Divas and Scholars

by Philip Gossett

  The situation was worse in act 1, whose two settings reproduce the same configuration as the last two settings in act 3: a shallow setting for a hall in the governor’s residence and a deep setting for the dwelling of the sorceress, which should already be largely set up toward the rear of the stage, behind the first backdrop. Again the disposizione scenica is explicit: the first setting “va via a vista, e scopre l’abituro” (is removed in full view of the audience, and behind it is found the dwelling). How long should the change take? Recall that the same procedure in act 3, which is accompanied by Verdi’s music, takes fifteen seconds. In Parma the change of set took five minutes. Five minutes in the dark, five minutes of restive quasi silence. Frigerio’s sets were beautiful, but Verdi’s stunning juxtaposition of the “can-can” that concludes the first scene and the three hammer-like dissonant chords for the entire orchestra that open the second scene was utterly lost. No one imagines that theaters should return to painted backdrops, should give up massive scenery where such scenery seems desirable, or should reject other, more original approaches to set design; but to require an audience to sit patiently for a long scene change within an act is a failure both of historical knowledge and of artistic imagination.

  There can be moments in which a modern production plays brilliantly with our sense of time in a way that could not have been contemplated by those who brought the opera to life at its premiere. I recall Graham Vick’s Moïse at the Rossini Opera Festival during the summer of 1997. The production was staged in the Palafestival, the basketball stadium intelligently transformed into a theater. Normally the stage was constructed at one of the longer sides of the rectangular space, and the public sat on bleachers on three sides of the room and on chairs placed where the basketball court used to be. In this case, though, Vick and his designer, Stefanos Lazaridis, constructed an enormous thrust stage starting from one of the shorter sides of the rectangle. The public was seated on the other three sides of the stage, which could be adjusted hydraulically so that at one moment it would be flat, at another raked. Probably the most remarkable moment in the production was the famous Prayer in act 4, “Des cieux où tu résides” (From the heavens where you reside), where Vick avoided all direct reference to the Red Sea. Instead, he had the Hebrews, many dressed as East European Jews at the time of the Holocaust and carrying makeshift valises, appear at the back of the raked stage and then gradually descend the long distance toward the front. As the music turned from the minor key in which it begins to a major key for the final section, the now-assembled chorus sang directly to the audience, confronting them with the enormity of the biblical story and the twentieth-century disaster. It was a profoundly disturbing, yet beautiful moment.

  It was in the third act, though, that Vick played with time. The act, which takes place in the portal before the Temple of Isis, begins with a choral march, “Reine des cieux” (Queen of the heavens). For this act Vick flattened the stage, around the whole of which was a channel filled with water. When the lights came up, standing in the channel, barefoot, were the priestesses who later in the act would participate as dancers in the divertissement. They were dressed in flowing, diaphanous white robes, and they proceeded slowly and with beautiful gestures to walk in measured fashion around the entire channel. No music played: the entire theater was silent. I do not know how long the procession took, for time seemed to stand still. When I first heard what Vick had been planning, I worried that members of the audience might grow impatient, but the fear was groundless: the sheer beauty of the movements and the hypnotic quality of the action testified to the director’s genius.

  “DISPLACED” AND “RADICAL” STAGINGS

  What freedom should a stage director have to modify an opera in a modern production? As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, many lovers of Italian opera become incensed when faced with directorial interventions, whether a simple transposition of period or a more radical reinvention of the action. Perhaps it would console them to know that similar controversies swirl around the staging of plays, although in the United States, Britain, and Italy, at least, the theater has in general been more open than the operatic world to radical staging. For many years I have kept a file of interesting cases. One is a 1994 debate that intrigued me because of the respect I have for both the author and the performers: Deborah Warner directed Fiona Shaw in a revival of Samuel Beckett’s Footfalls at the Garrick Theater in London.95 According to Edward Beckett, his uncle’s executor, the production “destroyed the play’s timing, atmosphere, the ghostly aspect.” Warner replied that the text was unchanged, but that it was time to move away from what she referred to as “a Beckett cliché”: “someone standing in a white light in a black box set.” What may have seemed innovative in the theater thirty years ago, in short, needed to be studied anew. “Beckett,” Warner concluded, “will withstand productions that will delight some and offend others. The estate is reluctant to allow him to take on sure wings of his own.” The Beckett estate, furious, withdrew permission for a European tour.

  There are times, though, in which the artists themselves rebel. Such a rebellion preceded the performances planned for the Teatro alla Scala on 6 and 8 November 2001 of Verdi’s Luisa Miller in a production by Götz Friedrich. The head of the Deutsche Oper in Berlin from 1981 until his death in December 2000, Friedrich was one of Europe’s most distinguished, if controversial, stage directors. His last opera production, which had its premiere in Berlin on 22 November 2000, shortly before his death, was a Luisa Miller conducted by Lorin Maazel. That production, still under the direction of Maazel, was scheduled for revival in Munich in October 2001 with a new cast, Barbara Frittoli and Vincenzo La Scola in the roles of Luisa and Rodolfo, to be followed by the performances in Milan with the same team. In both Munich and Milan, however, the staged production became a concert performance. Paola Zonca, writing in the pages of La repubblica, explained that “the first to protest was Frittoli, who narrated what, according to her, were the exaggerations and incongruencies of the staging: her Luisa was supposed to take a bath dressed in underwear, have a lesbian relationship with Federica (the contralto), be raped by Wurm (the bass), improvise a striptease, and remain on stage always with scanty clothes and suggestive makeup.”96 La Scola commented that “the staging betrayed the spirit of the opera.” Whether Friedrich might or might not have been willing to adapt his ideas to Frittoli and La Scola is something we will never know.

  When speaking about directorial intervention today, we need to differentiate two approaches, “displaced stagings” and “radical stagings,” without pretending that the division is absolute. Indeed, within each tendency there is a range of differing attitudes. In what I have called displaced stagings, a story is moved either temporally or spatially, but the subject, characters, situations, and action are basically unchanged. In radical stagings, in the words of Roger Savage, the operatic text is treated as “a sheer, unprescriptive stimulus to the free play of theatrical imagination.” He adds, “It is the text itself, unshackled by time or authorship, which is alive; and its untrammelled life triggers new responses in the imagination of directors and designers.”97

  About displaced stagings it is possible to lay out a coherent historical argument. There are Italian operas, such as Verdi’s Aida, with strong roots in a particular historical moment or geographical location. Others float more freely from one venue to another, although composers were never indifferent to where they landed. Subject to the intervention of theatrical censors, Verdi himself was compelled on multiple occasions to shift an opera in time and/or space. As we have seen, Rigoletto was originally conceived as occurring at the court of the French Renaissance king, François I, who reigned from 1515 to 1547. Verdi was willing to displace the story either temporally (he suggested moving it to an earlier period, before the reign of Louis XI, which began in 1461, when France was not a unified kingdom) or geographically (to an independent duchy of Burgundy or to an Italian principality), as long as there was “an absolute ruler.” Ultimate
ly the King of France became the Duke of Mantua, while the period remained the sixteenth century.98 The early nineteenth-century German narrative of the 1850 Stiffelio, along with much of its music, flowed seven years later into a Scottish story set in 1200 for the revised Aroldo (whose last act, entirely new, takes place on the banks of Loch Lomond). As we saw in chapter 11, in order to make Les Vêpres siciliennes, which takes place in Palermo, Sicily, in 1282, acceptable to the Italians, Verdi himself displaced it to Lisbon, Portugal, in 1640, as Giovanna de Guzman.99

  The tormented travels of Un ballo in maschera are well known, but some of Verdi’s letters on the subject are particularly apposite at defining the composer’s attitude toward displacements. Although he regretted that the censors would not permit him to maintain the drama at the royal court of Gustaf III of Sweden in 1792, he was hardly surprised. The problem was to find an acceptable alternative. Among Somma’s first notions was to move the story back to medieval times (“It wouldn’t be bad to place it in Pomerania—a part of Prussia—and an independent Duchy in the twelfth century, when the Teutonic knights fought to eliminate the idolatry that persisted in many parts of the Duchy”).100 Verdi’s response was unequivocal:

  The twelfth century seems to me too remote for our Gustavo. It was such a coarse and brutal period, especially in those lands, that it seems to me a grave contradiction to insert characters cut in the French manner, like Gustavo and Oscar, and a lively drama, fashioned according to our modern customs. It would be better to find a little prince, a duke, a devil, even one from the North, who had seen something of the world and smelled the odor of the court of Louis XIV.

  Displacement was fine, so long as it was accomplished with sensitivity to the characters and situations. Verdi did finally agree to move the drama to Stettin, capital of Pomerania, but set it in the second half of the seventeenth century.

  When the Neapolitan censors sought to displace his opera yet again, under the name Adelia degli Adimari, to Florence in 1385, Verdi returned to the same theme in his letter of 14 February 1858 to Vincenzo Torelli, impresario of the Teatro San Carlo: “Shift the action back by five or six centuries?! What an anachronism! Cut the scene where the name of the assassin is chosen by lot?!... but that is the most powerful and novel situation in the drama, and you want me to give it up?!”101 After failing to reach a satisfactory compromise in Naples, Verdi began negotiations with Rome, but similar problems surfaced. Finally, exhausted by the squabbles and concerned that his completed opera would languish unperformed, he wrote to Somma on 8 July 1858: “The censors might permit the subject and situations, etc., etc., but they would want the setting removed from Europe. What do you think about North America at the time of the English domination? If not America another place. The Caucasus perhaps?”102 A whiff of the court of Louis XIV in the Caucasus?103 What was he thinking?

  For Verdi, there was no compromising on the situations and the characters, but he was prepared to discuss and effect displacements—even improbable ones—in both time and space. Given these histories (and their number can be multiplied to include other operas by Verdi and many works by Donizetti), arguments against modern displaced stagings ring hollow. A New York Mafia don “Duke” from the 1920s in the manner of Jonathan Miller, or a Holywood mogul “Duke” with a swimming pool in the manner of Bruce Beresford, would never have crossed Verdi’s mind, for obvious reasons, but the composer’s own displacements were just as significant. In a 2003 interview in The Paris Review, referring to his Rigoletto, Miller offered a way to think about what he called “isomorphic” displacements in operatic staging:

  Ah, but now we are talking about plays or operas which are written in one period, apparently about another, but the world to which these “historic” works nominally refer is nonexistent. For example, none of the actions that are represented in Verdi’s Rigoletto could possibly have happened in the Gonzaga world to which it refers. It is a virtual historic world. It is generically historic. You have to find a world with some sort of common structure, one in which a man has absolute power of life and death over his followers, and who can behave as badly as he wishes because he is the boss. And that happens in the Mafia. [...] Underneath the surface differences there are common structures which allow some plays and operas to be transposed without distortion.104

  Of course, Verdi and his librettists were prepared to adjust the language of the libretto and even the music to make sure that their displacements were coherent.

  While extensive adjustments are rarely made in operatic scores today, minor changes can help a particular displaced production cohere. An American wild-west version of Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims in Brian Dickie’s Chicago Opera Theater in the spring of 2004, for example, substituted Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration for the coronation of Charles X, an amusing and engaging displacement that did not require changing the plot. Similarly, manipulations in the simultaneous translations projected over the stage have become quite common. In general, though, audiences are not disturbed by hearing an occasional “King” or “Duke” addressed to a character without dynastic pretensions. Of course, we smile inwardly at those cases in which an apparent inconsistency is cleverly removed. The best example I know is not operatic but cinematic, the first scene of Baz Luhrman’s displaced Shakespeare’s R & J, which begins with a fight between two feuding Latino gangs, equipped with submachine guns, at a gas station in Verona Beach, California. When Benvolio calls out, “Fools, put up your swords,” the camera zooms in on the barrel of the guns, where the manufacturer’s name is engraved: “Sword.”

  In modern productions of Italian opera, then, displaced stagings seem entirely appropriate, although it must be acknowledged that modern displacements tend to bring the events of an opera into the present, a different kind of displacement from the ones Verdi undertook. Nonetheless, the practice is historically defensible as long as the works preserve, in Verdi’s words, “the subject and situations.” Even the occasional and inevitable incoherence is admissible. What matters is whether the displacement functions effectively in the theater, and whether it illuminates those elements of the drama that are independent of time and place. Those are judgments each member of the audience must make.

  “Radical” stagings by their very nature ask different kinds of questions, questions for which the history of a work, the thinking of the composer and the librettist, and the niceties of character, action, and stage directions provide little guidance. Roger Savage summarizes the problem neatly when he speaks of the “untrammelled life” of an opera that “triggers new responses in the imagination of directors and designers” (quoted above). In David Alden’s 1999 Macbeth at Chicago, defined by von Rhein as “campy, creepy American Eurotrash,” the witches were conceived—in Alden’s words—as “Strong, power-suited executives.”105 At the end of the opening scene, after their first encounter with Macbeth and Banco, they reached into their purses, pulled out bright red lipsticks, and applied them with aggressive menace toward any men in their vicinity, including the audience. Most of us may not believe in witches today, but are the sentiments and insecurities that caused our ancestors to burn at the stake women considered dangerous altogether absent from modern society? And how do we react to characters like Macbeth and Lady, who continue to embody the problem of the power relationship between a man and a woman? While Alden’s staging of Macbeth was filled with provocations emerging from the text of Verdi’s opera, it was certainly not a presentation of the opera as conceived by its authors. Yet I often found the production powerful and effective, and it has stayed with me where many more conventional treatments have rapidly faded.

  When critics speak of Regietheater or of productions with a Konzept, this is the kind of production they intend to invoke. That the words are German is not coincidental, for the dominance of the stage director in opera was strongly felt in Berlin already by the 1920s, as exemplified in operatic productions of the Kroll Theater (in particular the abstract, antinaturalistic staging by Jürgen Fehling of Wagn
er’s Der fliegende Holländer in 1929) and closely related ideas of epic theater being developed by Bertolt Brecht.106 There is an enormous literature about the increasing significance of the stage director in the opera house during the twentieth century, a good deal of it associated with the staging of Wagner. Among the key individuals were Walter Felsenstein at the Komische Oper of East Berlin, later succeeded by Harry Kupfer; Götz Friedrich at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin; Hans Neuenfels and Ruth Berghaus, both of whom worked at the Frankfurt opera house under Michael Gielen; and the French director Patrick Chéreau (known principally for his Ring at Bayreuth in 1976).