When Erkki Korhonen, a pianist, conductor, and opera administrator, became general director of the Finnish National Opera during the summer of 2001, one of his earliest projects was to develop a Rossini Festival week for early 2003. His idea, formulated in conjunction with his artistic administrator, Aviel Kahn, was to revive two current productions of Rossini operas, Il barbiere di Siviglia and La Cenerentola, adding to them a new staging by Dario Fo of Il viaggio a Reims. The choice of Fo as his stage director was not wayward. Fo and his wife are well known in Scandinavia, not only for Fo’s Nobel Prize, but also for the visits of their theatrical troupe. While opera has not played a significant part in Fo’s theatrical life, he had made several forays into the art, always with comic operas by Rossini. After a staging of Il barbiere di Siviglia at the Amsterdam Opera in 1987, later revived in many other opera houses, he was responsible for two new productions at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro: L’Italiana in Algeri in 1994 and La gazzetta in 2001.
I supervised vocal ornamentation for the Italiana performances, so I followed the rehearsals carefully. It was a brilliant staging, inventive to a fault: at every point there was something to engage the eye. Some argued that the staging overwhelmed the music, but it is hard to submerge Rossini’s spirit, and in any event Fo—while not a musician—is eminently sensitive to music, especially its rhythmic side. During the overture, for example, he adopted the standard stage trick of imitating the sea by means of a set of tautly stretched colored silks that could be manipulated to give the appearance of moving water. When the Allegro began, and Rossini lets loose his main theme, with its explosive syncopated chords (example 14.4), those chords were visually punctuated with flying fish. With all the twirling and twisting the cooperative Jennifer Larmore had to endure as Isabella, I had to be rather parsimonious with ornamentation, since it was hard enough for her to get through the part without becoming seasick. She also had to resign herself to audience hilarity during her gorgeously seductive aria “Per lui che adoro” in the second act, which entranced not only her three hidden would-be lovers but also the very plants, which, standing straight up, reacted to each lascivious strain by growing a little more erect.
EXAMPLE 14.4. GIOACHINO ROSSINI, L’LTALIANA IN ALGERI, SINFONIA, MM. 33–34.
Fo, the playwright, did not intervene in the vocal text of L’Italiana in Algeri, but with La gazzetta he failed to show similar restraint. There was some justification. The 1816 printed libretto of the first act includes several scenes adapted from Goldoni’s Il matrimonio per concorso (the primary source of the libretto) that Rossini does not seem to have set to music. These scenes, which appear in no musical sources—not even in the composer’s autograph manuscript—contain events significant to the drama, establishing relationships and providing information to be drawn upon later. They include not only verses of recitative but also the text for a major quintet. Unless something is done to include their gist, the plot descends into incoherence.40 Scholars tend to adopt a minimalist approach to interventions. Thus, for the purposes of the critical edition of La gazzetta, I had set to music one scene of recitative, without which the second pair of lovers is never introduced, and had suggested a group of smaller changes to cover the remainder of the missing action: removing references to the action of the quintet and introducing stage business (such as one character’s overhearing others in conversation) to account for knowledge that pertains only to the scenes Rossini did not set to music. My coeditor and I were not prepared to take responsibility for composing from scratch a quintet in Rossinian style. All of this worked well in the first production of the new edition of La gazzetta, which had its premiere on 12 June 2001 at the Garsington Festival outside of Oxford (before Fo’s Pesaro première), and will, I trust, continue to work well in future productions.
But bestia animal de palco that he is, Fo disdained “overhearing” as a technique: “old stuff,” he said, and never very effective (I resisted citing Polonius). No, he felt there was a dramaturgical hole in the middle of act 1, where the quintet ought to have gone, and he was determined to fill it. Fill it he did, with a newly devised rhymed and metrical text, developed in part from the verses in the printed libretto not set to music. The whole tamurriata, as he called it, a dialectic derivative of the word tamburo or small drum, was inflected with a Neapolitan accent and recited while the continuo group in the orchestra played Rossini’s tarantella, La danza, in the background. As Fo wrote in the program notes: “The first to enjoy themselves, declaiming it in a rhythmic manner, were the singers themselves, protagonists of the opera. All of us on the stage, from stagehands to musicians, were enormously amused.”41 And so was the audience, as they watched the entire cast engaged in the most frenetic gyrations. Fo had taken what was a significant textual problem and turned it into a scenic opportunity.
Having seen and been entranced by the Gazzetta production in Pesaro, Korhonen and Kahn invited Fo to direct Viaggio in Helsinki. Fo accepted the challenge. His extraordinary theatrical imagination, of course, readily found a way to create a visually entrancing spectacle, full of movement and scenic wonders. Whereas some directors prepare a stage book that charts blocking and positions—a document used both to record ideas pertaining to the first production and to guide subsequent revivals (very much like the disposizioni sceniche discussed in chapter 13)—Fo works differently.42 Trained originally as an artist, he typically executes hundreds of pages of drawings, with costume designs, characters in motion, grotesques, montages of historical events or characters and commedia dell’arte figures, tracing in this form the progress of the entire spectacle from beginning to end. These exuberant designs provide him with a starting point for his actual work in the theater: costume designs, the elaborately flexible stage design, the blocking of the principal characters, the dancers, acrobats, and clowns that populate every part of the stage, on the ground and in the air.
As he began to study Il viaggio a Reims more closely, however, Fo realized that he had a serious problem. What was the sense of all this elaborate scenic paraphernalia in the service of an opera glorifying the coronation and the regime of a corrupt king, whose politics could not have been more foreign to the political and social views of Fo? He could, of course, have presented a staging that treated the text in an ironical manner (as Robinson did at New York City Opera), but he soon developed a different perspective: why not change the text?
Dario Fo was, of course, not the first to discover that Rossini had written a musical masterpiece to problematic words. The composer himself was keenly aware of the dilemma, although he tended to see it not as political but as generic. Il viaggio a Reims was born as an occasional piece, a celebratory cantata. What could one do subsequently with long “improvisations” by Corinna praising Charles X and the restored Bourbon monarchy or celebrating the victories of the “cross” against the Turkish crescent? How could one make sense of a succession of European travelers singing patriotic songs in honor of Charles X? We may live in a world where the intersection of history and opera can delight, but Rossini’s audience wanted well-oiled dramas. As we have seen, the composer withdrew the opera/cantata and reused parts of it in 1828 for his comic opera Le Comte Ory, abandoning the rest. Among the abandoned sections were those most directly tied to the historical circumstances of the coronation: the sextet and the entire finale.
Yet, despite Rossini’s best efforts to suppress them, some sources circulated and led to two nineteenth-century revivals, as discussed in chapter 5. In both cases the text was heavily modified. Rossini’s music had become a chameleon, changing its identity for these new occasions. The 1848 Andremo a Parigi? (Shall we go to Paris?) recast characters and situations. Don Profondo, described in Viaggio as “learned, friend of Corinna’s, member of various academies, and a fanatic for antiquities,” became Don Pandolfo. This “symbol of petite bourgeoise society” (in the words of Janet Johnson)43 is interested only “a salvar la pelle” (in saving my skin), as Don Pandolfo says in recitative preceding his aria. Represe
ntative is the first strophe of the Profondo/Pandolfo aria in the two versions. Don Profondo lists the personal items that he plans to take on the trip to Rheims; Don Pandolfo worries about his future:
Il viaggio a Reims
Medaglie incomparabili,
Camei rari, impagabili,
Figli di tenebrosa
Sublime antichità.
In aurea cartapecora
Dell’accademie i titoli,
Onde son membro nobile
Di prima qualità.
[Incomparable medals, rare, priceless
cameos, children of dark, sublime
antiquity. In golden parchment the
titles of the academies of which I am
a noble member of the first order.]
Andremo a Parigi?
Consiglio nel mio cerebro
Politico economico
Io debbo qui tenere
Per la mia sicurtà.
Allontanar gli ostacoli,
Non affrontar pericoli,
Prudenza mare cauto
Schivar la società.
[I need to think through the political
and eonomic situation so as to guar-
antee my safety. Put aside obstacles,
don’t confront dangers, use cautious
prudence, avoid society]
In the Viennese adaptation of 26 April 1854 as Un viaggio a Vienna, Corinna’s concluding “Improvisation” becomes an encomium for Franz Joseph, recalling his lineage and proclaiming his virtues:
Il viaggio a Reims
All’ ombra amena
Del Giglio d’Or,
Aura serena
Inebbria il cor.
Di lieti giorni
Più dolce aurora
Sorger la Francia
Non vide ancor.
[In the lovely shade of the Golden
Lily, a serene breeze intoxicates
the heart. France has never seen a
more lovely dawn of happy days.]
Un viaggio a Vienna
Del Gran Rodolfo
O Germe Augusto
Di gloria onusto
Qual brilli Tu!
Sul Tron degli Avi
Da un lustro appena,
Già l’Austria hai piena
Di Tue Virtù.
[Oh majestic seed of the great
Rudolph, you shine with the
weight of glory! Though you have
been on the throne of your ances-
tors for barely five years, Austria is
already filled with your virtues.]
The opera concludes with a “New Popular Hymn on Haydn’s melody, here expressly translated into Italian,” with a text beginning: “Dio Conservi, Dio Protegga / Sempre il Nostro Imperator” (God conserve, God protect our Emperor forever).
New Words in the Service of Theatrical Invention
The notion of performing Rossini’s coronation opera with a modified text, in short, has illustrious historical precedent, and Fo seized upon it. His realization was both simple and audacious: locate those moments in the score where the original libretto extravagantly praises the new King and the social, political, or economic policies he represented, and substitute verses that “tell the truth” about Charles X and his world, verses that would resonate for a public in the first years of the twenty-first century. Despite certain reports in both the Italian and the Finnish press, my role in all of this was not to give scholarly “approval” to the operation: Dario Fo needs no external approval to do whatever he wants to do. I was simply there to help him make certain that his new verses worked fluently with Rossini’s music. When needed, I introduced small changes in declamation and rewrote short sections of secco recitative (for some parts of which I had already helped to compose the music in the critical edition). When Fo’s verses in concerted numbers seemed awkward musically, I told him so directly, and he modified them with alacrity. Not a single change had to be made in the orchestral parts. Implicit in the entire operation was Fo’s conviction that Il viaggio a Reims is not an opera we treasure because of its dramaturgical brilliance or plot construction: it is frankly an entertainment, rendered notable by Rossini’s magnificent score. Yet however piquant Fo’s verses may be, not all of them had the same resonance in the theater, and that is a story worth telling.
Operatic time is largely determined by the music, and only in the rarest cases can a stage director successfully modify the temporality that music imposes. While two stanzas of poetry may be equal in length on the page, in their musical realization they can occupy vastly different theatrical space. In some cases, Fo’s textual changes freed his directorial imagination and allowed him to introduce action and images that would have been unthinkable with the original poetry. In other cases, however, his changes involved text declaimed so quickly that the differences could hardly be perceived in the theater. There was insufficient time for the staging to reflect the new words, which were more apparent to an audience reading translated supertitles (in Finnish) than hearing Fo’s words in Italian.
That Fo might choose to intervene massively in the text of the Don Profondo aria, one of the jewels of the score, came as no surprise. In Luigi Balocchi’s original libretto, after having Don Profondo list his own personal items for the trip to Rheims, Balocchi provides several eight-line stanzas, each naming the nationality of one of the travelers and describing—in a brief vignette of national character—what he or she is transporting to the coronation. Rossini set all of this as the first half of his aria, with Don Profondo declaiming the words rhythmically, often on a single pitch. An orchestral melody recurs in each strophe, shifting from one key to another as the poetry focuses on each character in turn. Once all their possessions have been described, Balocchi changes the meter of the verses (to quinari) for a brief cabaletta, in which Don Profondo announces with delight that everything is ready for the trip. The entire aria flies by. In the 1984 recording of the Pesaro production, where Don Profondo was sung by Ruggero Raimondi, the 309 measures of this aria took exactly 5 minutes and 20 seconds to sing. Yet it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Raimondi received a nightly ovation in the small Sala Pedrotti that lasted longer than the piece itself. Some of that public enthusiasm acknowledged a brilliant interpretive maneuver: while Rossini did little to differentiate the musical presentation of the seven national travelers, Raimondi declaimed each stanza using a different accent (his German, English, French, and Russian-accented Italian were particularly hilarious). Although almost every successive Don Profondo has imitated this “invented tradition,” none has matched Raimondi’s grace.
In Balocchi’s libretto, the Spaniard declaims the following stanza, which gently satirizes the Spanish taste for family genealogy and decorations, referring, too, to Spain’s colonial history in South America:
Gran Piante genealogiche
Degl’avoli e Bisavoli,
Colle notizie storiche
Di quel che ognuno fu.
Diplomi, Stemmi e Croci,
Nastri, Collane ed Ordini,
E, grosse come noci,
Sei perle del Perù.
Great genealogical charts
Of grandfathers and great-grandfathers,
With historical information
About each one.
Diplomas, coats of arms, and crosses,
Decorations, medals, and orders,
And, large as walnuts,
Six pearls from Peru.
Dario Fo took Balocchi’s invocation of colonialism and made it the heart of this rewritten stanza:
E qui i bottini storici,
Raccolti dagli Iberici,
Saccheggio inimitabile
Su Aztechi del Perù.
Selvaggi privi d’animo
Che in cambio del massacro,
Furono battezzati,
A colpi di cannon.
And here the historical spoils,
Collected by the Iberians,
Inimitable sacking
Of the Peruvian Aztecs.
Savages without souls
Who, instead of being massacred,
Were baptized
To blasts of the cannon.
Fo’s text is essentially identical in its rhythm to that of Balocchi, with only small differences, easily reconciled with the music. Alas, it does give up the rhymes so characteristic of the original...
On stage, however, this textual change, and the many others throughout the aria, had no impact whatsoever. There is only so much a Don Profondo can be asked to do in the midst of an aria that resembles a fifty-yard dash: if he demonstrates sufficient endurance and keeps enough breath to arrive intact at the end, he has accomplished much. And even in the frenetic theatrical universe of Dario Fo, with acrobats, dancers, crocodiles, and balloons, the eleven seconds it took Raimondi to declaim the Spaniard’s stanza (I did not clock Damon Nestor Ploumis’s performance in Helsinki) provides insufficient time to recount visually the history of the Spanish conquest of the New World.
The improvisation of Corinna near the end of the opera created quite a different opportunity for Fo. Balocchi had modeled her after the heroine of Madame de Staël’s 1807 novel Corinne, ou l’Italie, where Corinne is a poet, an “improviser,” recognized by the Arcadian Academy of Rome and crowned on the Campidoglio. In the famous painting by François Gérard of 1819, “Corinne au Cap Misène,” Madame de Staël herself is portrayed as Corinne, lyre in hand and dressed in the Greek robes of the Cumaean Sybil, with the bay of Naples and an erupting Vesuvius in the background.44 In one form of improvisation, the poet/singer was expected to receive suggestions for a theme from the assembled listeners and would choose one at random, declaiming her improvised verses over an accompaniment of her own devising. In Balocchi’s libretto, each assembled voyager writes a subject on a piece of paper and hands it to Don Profondo, who reads the theme to the company and places the paper in an urn. (In most modern productions, the voyagers themselves read out their own subjects—a theatrical solution that provides more variety.) The themes are all from French history, including Joan of Arc, St. Louis, the three royal lineages of France, and so on. It is the French Cavalier Belfiore who suggests “Carlo Decimo, Re di Francia” (Charles X, King of France), and when Melibea draws one subject from the urn, the topic chosen is indeed the new King. Corinna, lyre in hand, then improvises five stanzas, in extravagant praise of Charles X. Rossini set these stanzas with a harp accompaniment alone, alternating two principal sections (ABABA, followed by final cadences). The form is repetitive, as befits “improvised” music and poetry, but it also allows ample opportunity for a fine singer to ornament the melodic line.
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