Class 6: Two Views of Verdi

A. To a Distant World . . .

1. Title Slide 1 (Mestres Cabanes design for Act III)

Today, I am going to look at two of the 29 operas by (1813–1901). One is very well- known: Aïda (1871). The other, though popular in its time, is seldom performed today: (1846). Like all his operas except La traviata, both are historical. In fact, both belong to distant times: Attila is set towards the end of the Roman Empire, and Aïda takes us even further back, to Ancient Egypt.

2. Rameses II and Attila the Hun

Ancient Egypt or the heyday of the Huns, why should we care about either? In short, because there are human stories to be told. But the issue in each case is how to lead the audience into the world of the opera, how to make them care. The two productions I am going to show take different strategies. Last year’s season-opening production of Attila at uses contemporary stage techniques not merely to update the opera, but to do so in terms of images that will have emotional resonance for the audience. By contrast, the 2003 production of Aïda in Barcelona uses painted sets from over half a century earlier, and those a deliberate revival of a tradition from at least a century before that. It is thus as close as we can get on video to an “authentic” production. It works by seducing the audience with the loving detail of its craft, transporting us as though on a magic carpet.

In contrast to the massive constructed sets by Franco Zeffirelli still used at the Met, those in Barcelona are painted on paper; any illusion of depth is purely trompe l’oeuil. They are the work of the artist Josep Mestres Cabanes (1898–1990). Let me start with the opening sequence in the video, shown over Verdi’s prelude, in which the stage crew fly in various pieces of scenery piece by piece. As you see, it is literally paper-thin, but not at all insubstantial in effect.

3. Verdi: Aïda, prelude with shots of technical rehearsal 4. Josep Mestres Cabanes: Aïda, design for opening scene

The stage was still dark at curtain-rise, but here is Cabanes’ design for the opening scene. The DVD also contains a documentary showing the designs and actual stage pictures for the whole opera:

5. Aïda documentary: overview of Cabanes designs 6. Auguste Mariette Bey: costume designs for Aïda

Although Verdi’s librettist for Aïda was an Italian, Antonio Ghislanzoni, he merely translated and versified a prose text by the French playwright Camille du Locle, who had completed the libretto for Verdi’s previous opera, , after the original author died. But the plot idea was not even du Locle’s; it came from the Egyptologist Auguste Mariette Bey, a distinguished scholar and apparently also

— 1 — an artist, who also designed the costumes and supervised the accuracy of the scenery. So the premiere of Aïda in 1872 must have been as close to total immersion in the world of Ancient Egypt as you are likely to get. In his designs for Barcelona, Mestres Cabanes was pursuing a similar aim.

If there seems an awful lot of French here, that is because Aïda was commissioned for the opening of the Suez Canal, which was then under French control. Verdi had already written one French-language opera for Paris in Don Carlos (1867); in every respect other than the language in which it is sung, Aïda is a French grand opéra through and through, the last great flowering of the genre. Think of it: it has an historical subject; it calls for seven varied and spectacular settings; it makes much use of the chorus; and there are ballets in three of the seven scenes. Let’s look at the opening of the grandest scene of all, the triumphal march of the Egyptian armies in the second scene of Act II. We shall stop after the first section of the five-minute ballet.

7. Verdi: Aïda, Act II, scene 2, opening 8. — still from the above

Of course, having period scenery does not guarantee an authentic period production; there is also the question of how you handle all the people in front of that scenery. [I originally advertised a production of for this class, in a DVD from Saint Petersburg, where the opera was originally premiered, and reusing the set designs for that production. But it didn’t work. Although they showed the relevant design before each scene, the lighting was generally so dim that the sets were almost invisible. And while the handling of the people did not seem outrageous, it was clearly based on a 20th- century aesthetic, not a 19th-century one—and the handling of the swooping, zooming camera brought it into the 21st.]

9. Verdi’s annotated libretto for the entrance of Amonasro.

Fortunately, we can get closer to authenticity with many of the later Verdi operas, because Verdi himself kept meticulous notes. Here is a page from the printed libretto with some scribbles in Verdi’s hand, made presumably during rehearsals for the first Italian production of the opera, noting the placement of the main characters and chorus groups in the scene that I am about to play, the entrance of the Ethiopian captives, with Aïda’s father Amonasro among them. Verdi has even jotted some notes on Amonasro’s interpretation, but I can’t read them. This is only a sketch made in the heat of the moment; I have made thousands like it. But Verdi also had his stage-manager make much more comprehensive notes on each change of the stage picture, and these production books are still available. Now I don’t say that the director in Barcelona, José Antonia Gutiérrez, followed the original production book, although the layout looks similar. But the use of flat painted scenery automatically creates an open space on the forestage, a kind of parade ground on which to place one’s forces, and in a large choral scene like this one, there are not very many ways of doing that.

10. Scene synopsis

I shall show one more excerpt from this scene. You will remember that Princess Amneris loves the Egyptian general Radames, and hopes to marry him. But he is secretly in love with another princess,

— 2 —

Aïda, the daughter of the Ethiopian King Amonasro. She has been captured without her rank being known, and now serves Amneris as her personal slave. Radames requests that the captives be brought in. Among them is Amonasro. Aïda cannot help exclaiming that he his her father, but Amonasro tells her not to reveal his true rank. He introduces himself instead as a captain who had fought bravely, and begs the Pharaoh for mercy—a request that is endorsed by Radames but opposed by the Egyptian priests. This leads to one of those many-stranded slow ensembles which were Verdi’s especial strength, in which several groupings of principals, and several blocks of chorus combine in a huge edifice of sound. We shall hear an earlier example from Attila in the second hour.

11. Verdi: Aïda, Act II, scene 2, entrance of Amonasro 12. Summary of Act III Aïda/Amonasro duet

But not even grand opera is all choruses and ensembles. I have always thought that the heart of Verdi is in his duets. Especially in the earlier operas, many of them take a similar form to the cavatina/cabaletta structure I remarked on for bel canto operas: a slow lyrical section, some kind of interaction that alters the situation, then something fast and driven arising out of that new situation. The scene between Aïda and her father in Act III has all these ingredients, but not in that pattern, and more subtly integrated.

The scene is a temple on the banks of the Nile. Amneris has come for an all-night vigil prior to her marriage to Radames the next day. Aïda is outside the temple, waiting for a tryst with Radames, but Amonasro gets there first. In their nine-minute scene, he will manipulate her into obtaining details of the Egyptian troop movements from her lover, Radames. After a couple of pages of recitative, we come to the first of the three main sections. Here’s how it goes: SLOW. In a gentle cantabile, he bids her remember the pine-scented forests of her homeland. With hardly any change, he has her think of the tragedies her country has suffered. And with scarcely any greater change, he is talking about armed revenge. ACTION. This is actually the beginning of the action section, typically acting as a hinge between the two parts, but here we are hardly aware of getting into it. Though we are soon back into recitative, as he tells her to get the plans from Radames. She refuses. FAST. This is the equivalent of a typical cabaletta, but instead of the two singing together, he uses the music to terrify her, first with a vision of the Egyptian hordes, then by conjuring up her mother’s ghost. SLOW. In a slow coda, she drags herself to his feet and begs his pardon, which he grands in one of those great arching phrases that are Verdi’s gift to baritones. Note the hesitating motif of a single repeated note that is sustained through this entire section. We have not talked about the staging here, but look out for what the director does.

13. Verdi: Aïda, Act III, Amonasro/Aïda duet 14. — still from the above

What did you make of the staging? I feel it is probably very close to how it might have been originally. The singers are always placed so that they can sing out to the audience, and their changing relationship in shown by simple means of stage positioning, rather than anything particularly intimate. This kind of presentational staging is now considered old-fashioned, but there are times when nothing else will do.

— 3 —

One more duet, if we have time, or at least the closing minutes of it. Despite Amneris’ pleas, Radames has been condemned to be entombed alive, but he finds that Aïda has hidden herself in the tomb to await him. This is their farewell to life. It is the only one of the Mestres Cabanes sets that uses a second level, for Amneris above. Perhaps it is because of this that the curtain does not close on the dying lovers as it usually does, but waits until they walk off into Paradise!

15. Verdi: Aïda, Act IV, scene 2, “O terra addio” 16. Title Slide 2 (Egyptian sculpture)

B. . . . and Into Our Own

17. Title Slide 3 (Ildar Abdrazakov) 18. Verdi and Vittorio Emmanuele

With Verdi’s Attila (1846), we go back to a rather cruder form of opera, the rousing pieces that the composer was turning out during the 1840s, whose success had much to do with their covert appeal to patriotism. Much of Italy was then under Austrian rule, and Verdi was among those who sought unification under King Vittorio Emmanuele. It was convenient that his name was also an acronym for Vittorio Emmanuele Re D’Italia (Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy), so crowds outside the theater chanting “Viva VERDI!” could make a political statement along with the musical one.

19. Attila figure in an Hungarian museum

Attila was an historical figure, who ravaged much of Europe in the 5th Century as warlord of a group of warrior tribes from the East and center of the continent. One of his last campaigns was the invasion of Italy. After destroying the city of Aquileia, causing its survivors to seek refuge in the marshes of what would later become Venice, and laying waste to much of the country north of the Po, he was halted by a combination of famine and delaying tactics by the Roman army, though Church tradition assigns most of the credit to Pope Leo I, who met with the invader near Mantua and persuaded him to discuss a treaty. Anyway, here was an historical case of Italians standing up to a foreign invader and winning!

20. Ildar Abdrazakov as Attila

But how to portray him? This picture of the great Ildar Abdrazakov, the reigning Attila today, is set against scenery of the kind that gives opera a bad name, and has no connection with real life. It is from some Russian theater, I don’t know which. But let me show you a clip from the 2010 production at the Mariinsky, just the opening chorus and Attila’s entrance; I’ll show more of the scene from another production in a moment.

21. Verdi: Attila (Mariinsky, 2010), opening scene of Prologue 22. — still from the above

Does this work for you? I would call it do-no-harm staging, with a vaguely primitive feel, a rather generic set helped by good use of smoke and lighting, though with some chorus members who could have been

— 4 — more convincing! But watching the whole performance, I grew increasingly bored. The singing was good, but there was nothing for my eyes and, more importantly, nothing that had any bearing on my life. By contrast, the 2018 production from La Scala that I am going to dip into for the rest of the hour never bored me once, although there was a lot in it that struck me as ridiculous. This is the opening of the Prologue. Attila enters on the heels of his brutal troops, but our heroine Odabella (Saoia Hernández) stands up to him and wins his grudging admiration (and ours)

23. Verdi: Attila (La Scala, 2018), opening scene of Prologue 24. — still from the above

Let’s stop to think what works here, leaving any negatives aside for the moment. Primarily, it is no longer about something from an almost mythological past; scenes like this will be in the memory of many of the oldest members of the audience, who recall when the Germans turned from allies into occupiers; change the uniforms a little and think of Sarajevo or Srebrenica, and images like these will be familiar to almost everyone. Secondly, it makes everything very clear in terms of character and drama; we see the brutal slaughter; we know the Attila is the oppressor, but we also see shreds of chivalry in him that keep our interest in him as anti-hero. And thirdly, it is quite splendidly operatic; that is a set of real scale, and that rusty railroad bridge makes for a most usable variety of spaces and levels.

OK, now what doesn’t work so well? You could say that the Nazi trope has become something of a theatrical cliché; I can think of at least three other productions that use it, ranging from Handel to Wagner, and including last week’s Guillaume Tell; there is a scene coming up that I think is definitely clichéd, though it did not worry me so much here. What did worry me was a number of the little things. In a generic production like the one in Saint Petersburg, you don’t worry about minor discrepancy. But in a show where even the shell-scarred concrete is so exquisitely detailed, you worry about things like those absurd little flashes and pops with which the soldiers shoot civilians; they would have been better to have avoided fireworks altogether.

I also worry about consistency: while he keeps the same general period, the director Davide Livermore is perfectly happy to switch between quite different uses of his stage devices between one scene and the next. But consistency of this kind is seldom important in post-modern production; it is matters more to find the right metaphor for each phase of the action, to trigger the right emotional associations. I will show you two very brief examples, and one longer one that also has the advantage of being musically the strongest scene in the entire opera.

Other than the billowing smoke, Livermore uses the projected background in the scene we have just watched to create a city of bombed-out buildings; the grey newspaper-photograph quality is part of the effect. At the beginning of the next Act, as Odabella prepares to sing an aria lamenting the killing of her father, the background is no longer realistic, but turns into a movie, again with deliberate evocation of black-and-white newsreels.

25. Verdi: Attila (La Scala, 2018), Act I, scene 1, opening 26. — still from the above

— 5 —

Personally, I like this, even though there is a further inconsistency in that the girl in the film is far too young to be our Odabella now. But the emotion gives a charge that lasts through the entire aria.

There are two other musically major characters in the opera—Odabella’s lover Foresto and the Roman general Ezio—but the heart of the opera is the relationship between Odabella and Attila. At the end of Act III, after he has married her, she will be in a position to kill him. He marries her because, at the end of Act II she has saved him from a poison plot concocted by Foresto and Ezio—saved him because she wants to reserve the vengeance for herself. This takes place in a sort of Belshazzar’s Feast scene which Attila throws against the advice of his own priests, and the gods take their revenge by blowing all the lights out. Here Davide Livermore does descend a little too far into cliché for me, going back into the Cabaret culture of the Weimar Republic, with its sexual ambiguity.

27. Verdi: Attila (La Scala, 2018), Act II, scene 2, banquet dance 28. — still from the above

Attila laughs this off. He has had one warning from the gods before—this time, the Christian God—and it has really spooked him. This happens in the second scene of Act I, about halfway through the opera. The scene opens with Attila awaking from a nightmare, in which he dreamed that an old man stopped him at the gates of Rome, saying that has no power over the realm of God. Note the striking music at which he quotes the old man’s words.

29. Verdi: Attila (La Scala, 2018), Act I, scene 2, Attila’s dream 30. Raphael: The Meeting of Leo I and Attila (Vatican).

This of course is a preview of his meeting with Pope Leo I, an historical event (albeit with a huge hagiographic overlay) that was represented by Raphael in the fresco at the Vatican shown here. Remember the picture and remember the music as we go to the end of the act (cutting the short cabaletta as Attila bounces back extraordinarily quickly from his black mood), and cutting also the minute and a half of applause. Attila is leading his troops once more into war, when he hears soprano voices sing Veni, Creator Spiritus and the Pope appears. I am not quite sure how Foresto and Odabella get onstage also for the grand finale—Livermore seems to suggest that the whole thing is a dream—but their voices contribute to another of those big curtain ensembles that Verdi was so very good at, and which he handles especially well here.

31. Verdi: Attila (La Scala, 2018), Act I, scene 2, finale 32. Title Slide 4 (still from La Scala)

— 6 —