from Liverani’s drawings, but instead of extending across the entire stage, as they would have done in 1844, the backdrops were inserted within a visible external frame, as if to anchor the past in the present. Costumes, too, were developed from contemporary accounts, including documents from the original Venetian performances. Working with an able young conductor, Roberto Abbado, De Bosio encouraged his singers (two of whom, the baritone Roberto Servile as Don Carlo and the bass Michele Pertusi as Silva, were to establish themselves as leading Italian artists of their generation) to adopt gestures and postures attested to in mid-nineteenth-century accounts of operatic staging, while keeping paramount the effectiveness of their performance before a modern audience.

  Most unusual were the efforts to reconfigure the Teatro Comunale of Modena following structural models of nineteenth-century theaters. The proscenium was extended forward into the theater, and singers were encouraged to present their solos directly to the public. The pit was covered and the orchestra, whose numbers were adjusted to appropriate levels—although all players used modern instruments—was raised to the level of the audience. The number of choristers was significantly reduced, and the remaining chorus was brought closer to the public. This physical redistribution of singers, chorus, and orchestra compensated for adjustments in the number of performers, so that sonic balances were always maintained. The theater could not return to oil lamps and candles, but tried to reproduce electrically the distribution of lighting a nineteenth-century audience would have experienced. Critical reaction to the entire project was excellent. Mario Messinis wrote, “This exhaustive appropriation of extinct processes is not a work of arid philology, but helps to liberate us from bad habits and makes us reflect on the very genesis of the Verdian works themselves.”81

  However fascinating these productions were in bringing to the stage some sense of nineteenth-century practice, no one expected them to replace modern theatrical usage, nor did anyone seek such an outcome. It was already clear, after all, that the myth of stable productions over the course of the nineteenth century was not sustainable, even if the role of the modern stage director did not exist in nineteenth-century Italy or France. That Verdi himself changed his views between 1847 and 1865 about how the apparitions of the kings might be handled in the third act of Macbeth is merely one sign of the important changes in staging and set design that took place during the course of the century. Not all changes in stagecraft were improvements, of course, and the experiments from the early 1980s made abundantly clear that those involved with the performance of Italian opera needed to evaluate early practices critically.

  In the area of theatrical lighting, for example, there was no turning back. Early in the nineteenth century, theaters were lit primarily by candle and oil lamps, notoriously difficult to adjust (not to mention the unpleasant smell and smoke from the oil lamps, widely mentioned in contemporary accounts).82 More easily regulated gas illumination was gradually introduced at the Paris Opéra, first in 1822 for a fairy opera that depended upon magical effects, Isouard’s Aladin, ou La Lampe merveilleuse. By 1833, all productions at the theater were illuminated by gas. In Italy, different theatrical centers had different traditions. At the Teatro La Fenice, gas lighting was not installed until the carnival season of 1844–45,so that the premiere of Ernani in Venice on 9 March 1844 would still have been lit with oil and candles.83 Electric lighting at the Opéra was first introduced for a special effect in Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète of 1849, the sunrise during the course of the third act, for which an apparatus was prepared to create a “light which is truly frightful: the sun of the Opéra threatens to eclipse the sun of the Good Lord.” The livret de mise en scène specifies that the electric mechanism used could be purchased at the shop of a “M. Lormier, 13 Rue du Delta in Paris.”84 Not until much later in the century was electric stage lighting more generally introduced in either France or Italy, but once it became widespread, gas lighting—always a fire hazard—rapidly fell out of favor.85 As Giulio Ricordi wrote to Verdi on 2 November 1883, while plans for the performance of Don Carlo at the Teatro alla Scala of Milan were being discussed: “I have had a meeting with the stage designer and another with the engineer responsible for arranging the electric lights: and I think that we have found beautiful effects that could not be achieved earlier with gas lighting.”86

  To recuperate lighting effects of the nineteenth century, then, even if fire departments were to allow it, would be an absurdity. At best, two centuries of real progress in theatrical lighting could be used to simulate the effect of candles and oil lamps, as in Modena. At a time when computer technology permits subtle lighting patterns and rapid shifts from one configuration to another that were unthinkable in the nineteenth century, not to mention effects using lasers, neon, and so forth, such a choice would make sense for the modern theater only as a curiosity.

  There were also vast changes in physical staging during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many in the area of set design, but here the situation with respect to today’s practice is more complex. Some elements of nineteenth-century stagecraft are intimately tied to the musical rhythm of the operas for which they were devised, and some subsequent developments had a decidedly negative effect on the presentation of Italian operas. One of my first operatic experiences in Italy was a performance of Norma at the Teatro Comunale of Bologna during the 1966–67 season. I remember only one thing about it. In the second act there are three settings: a first scene for Norma and, later, Adalgisa that takes place “Inside Norma’s dwelling”; a second scene for Norma’s father, Oroveso—the chief priest of the Druids—and the male chorus, set in an “isolated place near the wood of the Druids, surrounded by ravines and caverns”; and a final scene in the “Temple of Irminsul.” The entire second scene takes about nine minutes to perform. In Bologna, after
the first scene, the audience sat in the darkened theater for five minutes (I couldn’t help glancing at my watch) while the scenery was changed. When the curtain arose, what we saw was an enormous fallen tree in the middle of the stage, around which Oroveso and the Druids arranged themselves as best they could. After the final ensemble of this second scene (“Ah del Tebro al giogo indegno”), the curtain fell. And—as the restive audience sat once again in darkness—it took another five minutes (by my watch) to lug the tree off the stage and to set in place the Temple of Irminsul.

  Such a theatrical abomination could never have happened in Italy during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. No composer would have accepted it. The stage, after all, was arranged with a series of positions at which painted backdrops could be lowered or raised instantaneously, or where decorated side panels or pieces of scenery could be brought in from the wings. When, for large ensemble scenes, a few larger pieces of scenery were needed, on which one or more characters could walk (the praticabili), these were put into place either between acts or when a scene was performed using only part of the stage. We have many drawings that show how Italian stages were constructed to accommodate this kind of setting, but more important is the physical example of the Drottningholm Court theater in Stockholm, the best-preserved late eighteenth-century theater in Europe. It owes its exemplary condition to having been abandoned after the assassination of King Gustaf III (of Ballo in maschera fame) in 1792. Only in the 1920s did its exemplary character begin to be understood, thanks to its well-preserved mechanisms for changing painted backdrops and side flats, for wind and thunder effects, for descending gods ex machina in cloud machines, and all the rest. Diagrams in books could now be compared to an operational theater.

  Since operas written in Italy through the middle of the 1830s were normally in two acts, it was necessary to establish a sequence of set changes within each act that guaranteed continuity. The assumption was that only insignificant amounts of time would be needed to pass from one scene to another and that changes would be made in full view of the audience (a vista). This was accomplished by alternating deeper scenes, which filled most of the stage, with shallower ones, filling only the front part of the stage. At the beginning of an act, for example, most of the stage might be used. Then a new painted backdrop could be lowered into position nearer the front of the stage, and while a scene was played in that smaller space, a new deep scene could be prepared behind it. Something of this kind is what Romani and Bellini had planned for the second act of Norma.

  Because Verdi communicated extensively with his librettists by letter, we have written evidence that he was directly concerned about the rhythm of scene change. He wrote to Piave on 3 December 1846, for example, discussing the structure of the second act of Macbeth. Its first scene begins with a dialogue between Macbeth and Lady, and then has Lady remain alone to sing a solo number (for which he asked Piave to supply “two quatrains”). “Next,” Verdi continued, “comes the Chorus of the Assassins, and the scene should go on a bit, so that the Banquet can be prepared.”87 As the composer explained to Antonio Somma on 29 June 1853, at the beginning of their first effort to prepare Re Lear:

  [I am concerned that] there are too many set changes. The only thing that has always held me back from treating Shakespearian subjects more often is precisely this necessity to change the set at every moment.88 When I used to frequent the theater it was something that made me immensely unhappy, and it seemed to me I was attending a magic lantern show. In this the French are right: they plan their dramas so that only one setting is needed in each act. In that way the action moves along expeditiously, without obstacle, and nothing distracts the public’s attention.89

  Verdi’s description of French practice is not quite correct, but there are fewer set changes within an act than in Italian opera, rarely more than one per act, with a simpler setting always giving way to a more complex one. Thus, the third act of Guillaume Tell begins with a duet for Mathilde and Arnold alone, a “shallow” set, followed by the “deep” set in the central square of Altorf—the place where Gesler forces the Swiss to bow down before his hat, where the divertissement is sung and danced, and where the rebellious Tell, renowned as an archer, is compelled by Gesler to shoot an apple off the head of his son, Jemmy. As French stagecraft grew ever more elaborate—often adopting techniques from the popular, boulevard theaters that sought to astonish audiences with scenic effects—and as large pieces of furniture, functional monumental staircases, or architectural elements proliferated, changing scenery within an act became more difficult. It also became more central to the success of the total spectacle. In a work such as Le Prophète of 1849, the effectiveness of the fourth act is partially dependent on a fabulous set change à vue: while the audience watches, a public square in Münster is transformed into a set representing the inside of the cathedral for the Coronation Scene. Even in Verdi’s own Vêpres siciliennes of 1854 there is an impressive change of set within the third act, when the first “shallow” setting, in Montfort’s study, “changes and represents a sumptuous ballroom [a “deep” set] prepared for festivities.”

  In this regard, it is instructive to think about the three serious operas Rossini wrote for Naples—Otello, Armida, and Mosè in Egitto—in which the composer and his librettists divided the action into three acts instead of the standard two. In each case there are good psychological and dramaturgical reasons for this unusual organization. To pass from Desdemona’s despair at her father’s curse directly to the bedroom scene would be psychologically disastrous; to move from the pleasure palace and divertissement that dominates most of act 2 of Armida into act 3, where the illusion is destroyed, would seriously compromise the sense of the opera; and to shift without pause from Elcia’s horror at the death of her beloved Osiride to the scene of the passage of the Red Sea would allow no time for the Hebrews to regroup for the departure from Egypt. But alongside these dramaturgical considerations are some eminently practical ones. In Otello, no Desdemona could sing the Ave Maria, willow song, and final duet immediately after the major aria that concludes act 2. In both Armida and Mosè in Egitto, not only does the second act conclude with a “deep” set (a magnificent palace in Armida, Pharaoh’s throne room in Mosè in Egitto), but the third act must begin with one (an “enchanted garden” in Armida, the shore of the Red Sea in Mosè in Egitto).

  The gradual movement away from painted backdrops to three-dimensional scenery, growing ever more massive, continued during the first half of the twentieth century and—in some circles—into the twenty-first, establishing itself for a long period as the dominant approach to stage design. The Franco Zeffirelli productions that continue to hold the boards at the Metropolitan Opera are simply the decadent remnant of this tradition. Countertendencies grew during the course of the twentieth century: after World War II, the spare Wieland Wagner productions at the Bayreuth Festival were among the most important. But the tendency toward heavy, often awkward scenic display continued in many productions of Italian opera throughout the century and in all countries. While some of these productions were attractive to look at, their negative aspect was well described almost thirty years ago by Luciano Alberti: “This three-dimensional, volumetric, ‘constructed’ complication [which Alberti calls “a violent reaction to the old pictorial tradition of scenography”] in the last analysis risks being a betrayal, to the extent that it involves the systematic dissolution of that fluid continuity in changes between scenes that the music explicitly requires.”90

  The fashion for complicated scenery had other unfortunate consequences. As settings became more elaborate, a strange phenomenon occurred: operas written in two or three acts began to be played in three or four, primarily to allow for set changes. It became “traditional,” for example, to perform the first act of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia in two separate parts, with an intermission, because the first scene (in which the Count serenades Rosina outside her window and then encounters Figaro) would be given such an elaborate se
tting that the second scene (inside Don Bartolo’s house) could not be prepared behind it. The same problem affected the second act of La traviata, where the first scene, in the country home of Violetta and Alfredo, became ever more picturesque in its setting, a regular villa with full garden in the background, occupying more and more of the stage. The party at Flora’s, therefore, which actually forms the finale of the act, had to be treated as a separate unit in order to allow time for the set of the first scene to be removed and the new set to be put in place. In both cases, but particularly in La traviata, the effect is destructive. A curtain after the Germont aria is hardly how Verdi would ever have imagined closing an act, and, indeed, the theatrical effect is always very poor.91 It is absurd that these divisions persisted throughout most of the twentieth century, long after improved stage machinery and new approaches to set design had rendered them unnecessary. Yet it does not improve matters simply to play these acts as units, as the composers wrote them, if this means the public must sit in a darkened theater for several minutes while the sets are being changed. It is essential that the dramatic rhythm be continuous.

  Some directors and director/designers consider the necessity for continuity within an act so obvious that they wonder why it is even worth mentioning.92 Yet at the opening of the centennial Verdi Festival in Parma, that very problem had surfaced. In the third act of Un ballo in maschera, there are three separate settings. The disposizione scenica for the opera is precise about how they must be handled.93 The first scene, “a study in the home of Renato,” is intended to occupy half the stage. At its conclusion the front curtain should fall just long enough to allow for the lowering of the second painted backdrop, closer to the front of the stage.94 The new setting, in Riccardo’s chamber, thus uses a very shallow set. While Riccardo signs the paper that will send Renato and Amelia back to England, the first backdrop of the act is raised invisibly, revealing a painted backdrop for this last scene, which has been in place at the very rear of the stage since the beginning of the act. Additional columns and chandeliers are brought in toward the rear of the stage, behind the second backdrop, thus completing the setting for the ballroom scene. As Riccardo exits, then, the second backdrop “is raised in plain view of the audience, and the ballroom is discovered behind it.” Between the second and the third scenes Verdi’s music is continuous, so we can tell exactly how much time is available for the scene change: fifteen seconds. With no choice but to move continuously, Andrej Konchalovskij’s staging, supported by the sets of Ezio Frigerio, did the latter change beautifully, but between the first two scenes we waited in darkness for four minutes as heavy constructions were pushed and prodded into place.