Verdi Forum Number 16 Article 3 1-1-1988 Un ballo in maschera: Performance Practices at the Met Siegmund Levarie Brooklyn College Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.richmond.edu/vf Part of the Musicology Commons, and the Music Performance Commons Recommended Citation Levarie, Siegmund (1988) "Un ballo in maschera: Performance Practices at the Met," Verdi Forum: No. 16, Article 3. Available at: http://scholarship.richmond.edu/vf/vol1/iss16/3 This Performance Review is brought to you for free and open access by UR Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Verdi Forum by an authorized administrator of UR Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Un ballo in maschera: Performance Practices at the Met Keywords Giuseppe Verdi, Un ballo in maschera, Metropolitan Opera This performance review is available in Verdi Forum: http://scholarship.richmond.edu/vf/vol1/iss16/3 UN BALLO IN MASCHERA: Performance Practices at the Met• Siegmund Levarie, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York I shall first address myself to gratuitous disturbing because of its sudden occurrence. and to specified noises in the performance we Comparable nonmusical noise competes have just heard and seen, the latest with the fortissimo tutti that closes the first production of Un ballo in maschera at the scene: the ensemble of courtiers, conspir­ Metropolitan Opera. In this version, Riccardo ators, officials, and soldiers breaks into is shot rather than stabbed to death. Now applause. What or who is being applauded? whereas a dagger does not affect the ears of The decision to visit Ulrica? To meet in the audience, the noise of a pistol shot has disguise at three o'clock? The applause on the shock value of a kettledrum fortissimo. the stage just when the curtain is falling The audibility of the murder, in short, has the cheap effect of inviting the audi­ changes Verdi's orchestration. ence, as in a commercial show, to join in. The score specifies the sounds Verdi I have dwelled on these episodes intended for this moment. Only the strihgs because they show that the currently are involved, the bass reinforced by sustained widespread silliness and ignorance of notes of the two bassoons. All these operatic stage directors can spoil not only instruments are marked pianissimo. There are the visual but also the musical intent of no other winds, no brasses, and no poet and composer. (Parenthetically I might percussion. Verdi purposefully reserves the mention comparable violations at the Met, explosion for the identification of Renato for instance, the change of scenery tearing eleven measures later when a fortissimo tutti apart the unified structure of the second act supersedes the eerie pianissimo of the of Lohengrin or the third act of Otello.) murderous moment. The pistol shot at the Verdi's concern with the proper use of Metropolitan clearly spoils the composer's noise is well illustrated in the first Ba/lo carefully calculated dynamics. finale. He did not hesitate to use noise Another instance of this kind of when it served a purpose. The key is A indifference to what one hears occurs just major; the timpani are tuned to tonic and before Riccardo's canzone at the end of the dominant, A and E. The dynamic climax, first act. The courtiers and conspirators heard twice, bursts forth on an A-flat major have entered Ulrica's hut and boisterously ask triad in second inversion. Reluctant to omit her to prophesy. In unison they urge her to the timpani, which quickly thereafter empha­ tell the future, "canta ii futuro." The four size the closing cadence of the regained beats of thi~ exclamation are sounded on C, main key, Verdi lets them bang away on£­ the impatient repetition on D, and the final natural against the £-flat of the chord! double outburst on £-flat, an emphatically When he wants noise, he prescribes it; but high pitch for basses. The rising pitch adding noise when he deliberately avoids it parallels the rising impatience. The director, is presumptuous. In the performance we practicing one-upmanship on Verdi, has the heard, the timpanist certainly played £-flat whole crowd stamping in time to the final by either utilizing pedals for quick retuning request, eight beats in all. This intrusion of or an extra pair of timpani. Richard Strauss realism into a musical structure is a fall from in his edition of Berlioz's Traite d'instru­ a higher artistic level to a cruder naturalistic mentation inserts a specific reference to this one. The impact is here all the more spot. •comments in the AIVS Series of Lecture-Videotapes, 20 November 1987. The production discussed was first mounted at the Met in 1980 and will be replaced by a new staging for the 1990-91 season (Edd.). 22 Un ballo in maschera: Performance Practices at the Met 23 Personally I have reservations about this comment of Wurm in Luisa Miller whose modernization. When a good composer treacherous meanness he hoped to heighten encounters an externally given limitation, he by some comic touches which would make can turn it to his advantage. Beethoven, for Wurm all the more menacing (letter to instance, forced by the then limited range of Cammerano, 17 May 1849). As planned by flute or piano to break a line that pushes Verdi and Somma, at the end of the seven­ into the top register of the third octave, teenth century such characters plotting to often continues to employ the resulting get rid of a British governor seem plausible. inverted interval as a new motivic element. Moved by the Met to the American War of Though the solution in the Ba/lo finale is less Independence, the conspirators objecting to clear-cut, Verdi deserves respect for making a British rule find themselves in the company virtue out of an instrumental shortcoming. of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and the The director's basic unmusical attitude is rest who were neither assassins nor vicious evident from the very beginning--literally, nor comical. Verdi's and Somma's view is from before the curtain rises. He fills the clear; but the Met audience--an American Prelude with unnecessary action, thereby audience- -is forced, as a thoughtless by­ challenging the autonomy of music and product of the later date, to take sides demonstrating his conviction that music by against patriotic liberators. itself is a bore. The distracting busyness The American location poses one more, spills over into the opening chorus. Almost and rather subtle problem. In both libretto predictably he clutters up Ulrica's music with and score, Renato is identified as creolo, a a highly distracting and unnecessary episode creole, that is, somebody born in America of involving the behavior and treatment of a French, Spanish, or Portuguese descent and hysterical girl. thus culturally distinct from the British. This particular bit of action and the This foreign character of Renato--missing whole setting obviously derive from the witch from the Swedish version as well as from trials in Massachusetts in the 1690's. We all the libretti on the same plot by Auber and know that after Verdi had aired his initial Mercadante--has been generally ignored by resentment of censorship, he was rather critics and producers alike. Budden refers satisfied by the move of the plot from to it in a footnote, bluntly declaring that Sweden to Boston. "In its new guise the "what Verdi understood by Creole must re­ libretto has lost little and even gained main a mystery•.1. To Budden, the inclusion something from a change of scene," he wrote among the supernumeraries of whites, blacks, to Antonio Somma, his librettist. They mulattoes, and creoles, as noted in the agreed on Massachusetts at the end of the disposizione scenica of the Rome premiere, seventeenth century. So far so good. The makes the matter only "more complicated ." Metropolitan Opera, having to prove its Verdi's correspondence available thus far superiority to Verdi's taste and judgment, which I have checked contains no reference moved the plot to the end of the eighteenth to this detail. Clearly Renato's creole back­ century, thus placing the conflict within the ground has a very different function from context of the American Revolution. Now I Alvaro's obscure origin in La forza de/ do not mind at all the resulting anachronism destino which is the cause for his rejection of showing Massachusetts witches one cen­ by the haughty Spanish Calatrava family and tury after the fact. Opera need not be, and thus a prime mover of the plot. I suggest rarely is, faithful to history. Opera has its that in Ba/lo Verdi added the characteriza­ own rationale which is quite independent of tion of Renato as a creole for highly factual chronology. But what I found very personal reasons (and this is my private disturbing in the unnecessary updating is the interpretation for you to buy or reject). We unexpected demand it makes on our sympa­ know that he had come to terms with Giu­ thies. Samuel and Tom, two lowdown basses, seppina's rather loose love life before she are assassins depicted as partly sinister and joined him. The point has been made that partly ridiculous. You remember Verdi's the stories he chose for his operas in a 24 Siegmund Levarie critical period of his relationship with entire scene (a device Verdi had successfully Giuseppina offered one way of justifying to employed in the second act of Rigoletto). himself and to the world a woman's adulter­ Riccardo's presence, as it were, motivates ous actions, or thoughts, or attitudes, or Renato's jealousy, Amelia's despair, Renato's temptations.