Divas and Scholars

by Philip Gossett

42. No disposizione scenica seems to have been printed for the Macbeth revision for Paris of 1865 (and no Parisian mise en scène for this opera is listed in Cohen, “A Survey of French Sources for the Staging of Verdi’s Operas”); nor—as we have seen—has a copy been located of the Falstaff volume, supposedly published in 1893. For further details, see Peterseil, “Die ‘Disposizioni sceniche’ des Verlags Ricordi.” The disposizione scenica for Manon Lescaut (1893) is the last of the Ricordi volumes in Italian known to survive. It is not clear why Ricordi decided to abandon these efforts.

  43. The description is somewhat confused: the music for the dancers concludes before Riccardo sings “Ella è pura.”

  44. I cite the text after the facsimile of the disposizione scenica (59), published in Hepokoski and Viale Ferrero, “Otello” di Giuseppe Verdi. For the translation, I have adopted, with slight modifications, the text given by Hans Busch in his Verdi’s “Otello” and “Simon Boccanegra” (revised version) in Letters and Documents, 2:560.

  45. Ricordi makes this pronouncement on p. 7 of the disposizione scenica (see the facsimile edition cited above).

  46. Hepokoski, “Staging Verdi’s Operas,” 13.; see also Parker, “Reading the ‘Livrets,’” and Peterseil, “Die ‘Disposizioni sceniche’ des Verlags Ricordi.”

  47. See Pendle and Wilkins, “Paradise Found,” 175–82.

  48. See his letter to Antonio Dolci of 16 March 1835, in Zavadini, Donizetti, 369.

  49. For the surviving iconographical evidence pertaining to operas written in 1828 and 1829, see Schneider and Wild, “La Muette de Portici,” and Bartlet, Guillaume Tell di Gioachino Rossini. There is a vast literature concerning sets and costumes for operas performed in Paris during the nineteenth century. Of great importance has been the work of Nicole Wild, in particular her Décors et costumes du XIXe siècle. For reproductions of sets and costumes from the popular press, see Cohen, Lacroix, and Léveillé, Les Gravures musicales dans l’Illustration, 1843–1899. On Parisian opera in this period more generally, with important comments on the physical productions, see Gerhard, The Urbanization of Opera.

  50. For information about nineteenth-century publications pertaining to Milanese theaters through the retirement of Sanquirico in 1832, see the chapter on “Scenografie nell’editoria teatrale” in Viale Ferrero, La scenografia della Scala nell’età neoclassica, 91–95. The most important publications to include reproductions of sets by Sanquirico are the engravings in Raccolta di Scene Teatrali eseguite e disegnate dai più celebri Pittori Scenici in Milano (Milan, c. 1824–29), ed. Santislao Stucchi; the engravings in Raccolta di varie Decorazioni Sceniche inventate, ed eseguite da Alessandro Sanquirico Architetto (Milan, c. 1824–32); and the lithographs in Nuova raccolta di scene teatrali inventate dal celebre Sanquirico (Milan, 1827–32), ed. Giovanni Ricordi. All these sources are described in Viale Ferrero, “Per Rossini.”

  51. For information about how this effect was achieved in the Neapolitan performances, see Black, “The Eruption of Vesuvius in Pacini’s L’ultimo giorno di Pompei.”

  52. Verdi claims this in his “Racconto autobiografico,” in Pougin, Giuseppe Verdi, 40–47 (in particular 45), based on a text Verdi is supposed to have dictated to Giulio Ricordi on 19 October 1879. In it the composer puts the following words in the mouth of the Scala impresario, Bartolomeo Merelli: “I cannot have costumes or sets specially made for Nabucco!...and I’ll have to patch up as best I can the most suitable material I find in the storeroom.” See also Parker’s introduction to his critical edition, xvii (English) and xxxvii (Italian).

  53. The entire review is cited in the preface to the critical edition of Tancredi, xxiv–xxv.

  54. The article from the Gazzetta privilegiata di Venezia of 6 February 1823 is cited in the preface to the critical edition, xlii.

  55. Biggi, “Scenografie rossiniane di Giuseppe Borsato.”

  56. Povoledo, “Le prime esecuzioni delle opere di Rossini e la tradizione scenografica italiana del suo tempo,” 293.

  57. Biggi and Ferraro, Rossini sulla scena dell’Ottocento..

  58. There has been little work on stage design or scenography for either Bellini or Donizetti, but see Francesco Bellotto, “L’immaginario scenico di Marino Faliero.” Bellotto also speaks about Donizetti’s attitude toward staging in his “ ‘Fa’ le cose da pazza’: Una lettera inedita di Gaetano Donizetti su Lucrezia Borgia,” unpublished. Let me thank Dr. Bellotto for sharing this study with me.

  59. Budden points out that “Rio Alto” is a “piece of pseudo-antiquarianism on Solera’s part suggesting the origin of the Rialto” (The Operas of Verdi, 1:252n).

  60. See Conati, La bottega, 159. Verdi’s work with Bertoja is discussed by Baker in his article “Verdi’s Operas and Giuseppe Bertoja’s Designs at the Gran Teatro la Fenice, Venice,” 225–28. The original stage designs of Bertoja for both these scenes from the Prologue, and related drawings and lithographs, are found in “Sorgete! Ombre serene!” 33–37. See also Muraro, “Nuovi significati delle scene dei Bertoja alla Fenice di Venezia.”

  61. See the letter from Emanuele Muzio to Antonio Barezzi of 17 July 1845 in Garibaldi, Giuseppe Verdi nelle lettere di Emanuele Muzio, 208–10. At that point Verdi had thought to include a similar sunrise in the opera preceding Attila, that is, Alzira.

  62. I copialettere, 441.

  63. The letter is cited in both Italian and English in Rosen and Porter, Verdi’s “Macbeth,” 33; this translation is a slightly emended version. The great artist Francesco Hayez was a member of the supervisory committee to oversee set and costume design at the Teatro alla Scala. For further information about this committee, see Agosti and Ciapparelli, “La Commissione Artistica dell’Accademia di Brera e gli allestimenti verdiani alla Scala alla metà dell’Ottocento.”

  64. Rosen and Porter, Verdi’s “Macbeth,” 67.

  65. Letter of 11 March 1865, in ibid., 112.

  66. For color reproductions of the Bertoja drawings, several later scenic designs, and two costume designs from the Gazzetta musicale di Milano, which published the designs in the issues of 3 November and 8 and 22 December, see “Sorgete! Ombre serene!” 40–49 and 153–54. For a consideration of the five figurini, and reduced reproductions of them all in black and white, see Rosen and Porter, Verdi’s “ Macbeth,” 413–20.

  67. See Cohen, “Macbeth in Paris.”

  68. See Pigozzi, “Prampolini scenografo verdiano.” His Trovatore set is beautifully reproduced in “Sorgete! Ombre serene!” 131. The revival of Simon Boccanegra, on which Prampolini worked together with Girolamo Magnani (who was also responsible for sets for the revised version of the opera in 1881 at the Teatro alla Scala), is the subject of Conati, Il “Simon Boccanegra” di Verdi a Reggio Emilia (1857). See also Conati and Grilli, “Simon Boccanegra” di Giuseppe Verdi.

  69. See Grilli, Filippo Peroni scenografo alla Scala (1849–1867). Important new information is provided by Jesurum, “Lo spazio del dramma.”

  70. Jesurum, “Lo spazio del dramma,” 214. Peroni was known both for his figurini and his stage designs. Indeed, Verdi specifically asked that Peroni design the figurini for Simon Boccanegra in Reggio Emilia in 1857. Although he was not yet the head of the service, Peroni designed a set for the premiere of Giovanna d’Arco (see Jesurum, 219), at La Scala on 15 February 1845. Many of his set and costume designs are reproduced in Degrada, Giuseppe Verdi, passim.

  71. See Metelitsa and Fedosova, “A.L. Roller, the First Scenographer of ‘La forza del destino.’” Set designs of Roller’s from La forza del destino (sometimes variant versions of the same scena) are reproduced in ibid., 107–8; additional designs are found in “Sorgete! Ombre serene!” 57–62.

  72. Hepokoski, “Staging Verdi’s Operas,” 19. For a beautiful essay on this theme, with examples from both opera and theater, see Fenton, “The Cherry Orchard Has to Come Down.”

  73. Porter, “In Praise of the Pragmatic”; see also his “La forza della ricerca.”

  74. Carlo Ferrario worked as an assis
tant at the Teatro alla Scala in 1859, taking the place of Filippo Peroni as director of scenography in 1867 (see Jesurum, “Lo spazio del dramma,” 215). In that capacity he designed the 1869 revival of La forza del destino. By 1871 his relations with La Scala had disintegrated. In a letter to Verdi of 23 May 1871, Ricordi informs the composer that “the management (which wants to stage Aida in the best possible way) has determined to change the scenic designer, replacing Ferrario with some better artist”: see Busch, Verdi’s “Aida,” 161. But Ferrario was again on the scene in 1886–88, preparing the sets for Verdi’s Otello. His designs are printed in Bignami, Cinquecento bozzetti di scenografia di Carlo Ferrario. Several drawings for the 1869 Forza can be found in “Sorgete! Ombre serene!” 63–65. Verdi must have liked the Forza sets greatly, for he apparently wrote congratulating Ferrario, a letter the designer wanted to produce, but could not find, in 1886 when he was competing for an academic position (see Giulio Ricordi’s letter to Verdi of 23 October 1886, in Busch, Verdi’s “Otello” and “Simon Boccanegra,” 247). In the early 1980s the Verdi community did not know the original Roller sets for the St. Petersburg production.

  75. I will have more to say on this point later in this chapter.

  76. Porter, “In Praise of the Pragmatic,” 24.

  77. Ibid., 23.

  78. Ibid., 24.

  79. Ibid., 25.

  80. De Bosio, “Un’ipotesi di regia dell’ ‘Ernani.’ ” In 1982 De Bosio had reconstructed for the Arena of Verona the production of Aida that opened the Arena’s operatic programming in 1913, “constructing the entire production by rigorously following the disposizione scenica of Verdi and Ricordi” (324).

  81. Messinis’s article appeared in Il gazzettino of Venice on 14 December 1984.

  82. Several accounts of nineteenth-century staging and set design in Italy discuss theatrical lighting. The most exhaustive treatment is Capra, “L’illuminazione sulla scena verdiana, ovvero L’arco voltaico non acceca la luna?”

  83. See Baker, “Verdi’s Operas and Giuseppe Bertoja’s Designs at the Gran Teatro la Fenice, Venice,” 219.

  84. See Pendle and Wilkins, “Paradise Found,” 199. (The first quotation is from an article of 25 March 1849 in Le Ménestrel.) For further information about the use of electricity for the sunrise in Le Prophète, see Gerhard, The Urbanization of Opera, 298–303.

  85. According to Capra, “L’illuminazione sulla scena verdiana” (232), the Teatro alla Scala of Milan was the first theater to introduce electric lighting for an entire production, on 26 December 1883, when Meyerbeer’s La stella del nord (L’Étoile du Nord) was produced.

  86. Carteggio Verdi–Ricordi 1882–1885,157. For some considerations as to how advantages in theatrical lighting affected the music of Puccini, see Greenwald, “Realism on the Opera Stage.”

  87. See Rosen and Porter, Verdi’s “ Macbeth,” 18–19. The phrase in Italian reads: “Dopo viene il Coro dei Sicarj, e qui va la scena assai avanti per prepare il Banchetto.” The phrase “qui va la scena assai avanti” is slightly ambiguous: Does it refer to the temporal length of the scene or to the structure of the stage? In any event, if the banquet was to be prepared while the scene of the assassination was taking place, the latter had to be played on only the front part of the stage, using a “scena corta.”

  88. In Elizabethan theaters, of course, there was no “scenery” to change. Here, too, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries imposed a system of formal sets that seriously misrepresented the rhythm of the original plays. That the original rhythm must be preserved, even in modern stagings, is now universally recognized.

  89. Carteggio Verdi–Somma, 47–48.

  90. Luciano Alberti, “ ‘I progressi attuali [1872] del dramma musicale,’ ” 137. Andrew Porter makes a similar point in “In Praise of the Pragmatic,” 25.

  91. Another example is the first act of Rigoletto, so often played during the middle of the twentieth century as two acts, separating the “Introduzione” in the palace of the Duke of Mantua from the scene incorporating a street and the houses of Rigoletto on one side and Ceprano on the other. But the stage direction is clear: “the curtain is lowered for a moment [un istante] in order to change the set.”

  92. That was the reaction of the director/designer Pier Luigi Pizzi when I raised this issue in a symposium devoted to the staging of the Verdi operas, “Didascalie e immaginario, fedeltà e libertà,” organized by Lorenzo Arruga in Prato on 31 March 2001, as part of the Verdi centennial celebrations. And it is certainly true that the many Pizzi productions I have enjoyed over the past twenty years at the Rossini Opera Festival, where he has been—in fact if not in name—a resident director/designer, have always been sensitive to this problem.

  93. See Rosen and Pigozzi, “Un ballo in maschera” di Giuseppe Verdi, especially the “description of the scenes,” 159–64.

  94. Meanwhile, various small pieces of constructed scenery, all of which are behind the second backdrop, can also be removed: a fireplace, a portrait of Riccardo, a flat with a painted bookcase, and flats with door frames.

  95. I report this incident after Mel Gussow, “Modify a Beckett Play? Enter, Loud Outrage,” New York Times, 26 March 1994; the quotations are all derived from Gussow’s article.

  96. Zonca’s article, entitled “Luisa Miller da scandalo,” from which I quote, was published in La repubblica on 5 November 2001.

  97. See the excellent essay by Savage, “The Staging of Opera,” esp. 282.

  98. For details and the relevant letters, see Chusid’s introduction to his critical edition of Rigoletto, xvi–xvii (English) and xl–xlii (Italian).

  99. For the composer’s own work with this Italian translation of Les Vêpres siciliennes see chapter 11.

  100. Letter from Somma to Verdi of 19 November 1857, Carteggio Verdi–Somma, 238–39; for Verdi’s reply of 26 November 1857, see 243.

  101. Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, 2:472.

  102. Carteggio Verdi–Somma, 280.

  103. The history of Gustavo III and Un ballo in maschera will be considered more fully in chapter 14.

  104. I consulted this interview, “A Talk with Jonathan Miller,” conducted by Shusha Guppy, in the online version of the Paris Review (no. 165, Spring 2003) at: http://www.parisreview.com/ tpr165/miller1.html (accessed 13 October 2003).

  105. I quote from Alden’s article in the Lyric Opera program. This Macbeth was a coproduction with Houston Grand Opera.

  106. For an overview and critique of the history I am summarizing here, see Savage, “The Staging of Opera”; Levin, “Reading a Staging/Staging a Reading”; and Guccini, “Directing Opera.” Modern thinking about operatic staging is also influenced by late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century innovators such as the Swiss Adolphe Appia, the German Max Reinhard, the British Gordon Craig, and the Russian Constantin Stanislavski.

  107. Ashman, “Misinterpreting Verdian Dramaturgy.”

  108. Guccini, “Directing Opera,” 160.

  109. Ibid., 167.

  110. Ibid. Guccini’s essay was originally published in 1988, but the translation did not appear until 2002. Today he would have been able to choose from a much broader range of examples in Italian theaters, some of which have already been cited in this book.

  111. Risi, “The Performativity of Operatic Performances as Academic Provocation,” 489.

  112. Weber, “Taking Place,” 107; the subsequent quotations are found at 121–22 and 123–24.

  113. Risi, “Shedding Light on the Audience,” 208. He refers to the controversy between Said, “The Empire at Work: Verdi’s Aida,” and Robinson, “Is Aida an Orientalist Opera?”

  114. I have taken this quotation, as well as the following one attributed to Francesca Zambello, from the article by Matthew Gurewitsch, “Poking Holes in Verdi to Let Audiences In” in the New York Times, 4 March 2001.

  115. Levin, “Reading a Staging / Staging a Reading,” 51–52.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  1. The first performances,
in January 2002 in Lyon (Dessay’s native city), conducted by Evelino Pidò and featuring also Roberto Alagna, are preserved on a Virgin Classics recording, 45528. Donizetti himself prepared this French version of Lucia di Lammermoor for performances at the Théâtre de la Renaissance in Paris on 6 August 1839. It is different in many important respects from the Italian original.

  2. I mentioned the Martina Franca Otello in chapter 7. For a careful assessment of the extent of Rossini’s likely participation in Ivanhoé, see Everist, Music Drama at the Paris Odéon 1824–1828,100–101 and 177–88. The composer did participate in part of the preparations, for he wrote a brief recitative intended for insertion into the opera (the autograph manuscript is in London, at the British Library, Add. Ms. 30,246, ff. 23–27), but the rest of the score was arranged and prepared by Antonio Pacini. Rossini certainly conversed with the librettist Gustave Vaëz and the composer Abraham-Louis Niedermeyer about transforming La donna del lago into Robert Bruce, a French opera for the Académie Royale de Musique, where it was first performed on 30 December 1846. The two Frenchmen visited Rossini in Bologna in July 1846, and he seems to have advised them about which pieces to incorporate, including pieces not only from La donna del lago but also from other operas. But he had absolutely nothing to do with the realization, which involves extensive rewriting of his original music.

  3. See Lomnäs and Lomnäs, Stiftelsen Musikkulturens främjande, i and 18. They describe Nydahl as “the Swedish music lover, wine merchant, and officer.”

  4. See, among others, Budden, The Operas of Verdi, 2:361–76; Abbiati, Verdi, 2:447–529; Luzio, Carteggi verdiani, 1:219–75; Pascolato, “Re Lear” e “Ballo in Maschera. ” The most important source, however, is Ricciardi’s 2004 edition of the correspondence between Verdi and his librettist, Carteggio Verdi–Somma. I first formulated some of these ideas in “La composizione di Un ballo in maschera.”

  5. As we saw in chapter 5, before the change in Rigoletto was introduced, Verdi had written out his continuity draft of the entire first act, and the new location required essentially no changes to the music. The names in the sketch were simply modified when the composer laid out his skeleton score: “Triboletto” became “Rigoletto,” “Bianca” became “Gilda,” and “Il Re si diverte” became “Il Duca si diverte.”