Nonetheless, this “improvisation” seems long and the poetry provides little opportunity for scenic expansion. In the opening stanza (whose first eight verses, beginning “All’ombra amena,” were quoted above) Corinna sings of the happy days that France can now anticipate. The second stanza refers to Charles as bestowing new splendor and nobility on the crown of France. He has been on the throne only a short time, the third stanza relates, but already the country is happy and hymns of love are sung everywhere. In the fourth stanza the coronation itself is described. By setting the ceremony for Sunday, 29 May—Trinity Sunday in 1825—Charles had tapped into a long medieval tradition and symbolically emphasized the divine right of kings:45
Appiè dell’are,
Ei chiese al cielo,
Che secondare
Degni il suo zel;
Non fia deluso
Il bel desio,
Figlio dell’almo
Suo nobil cor.
Sacro il diadema
Già rese Iddio,
Né più del fato
Teme il furor.
At the foot of the altars,
He asked heaven
That it deign to lend support
To his zeal.
Let his fine wish
Not be disappointed,
Divine progeny
Of his noble heart.
God has already
Made sacred his crown,
Nor need it fear any longer
The fury of fate.
The final stanza augurs long life and divine favor on “Carlo, de’ Franchi / Delizia e amor” (Charles, the delight and love of the French). Already in the 1984 production, Abbado had cut the third and fourth stanzas, and almost every subsequent revival has done the same, reducing the ABABA of the original to ABA. When I have advised productions of the opera, I too have recommended that cut.
The greatest triumph for Fo’s rewriting of Balocchi at Helsinki came precisely in this scene. What makes the triumph ironic is that this production—with its altered words—is the only one I know in which the music of Corinna’s “improvisation” was presented successfully without cuts. Fo drew his inspiration from the original text, specifically its fourth stanza, with its image of Carlo X kneeling before the altars at Rheims, as God blesses his future reign. Fo had already let loose a savage critique earlier in the scene. After the travelers had announced what they had written on their slips of paper (many modified for the Finnish context), Don Profondo read the subject chosen for the improvisation, “Carlo X, Re di Francia.” At that point, however, a servant holding the urn stumbled, and all the other proposals fell out. Characters scurried to pick them up, and on every one had been written: “Carlo X, Re di Francia.” Commenting on an election in which only one result was possible, Count Libenskof opines, “La votazione è legale” (The vote is legal). Electorates worldwide would have had no trouble understanding Fo’s gibe.
Now Corinna steps forward, and Fo’s verses relate actual events from the coronation. She tells of Carlo stretched out on the cold marble, anointed with holy oil. The King, who is supposed to have the divinely granted power to cure the sick, is surrounded by the “scrufolosi” and “rognosi” (those with tumors and scabs), but, miserable with the damp and cold, he pays them no heed. His sneezes are greeted by shouts of “Santé!” from the crowd. When he tries to rise, a cardinal steps on him to hold him still. Here is Fo’s description of the consequences in the fourth stanza, corresponding to “Appiè dell’are” cited above:
Sente un prurito,
Pel corpo intero,
Il foco addosso
E un gran febbron.
Non ha guarito
Manco un fetente,
Però in compenso
Ha il morbo blù.
Perde i capelli,
È tutto a chiazze,
E il coro canta
“Salute al Re.”
He feels an itching
Over his entire body,
A fire all over him
And a high fever.
He didn’t cure
Even a single stinking wound,
But in recompense
He has syphillis.
He loses his hair,
He is covered with blotches,
And the chorus sings
“Health to the King.”
In the final stanza Corinna describes other elements of Charles’s reign: how he turned over control of public education to the clergy, closed newspapers, banned satire and bordellos; and she concludes, “Senza più fiato / Muore il pensier” (With no room to breathe, thought itself dies).
In his staging, Fo transformed Corinna into a medieval cantastoria, the kind of entertainer who participated in popular festivals during the Middle Ages, relating a story—religious or secular—as it was simultaneously acted out by his or her colleagues in mime. A simply painted ecclesiastical backdrop was carried onstage. Dressed in white, the actors seemed like statues descended from the portico of a cathedral—the King, a cardinal, and a group of scrufolosi and rognosi. Thus, in the long-standing tradition of comic theater, Fo transmuted one kind of poetry, the extravagant encomium, into another, the mock epic, thereby overcoming the scene’s dramaturgical stasis.
From there until the end, his invention never flagged. As the assembled company broke out to the strains of “Vive Henri IV,” the celebratory verses of Balocchi became a commentary on Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose:
Balocchi
Viva il diletto
Augusto regnator,
Ond’è l’aspetto
Forier di gioia e amor
Che desta in petto
Rispetto, e vivo ardor.
[Long live our beloved, august
ruler, whose appearance, harbin-
ger of joy and love, evokes in our
hearts respect and keen ardor.]
Fo
Gran vita a Carlo.
L’oracol vede il Re...
Fuggir cacciato,
Un altro Re verrà
D’altro casato,
Evviva sempre il Re.
[Long life to Carlo. The oracle sees
the King... driven away in flight, an-
other King will come from another
lineage, but still, Long live the King.]
As for the ordinary people, the “chorus,” so dear to Fo’s heart, sang in Fo’s words,
Per noi del Coro
La musica è cotal.
Sì, quel che importa è
Che tutto resti ugual.
Il regno è tutto,
Non cambia il gran final.
[For us of the Chorus, that’s the way
the music goes. Yes, what matters is
that everything stays the same. The
government is everything, The grand
finale doesn’t change.]
But Fo had a final trick up his sleeve. As these verses were sung, a small airborne vehicle crossed the stage at a distance, then reappeared, full size and closer up. It was a helicopter-like contraption, with a bicyclist in full view pedaling through the skies what seemed to be a glistening Fabergé egg. When the device landed in the center of the stage, out popped a sabled and ermined Charles X, who acknowledged the people, sat for a moment on an improvised throne, then returned to his egg, which soon lifted off, with flags of all the European nations jubilantly waved and juggled. As the last strains of the opera sounded, the smaller version of the vehicle again crossed high over the back of the stage, but now attacked by antiaircraft missiles, one of which blew it out of the sky as the curtain descended. Putting words to Fo’s anarchical images would be utterly superfluous.
Adjustments in the text, nonetheless, were not made exclusively for political purposes. Since Fo is a director who often allows images to inspire his staging, in at least two scenes the visual was determinate. He conceived the jealousy duet between the Polish Marquise Melibea and the Russian Count Libenskof as being dominated by a tempest, with dark
colors, protective coverings buffeted by the wind, torrents of rain, and flying umbrellas everywhere (sometimes with mimes attached to them), “una tempesta in cielo, in terra un omicidio” (a storm in the heavens, on earth a murder), as Rigoletto would have commented. While the effect may have had little to do with Rossini and Balocchi’s duet—which, after all, is mostly about reconciliation, not conflict—Fo’s darker reading of jealousy had its own rationale. No words were changed in the duet, but a small modification in the preceding recitative introduced the idea that the skies were threatening (“il ciel non promette nulla di buono”).
In the aria of the Countess Folleville too, some of the text changes went hand-in-hand with the staging. The piece itself is a parody of Italian operatic arias of Rossini’s generation, an ironic commentary on their structure and dramatic shape. As we have seen, the standard form of a Rossini aria (not to mention a Bellini, Donizetti, or early Verdi aria) involves two principal sections: the first is a slow cantabile, often both lyrical and florid, in which the singer reacts to a specific dramatic situation or expresses a particular emotion; then a change of tone, set up either by an external event or by an internal change of mood, leads to a quicker second section, normally called a cabaletta, in which a lyrical period is sung once, repeated (providing an opportunity for singers to vary the melodic line) after a transition, and brought to a conclusion with elaborate cadential phrases.
What makes the aria in Il viaggio a Reims a parody is the emotional gulf between the events that call it forth and the extraordinary music Rossini uses to give it dramatic depth. The tragic tones of the first section are a reaction to the “calamity” that the coach containing the Countess’s clothes has overturned, so that she has nothing appropriate to wear on the trip to Rheims: she sings, “Donne, voi sol comprendere / Potete il mio dolore” (Women, only you can comprehend my sorrow”). What changes her mood is the appearance of the one item rescued from the debacle, a hat: she thanks God for having heard her prayer, and continues, in some of the most exuberant coloratura Rossini ever wrote, “A tal favor quest’anima / Grata ognor sarà” (For such a favor, this soul will always be grateful). When the composer reused the music of the aria (practically unchanged) three years later in Le Comte Ory, the subject of the text touched a deeper emotion: Should Adèle, the Countess of Formoutiers, keep her vow to seclude herself from the society of men until her brother returns from a crusade, or should she allow herself to express the love she feels for her cousin and Count Ory’s page, Isolier? In a stunning reversal, Rossini had first written the parody, and only later transformed it into what was being parodied.
Staging this aria from Il viaggio a Reims, Fo envisioned not one hat but a sequence of hats, beginning with one of normal size, then growing larger and larger, out of all proportion. They multiplied like rabbits and began to fly through the air with abandon. Certainly it was that image of flying hats that led Fo to modify the words of the cabaletta to read: “È vivo il mio capell, ha l’ali, è vivo il mio capell” (My hat is alive, it has wings, my hat is alive). The final hat—unveiled as the Countess began the ornamented reprise of the cabaletta theme—was large enough for Folleville to stand on and be lifted into the air by her attendants, as she continued to sing her coloratura.
On opening night, the not normally hyperexpressive Finns granted Il viaggio a Reims, as seen through the eyes of Dario Fo, a fifteen-minute standing ovation. Viaggio is a work that delights in its original version but also welcomes the kind of creative intervention that he brought to Finnish National Opera. Certainly a modern audience can react only with amused distance to the original libretto’s extravagant praise of a Restoration monarch whose social and political actions were despised not only by liberal thinkers but even by those who sought to build a peaceful post-Napoleonic Europe. By taking the politics of Charles X seriously and by describing and commenting on them in his modified text, Fo offered a modern audience a way to experience Rossini’s opera from a very different perspective. Instead of retaining in full a libretto that can be heard only across a vast historical gap, he introduced new words in crucial places, forcing us to come to grips with elements of the history of Charles X that resonate with our own time. When asked by various journalists about ways in which his Viaggio adaptation seemed to reflect elements in the politics of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi or America’s George W. Bush, Fo—in his patented brand of wide-eyed innocence—demurred: no such connection had occurred to him. He could hardly be blamed for the perception that, unwittingly, those national leaders have taken Charles X as their model. Through Dario Fo’s work, Il viaggio a Reims became a voyage of political discovery for today.
Some opera lovers reacted to Fo’s production both with genuine appreciation and sincere fear. Yes, it was enormously appealing, they said, but suppose we started to change the words of all operas? What would happen to the art form? I do not share their concern. Just as Peter Brook’s La Tragédie de Carmen did not result in a host of epigones, neither will Dario Fo’s Il viaggio a Reims. And each of these highly personal efforts was made with great respect for the music, whether it was a question of arranging the original for a new context à la Brook or of showing sensitivity to the way words and music interact à la Fo. Far better an inventive operation under the guidance of one of the great theatrical geniuses of our time than the kind of plodding, ordinary performances, unstylistic and sometimes musically decimated, that we hear too often in the theater.
One more story needs to be told in conclusion. Opera News, the magazine published by the Metropolitan Opera Guild, instead of covering the Gothenburg Gustavo III in its print edition, decided to send readers to its online pages for a review. Although George Loomis’s notice was both accurate concerning the nature of the project and laudatory about the performance, I found unacceptable the phrase the magazine printed as a way to draw attention to Loomis’s online review: “Göteborg’s ‘authentic’ Un ballo in maschera.”46 Of course, “authenticity” had nothing to do with our Gothenburg project, and I explained as much to the then editor, Rudolph Rauch. He responded, “Your letter demonstrates that opera scholars are as passionate as opera fans about the art form.”
Yes, opera scholars are as passionate as opera fans about the art form. Indeed, opera scholars are opera fans. But in a world where there is such a paucity of serious thought about performing Italian opera, the task of bringing divas and scholars together seems positively quixotic. Nonetheless, those of us who love this art form in all its complexity, who are negotiating the past with the present, the practical with the theoretical, the needs of staging with the vocal health of singers, the written score with performances based on it, will continue to work diligently to raise the level of discourse. It is to that end that my book has been dedicated.
NOTES
(Authors’ and editors’ first names, subtitles of works, and publication details are omitted in the notes. After first mention, long titles are shortened. Full details are to be found in the bibliography.)
PREFACE
1. See Miggiani, “Il teatro di San Moisè (1793–1818).”
2. At the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, for example, of the 242 opera performances in 1823, at the height of Rossinimania, 162 were of operas by Rossini; comparable figures for 1824 are 191 performances out of 232. See Gatti, Il teatro alla Scala nella storia e nell’arte (1778–1963), 2:30 –32.
3. Pacini, Le mie memorie artistiche, 54. All translations from foreign languages, unless otherwise noted, are my own.
4. There are, to be sure, important continuities to be observed in Verdi’s two next operas, Don Carlos (1867) and Aida (1871), but the repertory and social context I am describing largely come to an end with Un ballo in maschera (1859) and La forza del destino (1862).
5. Contract of 26 December 1815 between Rossini and Francesco Sforza Cesarini, published in Rossini, Lettere e documenti, 1:124 –25.
6. One area I have touched upon only tangentially is early recordings. As Crutchfield has shown in an important
study, “Vocal Ornamentation in Verdi,” there is much we can learn about performance traditions from a careful consideration of this evidence. Because I have a relatively limited knowledge of these recordings, however, I prefer to leave this analysis to those, like Crutchfield, who know better how to negotiate its many pitfalls. These recordings have documentary value for singers such as Victor Maurel or Francesco Tamagno, who participated in the first performances of Verdi’s late works, Otello and Falstaff; what they teach us about La traviata or Rigoletto, not to mention Il barbiere di Siviglia, is more ambiguous.
7. See, in particular, Rosselli’s The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of the Impresario; Music and Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Italy; and Singers of Italian Opera. Two fine recent studies are Banti, La nazione del risorgimento, and Sorba, Teatri: L’Italia del melodramma nell’età del Risorgimento.
8. Marvin, “Aspects of Tempo in Verdi’s Early and Middle-Period Italian Operas”; see also Mauceri, “Verdi for the Twenty-first Century.”
9. Brown, Classical and Romantic Performing Practice 1750 –1900.
10. Hansell, “Il ballo teatrale e l’opera italiana”; Jürgensen, The Verdi Ballets.
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