Nineteenth-century Italian opera, especially as produced in Italy, the United States, and Britain, largely held aloof from these tendencies. Writing in 2001, Mike Ashman commented:
A cursory glance at Verdian performance history will focus first on singers and impresarios, then conductors, but rarely on the directors’ work, where, in terms of “progressive” (read “committed” or “theatrical”) stagings, Verdi seems to lag behind. Critical and public outrage at novel Verdi productions both outweighs that at like-minded Wagner (or other German-composer) productions—where it is currently regarded as de rigueur—and remains less willing to tolerate attempts to move beyond historically informed fourth-wall naturalism.107
If this is true of Verdi productions, how much more so is it of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. Even when innovative directors from the cinema and theater, like Luchino Visconti, Giorgio Strehler, Luca Ronconi, and Lina Wertmüller, began to enter the opera house in Italy after 1950, their productions only rarely tried to endow a work with “untrammelled life.” At most they stressed the blatant theatricality of the Italian operatic repertory, as when Visconti in his 1955 Sonnambula at La Scala turned the house lights on for the final cabaletta, “which focused the attention of the audience and the other singers on the performance of the protagonist.”108 This technique is similar to the one Pier Luigi Pizzi would employ almost thirty years later when he directed the tragic ending of Rossini’s Tancredi at the Rossini Opera Festival in 1982 as a hallucination of the sorrowing Amenaide. When her vision subsided, the victorious Tancredi made his return from the battle with Solamir, the house lights came up, and the evening concluded with a spirited rendition of the vaudeville that originally brought the opera to a happy conclusion.
Ronconi developed other innovative methods. Sometimes he sought to emphasize the relationship of a work to the culture that gave it birth (treating Nabucco as a Risorgimental myth at the Maggio Musicale of Florence in 1977) or in which it was being performed (celebrating the discovery of Il viaggio a Reims at the Rossini Opera Festival in 1984). Sometimes he luxuriated in a work’s inherent theatricality: his Guglielmo Tell at La Scala in 1988 used filmed Swiss travalogues and semicircular rows of graded benches from which the chorus could observe the proceedings during the first act, while in his Moïse at the same theater in 2003, a massive Baroque organ emerged from the sands in the middle of the desert. Yet, however theatrically compelling, Ronconi’s productions are not “radical stagings” in the sense described by Savage or by Guccini in his survey of Italian practice:
the type of direction that addresses the show in complete liberty, precisely as though [...] the musical text did not in its own right describe settings, situations, and characters. When directors apply their creativity to opera without accepting any degree of compromise, they produce shows with a double identity: on the one hand, the staged interpretation and, on the other, the musical text.109
Searching for an Italian example of such a staging, Guccini falls back on a production of Tristan und Isolde by Jurij Ljubimov at the Teatro Comunale of Bologna.110
For many years it was largely left to German theaters to explore radical stagings of Italian opera, and the techniques were applied for the most part to a number of operas by Verdi. The legendary staging by Hans Neuenfels of Aida at the Frankfurt opera in 1981 was “booed and maligned to an unprecedented extent,” but later “advanced to cult status, playing to sold-out crowds for years.”111 Neuenfels began by staging the prelude, that is, introducing stage action as soon as the music began to play. Many directors have done this even in highly traditional productions. After all, by opening La traviata with a prelude that will be reheard at the start of act 3 as Violetta lies dying of tuberculosis, Verdi himself “stages” the opera as a flashback. Introducing Violetta in her sickbed during the prelude, then, as in countless modern productions, simply confirms what is already in the score, although one could argue that it does it in a way significantly more banal than the composer’s. But Neuenfels had other aims. This is Samuel Weber’s description:
Radames, captain of the Egyptian palace guard, appears dressed in the civilian clothes of a nineteenth-century European businessman. At a certain moment in what seems to be a dream, he seizes a shovel (implausibly located in what appears to be an office) and begins to dig in the earth, or, rather, to tear up the floorboards of the stage, bringing to light first sand, then a sword, and finally the sculpted head of Aida.112
Weber attempts to define the meaning of this gesture in the context of Freud’s theory of the dream. The following sentences give the flavor of his discussion:
For when Radames takes the shovel—which, with oneiric incongruity, just happens to be ready at hand—and begins to dig, what comes to light is not merely a number of obviously symbolic objects—swords and sculpted head—but also, and perhaps more important, the materiality of the scene itself in all of its equivocal overdetermination. The gesture of Radames forces the spectators to direct their glance at the physical foundation of theatrical representation, the flooring of the stage, the “basis” of the scene.
And Neunfels’s concern with the position of the spectators with respect to an operatic representation carries over into the opening scene of the second act:
In this scene, the curtain rises to reveal a surprising, indeed even breathtaking tableau: the chorus assembled as the elegant audience gathered for the opening night of Aida at La Scala in 1872. What quite literally takes one’s breath away in this image is not merely the unexpectedness of its content but its location. The chorus, ranged horizontally and vertically in a grid representing the Scala loges and covering most of the visible area, is placed at the very front of the stage, just behind the curtain... One audience looks at another. And the other stares back.
In describing this production and other radical stagings of Aida, Clemens Risi—thinking about recent critical controversies surrounding the opera—insists: “Seeking out new and provocative images proves to be necessary in order to visualize Aida’s implicit statement about colonialist and imperialist tendencies.”113
As I hope I made abundantly clear in my discussion of Dominique Pitoiset’s staging of Macbeth earlier in this chapter, I am not prepared to condemn radical stagings of this kind in principle, even if they simply create a parallel universe to experience and to reflect upon alongside the music and libretto of a Verdi opera. I can only nod in agreement with Graham Vick, who—in the wake of his controversial staging of Il trovatore at the Metropolitan Opera in December 2000—contended that “a production should offer a surprising dialogue with the stage, which an audience is prepared to engage in. The notion of going to see a familiar opera is at its worst when it is like putting on a familiar pair of old carpet slippers. That has nothing to do with the spirit of why Verdi created his operas.”114
Whether it is necessary to visualize Aida’s Orientalist tendencies in the theater, in Risi’s sense, is quite another matter. There are many ways to stage Italian opera, and it is every bit as dangerous to insist on radical stagings as it would be to insist on displaced or traditional ones. That is why I am saddened when a director for whom I have great respect, Francesca Zambello, is quoted as saying, “If I have to think of a work of Verdi that moved me on stage, that’s going to be pretty hard.” I rather agree with David Levin that there are convincing and original traditional stagings and convincing and original radical stagings, just as there are failures across the spectrum.115 Verdi’s reaction to any such controversy would have been to look at the box-office receipts. We could do worse.
Whereas many works by Verdi have at least been the object of controversy, relatively little thought has gone into the staging of serious or semiserious operas by Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. Widespread acceptance of the Rossini serious operas, in particular, has been hindered by the failure of stage directors to realize these works effectively in the theater. That an unusual number of operas such as La donna del lago are regularly presented in concert form, rather
than being staged, attests to this failure. Since 1981, I have seen four productions of the opera, by Frank Corsaro, Gae Aulenti, Werner Herzog, and Luca Ronconi, all highly respected names in the theater, but none has succeeded in giving the opera a convincing profile on stage. The most successful stagings of Rossini serious operas over this period have probably been those of Pier Luigi Pizzi, many for the Rossini Opera Festival. Pizzi has such a splendid eye for theatrical space that his productions of Tancredi, Maometto II, Bianca e Falliero, and Otello have been extraordinarly beautiful. Only in the case of Maometto II, however, did he produce what I considered to be a convincing dramatic action. Others have followed in Pizzi’s footsteps, without his genius, and have given us Rossini productions that involve little more than shifting singers around the stage to form beautiful but static images.
Is it Rossini’s fault? That is hard to tell. Certainly his operas emerge from a theatrical tradition quite different from the more rapid dramaturgy that often characterizes the operas of Verdi. In Rossini, events come more slowly: arias, duets, ensembles expound the drama in a more formal way. In a slow ensemble, each character will sing the same melodic line and from those separate melodic lines, with added counterpoints, an overall emotional state emerges. The music can be stunningly beautiful, but it suspends time, rather than moving it along. Arias set forward one dramatic position in a broad opening section; a brief transition establishes a new dramatic position; and the latter gives rise to a lengthy concluding section. Within duets there are long melodic periods, first sung by one character, then repeated by the other. Conflicts are often stereotyped: love versus duty is the most common, often embodied in a daughter who refuses to wed the man chosen by her father for political reasons, but insists on following her own romantic instincts. Extended choral movements establish a mood against which the drama will develop. Given this more deliberate dramatic and musical pacing, traditional stagings of Rossini’s serious operas often seem like concerts in costume.
Yet much the same thing could have been said until recently about the operas of George Frideric Handel, which are even further from familiar theatrical traditions. Productions of Handel operas in major opera houses in England and the United States used to be as rare as they still are in Italy. The “da capo” aria tradition, with its almost obligatory ABA structure, the castratos that roamed the eighteenth-century stage, the formal poetic language, all seemed to place a barrier between a modern audience and the successful revival of Handel. Yet the situation has turned itself completely around in the past decade. Instead of trying to prod Handel’s operas into midnineteenth-century conventions, musicians have accepted the structure of the works and discovered their beauties. Stage directors have invented new ways of bringing them to life, not by deconstructing them in the German manner, but by treating their general plots with ironic distance—placing them in fanciful settings or laughing gently at the complications of their plots—while continuing to take seriously the emotions of their characters. They have discovered that it is possible to stage through a “da capo” aria, to make an aria tell a story that begins at the beginning of the first “A” and concludes only at the end of the repeated “A.” The music and art of the singer can therefore be enjoyed on one level, while the staging keeps the action going across the entire aria. One cannot argue with the extraordinary success these operas have been having: Who would have imagined that in the past few years delighted audiences in major American opera houses from Chicago to Houston to New York would vigorously applaud essentially complete performances of Partenope, Giulio Cesare, Agrippina, Xerxes, and Alcina?
We need directors who attempt to think through the Italian repertory anew, not directors who impose extreme settings in order to stir life into works in which they do not believe. I infuriated the head of the Rossini Opera Festival by referring to Pesaro’s Semiramide from the summer of 2003, directed by Dieter Kaegi, as “just silly.” And so it was: not terrible, not disgusting, not outlandish, just silly. The basic set, an enormous table with television monitors, evoked the control room of the Enterprise from Star Trek. At the very beginning of the opera, the ambassadors to Babylonia seemed to come not from all over the ancient world but from all over the universe. So far so good. And then the Konzept disintegrated, leaving the awkward table, around which characters struggled to sing their duets (Semiramide is largely an opera of duets). Arsace arrived with a shopping bag containing little cut-out hearts to present to his beloved Azema. (He abandoned the bag after his aria, and it had to be picked up by an extra.) The control table was then transformed into a gaming table—filled with characters tossing in chips—for the duet between Arsace and Assur, who could hardly get near to one another in the pandemonium. It was worse when Arsace and Semiramide were served dinner on opposite sides of the table during one of their duets. Assur sported a Dr. Strangelove prosthesis instead of an arm, and when it came time for him to descend into the tomb of Assur, he writhed around the middle of the table from which smoke emerged. If there was a point, even a Konzept, no one seemed to have understood what it was, and I have yet to see it explained.
Because they emerge from Neoclassicism, but also initiate the glorious tradition of Italian Romantic opera, the Rossini serious operas pose special opportunities and challenges to contemporary directors. As debates about staging continue, the operas themselves demand our attention for their musical beauty, their dramatic truth, and the complex and continually changing ways in which they interact with the artistic visions of performers. What theaters can do is make available to stage directors and set designers the best possible texts of the operas and all relevant secondary materials (including staging manuals and contemporary set designs), and then turn them loose to do their work as they conceive it. Whether designers and directors choose traditional, displaced, or radical stagings, such as those discussed in this chapter, or seek other innovative approaches, it is only through their artistry that these operas can come to life in the theater.
CODA
14
TWO KINGS HEAD NORTH:
TRANSFORMING ITALIAN OPERA
IN SCANDINAVIA
While divas and scholars alike may spend most of their time learning the score—in one or more of its surviving versions—and developing the stylistic sensitivity and skills needed to perform an opera, there are occasions when contemporary theatrical life allows them, even encourages them, to take a role that goes significantly beyond the kinds of interventions discussed thus far. In the spoken theater, performers are assumed to have ample liberty to modify and invent, even when faced with the works of the very greatest playwrights. To what location hasn’t one stage director or another moved “To be or not to be” in order to give “his” or “her” Hamlet a particular aura? When the film director Baz Luhrman, known for his Latino Shakespeare’s R & J, mounted Puccini’s La Bohème on Broadway on 8 December 2002, he boasted about maintaining the musical and verbal integrity of the opera, while allowing his invention full reign within the realm of contemporary stagecraft and updating the action to 1957. But in many countries (including the United States), operatic performers, critics, scholars, and audiences tend to be impatient with inventions that transform the musical and verbal substance of a familiar work, which is why there have been relatively few efforts to renew the repertory of Italian opera by manipulating it from within.
In the world of theater, after all, there is no expectation that the version of an important play produced by a great director—such as Deborah Warner’s Medea with Fiona Shaw, which opened in New York at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on 2 October 2002—will be around five years later. Such a version will be performed many times in succession within a single season (sometimes night after night), toured from one venue to the next, or revived in subsequent seasons, until the audience begins to lose interest, and then will be retired, often encased in an electronic form for home viewing. The economic and artistic realities of operatic production, on the other hand, do not encourage similar freedom. Textu
al uniformity is economically advantageous. While a play script is a relatively simple document to manipulate, modifying operatic performing materials (parts, scores) is more time-consuming and costly. There are also practical considerations. With operas from the standard repertory, it is difficult enough for singers to learn new stagings and remember a new set of musical cuts; asking them to change text or rearrange sections of music often proves impossible, especially when they will perform the work in that version no more than eight to twelve times before moving on with the same work to a different country, a different opera house, a different stage director, and a different conductor.
And yet there are occasions when unusual interventions seem justified. By studying carefully the history of a work, scholars and performers may be able to produce or resurrect a version sufficiently interesting to a particular opera house that it justifies the unusual effort required to bring it before the public. A singer such as Natalie Dessay can be so entranced with a particular version of an operatic warhorse (the French Lucie de Lammermoor, for example), that multiple opera houses may decide to mount the work for her.1 Or a world-famous stage director may come up with an idea for producing an opera that requires significant creative interventions in the version or versions with which the composer was involved—interventions that involve not only staging but even text and music.
Is there a limit to the extent of such interventions? Since no one can assert moral rights in the theater, certainly not for nineteenth-century works long out of copyright, the rule of the marketplace holds sway. As Verdi would have said, what matters is whether the public buys tickets. The only moral imperative, it seems to me, is absolute honesty in describing what a theater is doing. When the Martina Franca opera festival in Italy’s Puglia region put on several important Rossini productions during the summers of 2000, 2001, and 2002, I criticized them not for their initiative in producing the shows (a most appropriate effort) or for the quality of their realizations (I didn’t see them), but for pretending that the 1831 “revision” of Otello with Maria Malibran in the title role, Ivanhoé at the Odéon Theater in Paris in 1826, or Robert Bruce at the Opéra in 1846 were composer-sanctioned texts.2 One understands a theater’s desire to sell tickets, but to do so by falsifying the historical record is unconscionable.
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