Divas and Scholars

by Philip Gossett

  Masks were everywhere on the stark set of Piero Vinciguerra. Throughout the entire opera the stage was bounded on both sides by enormous flats, on the upper half of which were assembled rows of red masks against a black surface, electromagnetically fixed in place. When Ankastrom shot Gustavo in the final scene, the current was switched off and the masks crashed to the stage. (One always worries about accidents in such cases—even one mask falling too early would have ruined the effect—but during the two weeks of rehearsals and performances I witnessed, there was never a problem.) The remainder of the stage consisted of platforms and a back cyclorama, with a rotating platform on which was placed a large, three-dimensional mask. Its front faced the audience during the first scene,32 but at the start of the second scene the mask and its platform turned, so that its back faced the audience, revealing Ulrica on the platform. A similar shift occurred between the two scenes of the third act, so that at the end of the opera the platform supported not only a ghostly Ulrica observing the fulfillment of her prophecy, but also the string instruments playing at the ball. And masks dominated Markus Pysall’s costumes: the absurdly comic, grotesque masks that the courtiers donned for their visit to Ulrica; the white, ghostlike mask that Oscar wore in the second act, which was then passed to Amelia (instead of a veil); and the many masks that dominated the third act.

  There were those who objected to this visual and dramaturgical modernization in support of a musical edition which, after all, prided itself on having tried to reestablish the original historical setting and text of Gustavo III. Wouldn’t it therefore have been more appropriate to set the opera in the Swedish court in 1792? I don’t think so. The updating worked for me because it found appropriate ways to stage the most characteristic elements of Verdi’s drama. Even when the production toyed with the original (in its treatment of the Chief Judge, for example), it never falsified: Verdi’s orchestral figure for the Judge’s entrance is readily heard as pompous and ironic. At the emotional heart of the opera, however, the interactions of Gustavo, Amelia, and Ankastrom were never treated with less than complete dramaturgical integrity, and Verdi’s magnificent score was given every opportunity to dominate the proceedings.

  What emerged clearly from the production of Gustavo III in Gothenburg was that Verdi had composed a superb opera for Naples. Had it not been for the assassination attempt on the life of Napoleon III in January 1858, which made compromise with the Neapolitan censors impossible, the opera by Verdi that we would know and perform today would be Una vendetta in dominò. And then, had it not been for the fears of the Roman censors, it would instead be Gustavo III, that is, not the work Verdi and Somma had begun preparing (in October and November 1857), but Una vendetta in dominò with a somewhat revised text, as sent by Verdi to Rome in March 1858.

  DARIO FO AND IL VIAGGIO A REIMS

  Rossini’s Coronation Opera and its Stagings

  Luca Ronconi’s brilliant 1984 staging in Pesaro of Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims was directly tied to the notion of “rediscovery,” ironically reflecting the media event that had been created around these performances: the production was replete with multiple television screens, reporters, microphones on booms, and postmodern efforts encouraging the audience to be inside and outside the theater (and the text) at the same time.33 Similar effects have been seen in the theater for many decades. How often has Claudius given his first speech in Hamlet (“Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death”) as if he were engaged in a news conference, microphones and all. Yet this image has continuing strength, for it helps illuminate Claudius’s words by invoking the widespread belief that on such formal occasions truth is bent for political purposes. The Pesaro staging of Viaggio was more explicitly tied to a single historical moment, and nothing ages so badly in the theater as a Konzept that celebrates the particularities of a production’s birth.

  Ronconi’s Il viaggio a Reims lost credibility when it continued to proclaim the opera’s rediscovery fifteen years after the premiere. In 1992, when the production returned to Pesaro and Ferrara to help celebrate the Rossini bicentennial, it still remained amusing and effective, especially under the baton of Claudio Abbado. But by the time the Rossini Opera Festival brought it back yet again during the summer of 1999, with a largely new generation of fine singers (among them Elizabeth Norberg-Schulz, Eva Mei, Valeria Esposito, Antonino Siragusa, Juan Diego Flórez, Michele Pertusi, Bruno Praticò, and Roberto Frontali) and with Daniele Gatti in the pit, the Ronconi production was interesting only for helping a knowledgeable audience to recall the intensity of a past theatrical experience: its too familiar devices had little significance for operagoers who had not seen the productions of 1984 or 1992. Many details of brilliant acting tied to the original singers lost their effectiveness with the new cast. It was pointless, for example, to have Norberg-Schulz and Esposito mimic the hilarious interplay between two singers who were known to have personal animosities, the Corinna of Cecilia Gasdia (with her hair in the shape of a lyre) and the Cortese of Katia Ricciarelli (who maliciously “strummed” Corinna’s coiffed lyre during the “Gran Pezzo Concertato”—Rossini’s piece for fourteen solo voices). Different singers, different personalities: not only could no one reproduce Gasdia’s waspish glances, no one should have been asked to try. Fine vocal fireworks were insufficient to rescue this return to the Ronconi staging.34

  But this 1984 staging is not the only one to have circulated in recent years, and several other productions focus on political themes in Il viaggio a Reims. Balocchi’s tale, after all, features representatives from all over Europe, who meet at a spa in Plombières (named after the symbol of the Bourbon family—the “giglio d’or” or golden lily), on their way to attend the coronation of Charles X at Rheims. Although at the beginning of the opera Ronconi wrapped the travelers in bath towels decorated with the flags of their respective countries, his political references stopped there. He made no effort to communicate the historical meaning of the sextet, in which the jealous Russian Count Libenskof and the proud Spanish admiral Don Alvaro almost come to blows in their jealousy over the Polish Marquise Melibea, until they are reconciled by the voice of the poetess Corinna, who enjoins all the people of Europe to unite in peace under the sign of the Cross so as to fight more effectively the threat from the “falcata luna” (Turkish crescent). As Janet Johnson has pointed out, this situation duplicates almost precisely the historical conflict over Poland, one of the key issues for Tsar Alexander I of Russia (represented in the opera by Count Libenskof) at the congresses of Vienna (1814 –15) and Verona (1822).35 Nor did Ronconi become involved with the politics of the opera’s finale, in which the guests address the new king in their various national hymns and styles, followed by Corinna’s improvisation in praise of Charles X and by concluding ensembles (with Rossini’s variations on the venerable French tune, “Vive Henri IV”). In Ronconi’s 1984 staging the scene provided the opportunity for a parade of fine singing, leveraged by the amusing entrance of the King and his train into the theater (after a mad dash up the stairs—projected inside the theater by video cameras).

  Two stagings of Viaggio during the 1990s were more interventionist with regard to the opera’s politics. Despite the Caballé shenanigans that exasperated the public (see chapter 1), John Cox’s Covent Garden production of 1992 had a number of distinctive moments that reflected England’s effort at that time to keep its distance from the European Community. There were amusing dances near the beginning of the finale, where figures representing England, Denmark, and Sweden twirled apart from the common core of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. At New York City Opera in 1999, James Robinson took a different tack, looking not to replicate today’s political situation but rather to explore the political realities of 1825. He prepared a set of notes for the company in which he sketched the historical background of the Bourbon restoration, from the downfall of Napoleon in 1814 –15 to the 1830 revolution.

  In 1793, according to Robinson’s accurate reconstruction, the French Revolutionaries ha
d chopped off the heads of King Louis XVI and his Queen, Marie Antoinette. Their son (who would have been Louis XVII) died in prison two years later. After the fall of Napoleon, then, it was to Louis XVI’s younger brother that the European allies looked to grace the throne of France. Louis XVIII reigned as a constitutional monarch until his death in 1824, but found himself under constant pressure both from those who favored a return to an “ultra”-royalist society and from those who believed in a constitutional monarchy informed by “liberal” ideals inherited from the French Revolution. The situation became more explosive when Louis XVIII, who died in 1824, was replaced by his younger brother, the Count d’Artois. Ruling as Charles X, he led a government that sought to stamp out as many traces of liberalism as possible. New taxes were instituted that weighed most heavily on the bourgeoisie; the French government paid indemnities to the returning nobility; severe restrictions were placed on the press; the church was given new power, and the educational system was largely turned over to the clergy; crimes defined as “sacrilegious” were punishable by death. Since the King reigned as the representative of God on earth, political debate was stifled. The situation became so oppressive that Charles ultimately lost the support of a vast majority of Frenchmen, even among the upper classes. After the so-called “July Revolution” of 1830, Charles went into exile, and Louis-Philippe, who traced his lineage back to Louis XIII through another branch of the Bourbon dynasty (the “Orléans” side), became King.

  On only a few occasions did Robinson point his production of Il viaggio a Reims in a markedly political direction. After the Gran Pezzo Concertante for fourteen solo voices, the travelers reconcile themselves to missing the coronation. In the libretto they decide instead to leave the next day for Paris, where they will greet the King on his arrival in the capital, after having “un bel convito” (a lovely banquet) that very night at the spa. They can pay for the entertainment by using the sums already collected from all the travelers for the voyage, now manqué, to Rheims. And what should we do with the money that will be left over, asks the Baron, to which Libenskof replies: “For the poor.” “Do you all agree?” the Baron asks the company, who respond in unison, “Sì.” There is nothing about this interchange, musically or poetically, that would lead us to interpret it as anything but sincere. Seeking to expose the mendacity and greed of the nobility under Charles X, however, Robinson had the company laugh long and hard at the suggestion of sharing their wealth with the poor, and their “Sì” provided the opportunity for more uncontrollable laughter and cynicism.

  This cynicism returned in an even more striking fashion at the end of the opera, when Charles X, bewigged, powdered, and dressed in formal seventeenth-century garb à la Louis XIV, appeared onstage during the final ensemble, scattering paper money, while the nobles madly dashed around picking up the bills: “Viva la Francia ed il prode regnator” (Long live France and its proud ruler) indeed! While one could appreciate the reasoning behind Robinson’s decision not to play these final moments straight, the grotesque movements of the nobles seemed unsupported by Rossini’s celebratory music, and it wasn’t easy for them to sing their vocal lines while scrambling to accumulate cash. Perhaps Robinson would have liked to provide an even more politically inflected reading of the opera, but had not quite figured out how to do it. As a result, the final moments seemed curiously out of place in the context of the remainder of his staging.

  Dario Fo was prepared to go much further toward politicizing Il viaggio a Reims. One of Italy’s foremost actors, playwrights, and stage directors, as well as the Nobel Prize laureate for Literature in 1997, Fo has been a controversial artistic and political figure from the beginning of his long theatrical career in the 1950s.36 He is one of the few artists in the West who has succeeded in antagonizing both the left and the right. His ferocious belief in combating through his art what he views as political, economic, or social injustice, wherever he perceives it, has earned him vociferous acclaim and intense opposition. Although his plays continue to be extensively performed in the United States, he and his wife, Franca Rame, were on several occasions in the early 1980s denied visas to enter the United States because of their political associations, leading to demonstrations, articles, denunciations. On 18 September 1984 the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations (including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences) held a conference in Washington, D.C., on “Free Trade in Ideas,” from which not only Fo and Rame were among the excluded, but also literary figures such as Gabriel García Marquez. When asked whether he was truly anti-American, Fo responded, “Our highest recognition goes to the U.S. State Department. It is, in fact, the only institution in the whole world to be so sensitive and aware of the thought and creative imagination of artists, it is convinced that those ideas advertised on the stage are even more explosive than the nuclear bomb.”

  As a man of the theater, Fo’s allegiances have long been to the theatrical traditions of the middle ages and early modern periods. His Nobel address in 1997 was entitled “Contra Jogulatores Obloquentes,” the Latin title of a law promulgated in 1221 by Frederick II (at that point the Holy Roman Emperor) that allowed the public to attack jongleurs (minstrels or entertainers) without fear of legal sanctions.37 In it he thanked the Swedish Academy “in the name of the strolling players, jongleurs, clowns, acrobats, and bards, particularly those of my own region on Lago Maggiore, where I was born and grew up.” And he cited as his two most important influences Molière and especially Angelo Beolco, known as Il Ruzzante, to whom he offered half of his medal, with these words in the local dialect he and Ruzzante shared:

  Beolco Ruzzante,

  bestia animal de palco

  cata ‘sto tòco del méo medajòn

  l’è anca tòo! Salùt!

  [Beolco Ruzzante, beastly

  stage-animal, take this piece

  of my medal, it’s also yours!

  I salute you!]

  A playwright from the first half of the sixteenth century, Ruzzante was known particularly for his transgressive art, which sought to break down the more literary traditions of contemporary theater with a strong dose of popular, peasant culture. Identifying his own theatricality with that of Ruzzante, Fo described the playwright as “the greatest author for the theater that Europe had in the Renaissance, even before the advent of Shakespeare” and called him

  my greatest teacher, together with Molière: both actor-authors, both ridiculed by the highfalutin literati of their time, scorned most of all because they brought to the stage daily life, the joy and desperation of the common people, the hypocrisy and arrogance of the powerful, the injustice and horrendous massacre of the innocent.

  Ruzzante, father of the commedia dell’arte, constructed a language for himself, a lexicon entirely theatrical, composed of diverse idioms: dialects from the Po region, Latin, Spanish, even German expressions, mixed with entirely invented onomatopoeic sounds. From him, from Beolco Ruzzante, I learned to free myself from a conventional literary language and to express myself with unusual words, with strange sounds, with different rhythms and pauses, arriving even at the mad orations in grammelot.38

  It is in this spirit that Fo mounted Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims for Finnish National Opera in January 2003.

  The Voyage to Finland

  The occasion was auspicious. As a country, Finland has made a concerted effort since the 1960s to strengthen musical education for all its citizens. The prestige and cultural significance of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius helped justify this agenda, and much of its success reflects the intensive, enlightened training young musicians receive at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. As a result, Finnish conductors (Esa-Pekka Salonen, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Mikko Franck), singers (the late Martti Talvela, Matti Salminen, Karita Mattila), and composers (Aulis Sallinen, Kaija Saariaho) are represented in the international arena in numbers far greater than the size of their country might suggest.39 Musical organizations have cultivated an attitude both sympathetic and adventurous tow
ard the traditional repertory and a solid commitment to new and experimental art. With a musically well-educated citizenry, these efforts continue to bring outstanding artistic results and large audiences, even in times of financial stress.

  The new opera house in Helsinki, which opened in 1993, is a beautifully designed building on the Töölö bay near the center of the city, and a short distance from the equally impressive Finlandia Hall, home of the Helsinki Philharmonic. With excellent acoustics and state-of-the-art stage facilities, the opera house quickly developed an enviable reputation for the quality of its productions (which have included a complete staging of the Ring), even as some lamented its massive concrete facade. Most roles are sung by native singers in productions that stress ensemble work, and the theater does not normally attempt to compete for the more expensive international stars. Even so, Finnish National Opera regularly sells out its productions, and draws overflow crowds to its educational programs. Governmental presence is not restricted to monetary support: the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister both attended the opening night of Il viaggio a Reims.