The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (41 page)

The roles of Alfredo (for lyric tenor) or Germont (a mature baritone) are less problematic.
In the past, it was the custom to cut the uninteresting cabalettas to both their arias in Act II, but these are usually included in performances today.
The preludes to both Acts I and III, both requiring refined string playing, display a reflective melancholy beauty and freedom of line that is new to Verdi’s orchestral music.
Also remarkable is the use of Violetta’s spoken voice, over a plangent violin solo, for her reading of Germont’s letter in the last scene.

 In performance

La
Traviata
was unsuccessful at its première – mainly because the audience at La Fenice in Venice was incredulous of a grossly fat soprano who scarcely suggested a fragile consumptive.
Verdi forbade any further performances until he found a singer more physically appropriate.
In 1854, the opera was slightly revised and then relaunched with the slim
and pretty Maria Spezia as Violetta.
From then on, it made emotional sense, and has stood ever since as one of the most popular pieces in the repertory.

Verdi had originally planned to stage
La
Traviata
in contemporary costume, but the management of La Fenice in Venice, which had commissioned the piece, found this unacceptable, and the libretto ended up specifying that the action takes place in 1700.
Producers and designers have invariably ignored this date, and the great majority of stagings present the drama in Dumas’s Paris of the 1840s.
However, in a quest for a more visually splendid setting, Luchino Visconti transplanted it to the 1870s (at La Scala, Milan, with Maria Callas) and to the 1890s (at Covent Garden).

More recently, several productions have also attempted to draw parallels between Violetta’s tuberculosis and the AIDS epidemic, while Jonathan Miller, a qualified doctor as well as a director, made a great point (in productions for ENO and Opéra Bastille) of presenting the pathological details of her illness accurately.
But
La
Traviata
is a direct and simple drama, which does not lend itself to radical reinterpretation.

In 1981, a lavish film version, soupily directed by Franco Zeffirelli and starring the immensely vulnerable and appealing Teresa Stratas, proved very successful and brought the opera to new audiences.

Many sopranos have been attracted to the role of Violetta and its vocal and dramatic possibilities, but few can be said to have truly mastered its complex demands.
In the last half-century, Maria Callas remains outstanding: sadly, she never made a proper studio recording of the opera.
Among her successors, the Romanian Ileana Cotrubas ranks for many as the most touching and musical interpreter; and in 1994, her compatriot Angela Gheorghiu’s sensational Covent Garden début in the role led BBC television to clear an entire evening to broadcast the performance.

Recordings

CD: Ileana Cotrubas (Violetta): Carlos Kleiber (cond.).
DG 459 089 2

Angela Gheorghiu (Violetta); Georg Solti (cond.).
Decca 448 194 2

Video: Teresa Stratas (Violetta); James Levine (cond.).
DG 0 73 120 3.

Simon
Boccanegra

Prologue and three acts. First performed Venice, 1857.

Libretto by Francesco Piave

Based on another play by the author of
Il
Trovatore,
Garcia Gutiérrez.
Criticized at its first performance both for its tangled plot and for a score whose dark tone and severity was unrelieved by
Trovatore
’s immediate melodic vitality,
Simon
Boccanegra
was substantially revised in 1881 with the help of the librettist Arrigo Boito.
It is this later version, most notable for the creation of the magnificent Council Chamber scene (substituting for two more narratively muddling and musically conventional scenes) which is normally performed today and which is described below.

Plot

In fourteenth-century Genoa, the plebeian Simon Boccanegra is elected Doge.
He hopes to marry the noblewoman Maria, who has already born him a daughter.
But Maria dies, the baby vanishes and Boccanegra is cursed by Maria’s father, Fiesco.

Twenty-five years later, Boccanegra is still in power.
He rediscovers his daughter, who has been brought up by his political enemies, the Grimaldis.
Her name is Amelia, and the loathsome Paolo, one of Boccanegra’s henchmen, lusts after her.
Paolo schemes to abduct Amelia, but the plot is foiled
when Amelia’s favoured admirer Gabriele Adorno murders the abductor.

This provokes the people of Genoa to break angrily into the chamber where Boccanegra presides over the city’s council.
Gabriele knows nothing of Amelia’s true parentage and denounces Boccanegra under the misapprehension that he was behind the attempted abduction.
Amelia enters dramatically and restrains Gabriele from murdering Boccanegra, but the rioting is only stopped when Boccanegra points menacingly at Paolo and commands him to find the traitor.

Paolo continues to plot against Boccanegra and attempts to win both Gabriele and Fiesco to the cause of armed rebellion.
But when Gabriele finds out that Amelia is Boccanegra’s long-lost daughter, he agrees to fight on his behalf.
Paolo’s forces are defeated and after his arrest he confesses all.
But it is too late – Boccanegra has already swallowed a slow-acting poison administered by Paolo.
As it takes effect, Boccanegra is reconciled to his old enemy Fiesco and tells him that Amelia is his granddaughter.
In his last moments of life, Boccanegra names Gabriele as his successor.

What to listen for

Because of its lack of obvious tunes or brilliance, as well as its over-complicated plot,
Simon
Boccanegra
has never been popular, though in terms of intensity and nobility it ranks as one of the most elevated and moving of Verdi’s operas.
It contains some fine arias – notably Fiesco’s brooding ‘Il lacerato spirito’ and Amelia’s first aria ‘Come in quest’ora bruna’, with its evocation of the shimmering Mediterranean – but as the opera progresses, it is the highly charged duets and trios which impel the drama towards the heart-rending final scene of confrontation.
The scene in the council chamber is extraordinary both for Boccanegra’s peroration ‘Plebe!
Patrizi!
Popolo!’, which the musicologist Julian Budden called ‘Verdi’s noblest monument to the baritone voice’, and for the way it builds the dramatic tension, pitching soloists against chorus and building towards a climax which descends
to a massive whisper before exploding in an equally massive shout.

Note also the persistent idea of the lilting sea, its ebb and flow rippling through the orchestra, and the sombre dignity of the opera’s ending.

In performance

Surely few opera productions have provided such a perfect visual embodiment of the music as Giorgio Strehler’s
Simon
Boccanegra,
first seen at La Scala in 1971 and subsequently much travelled: the brooding atmosphere of a medieval city riven by political faction and the romantic landscape of the sea were magically conveyed by Ezio Frigerio’s gauzy russet sets, and Strehler brilliantly dramatized both the grand public and intimate personal struggles which drive the plot.

A very different interpretation was presented by David Alden at ENO in 1986 – a mixture of medieval and modern, with an abstract setting featuring a giant iron hand, symbolizing both fate and power, which loomed above the Council Chamber, descending when the plebeians invaded.

Recordings

CD: Piero Cappuccilli (Boccanegra); Claudio Abbado (cond.).
DG 449 752 2

Video: Kiri Te Kanawa (Amelia); Georg Solti (cond.).
Covent Garden production.
Decca 071 423 3

Un
Ballo
in
Maschera
(
A
Masked
Ball
)

Three acts. First performed Rome, 1859.

Libretto by Antonio Somma