The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (43 page)

Leonora is not one of Verdi’s more difficult soprano roles in terms of range or flexibility, and the singer assuming it has about two hours to recuperate in her dressing-room between ‘La Vergine degli Angeli’ and ‘Pace, Pace, mio Dio’.
But Verdi does demand from her a rare ability to spin soft high notes in contrast to a hard, thrilling forte.
Alvaro is a monster role, and is gratifying only to the sort of dramatic tenor who can master Otello or Andrea Chénier.
For light relief, Verdi presents Trabuco the pedlar, Preziosilla the camp-following gypsy and the grumbling monk Fra Melitone.
None of these figures adds much to the central drama, though Preziosilla’s roulades and ‘Rataplan’ lend proceedings a welcome
élan.
The opera’s arresting overture, which opens with the ‘destiny’ theme which recurs throughout the action, is often played separately as a concert piece.

In performance

It is a brave opera house which undertakes
La
Forza
del
Destino.
Aside from the problems it presents in terms of casting, the sprawling range of action, character locale, and mood also make it almost impossible to stage coherently.
In Toulouse, Nicolas Joel transferred the action to the 1940s, and the evoked atmosphere of world war certainly made
some of the more outlandish coincidences in the plot more plausible.
The Kirov Opera mounted the original St Petersburg version, with sets copied from the original designs, but the result was no more convincing than more radical efforts.

Recordings

CD: Leontyne Price (Leonora); Placido Domingo (Alvaro); James Levine (cond.).
RCA RD8 1864

Galina Gorchakova (Leonora); Valery Gergiev (cond.).
Philips 446 951 2.
Original St Petersburg version

Don
Carlos

Five acts. First performed Paris, 1867.

Libretto by Joseph Méry and Camille du Locle

With its exploration of the clashes between Church and state, Catholic and Protestant, national liberty and imperial repression, political expedience and private passion, Schiller’s play
Don
Carlos
inspired Verdi to one of his very greatest operas.
It was originally composed to a French text for the Paris Opéra, where certain conventions – such as a ballet and a spectacular procession scene – had to be rigidly observed.
This necessitated many alterations in rehearsal and increased the length of the work beyond Verdi’s ideal measure.
When he revised the opera in 1882 for an Italian production, Verdi made substantial cuts and changes (among them the elimination of the first scene in the forest at Fontainebleau, when Carlos first meets Elisabeth) in an attempt to make the opera more concise.
Modern taste has now reverted in favour of the French version, although the various recensions are so complex that there can never be a definitive version of the score.

 Plot

1568: Elisabeth, daughter of the King of France, has fallen in love with Carlos, the Infante of Spain, but political considerations require her to marry his father, the widowed King Philip II.
Carlos seeks solace in the monastery of San Yuste, where his noble grandfather Charles V is thought to be still living in anonymous seclusion and meditation.
There Carlos encounters his great friend Rodrigo, Marquis of Posa, to whom he confesses his passion for Elisabeth.
Posa is sympathetic, but attempts to persuade Carlos to forget his personal troubles and join him in taking up the cause of Protestant Flanders, a province of the Spanish empire currently suffering from Catholic repression.
Carlos and Posa swear eternal friendship.

Princess Eboli, a lady of the court and secret mistress to Philip II, is in love with Carlos and misinterprets his agitation as a sign that he returns her feelings.
Elisabeth grants Carlos an interview, ostensibly to hear his suit on behalf of the Protestants of Flanders.
But when they are alone, Carlos breaks down in passion, forcing the tormented Elisabeth to remind him that she is now his stepmother.
The jealous and suspicious King Philip is furious to discover that the queen has been left unattended.

Posa pleads with Philip on behalf of Flanders.
Philip admires Posa’s idealism and confides in him his fears about Carlos and Elisabeth, but claims that he himself is restrained by the unbendingly reactionary attitudes of the ancient Grand Inquisitor.

In the gardens of the palace during a masked ball, Carlos waits for a lady who has summoned him with an anonymous note.
He believes that its author is Elisabeth, and shows consternation when Eboli appears.
She is enraged by his indifference to her advances, and threatens to expose him to the king.

At an
auto-da-fé,
the ceremony marking the burning of heretics, six deputies from Flanders appear to plead their cause before Philip.
Carlos publicly speaks out on their
behalf and draws his sword in a symbolic gesture of defiance.
Posa, who deplores such hot-headed tactics and believes he can win Philip over by more rational means, gently disarms Carlos and hands the sword to Philip.
As the pyre is lit around the heretics, a voice from heaven is heard promising redemption.

Alone in his study, Philip laments that Elisabeth does not love him.
The Grand Inquisitor appears, suggesting that the greatest threat to stability is Posa’s liberalism.
Elisabeth is distraught at the theft of her casket.
She sees it on Philip’s table – when he opens it, he finds her miniature portrait of Carlos and accuses her of adultery.
Eboli reveals to Elisabeth that she stole the casket out of jealousy and admits that she has been Philip’s mistress.
Elisabeth banishes her, either to exile or a convent.

Carlos has been arrested for his treasonable behaviour and Posa visits him in prison.
Posa tells Carlos that he has implicated himself as the leader of the Flemish deputies, nobly hoping that this will gain Carlos his freedom.
Posa is shot by the king’s assassins – as he dies, he tells Carlos that Elisabeth has agreed to one last meeting with him outside the convent of San Yuste.
A rebellious mob attempts to set Carlos free, but the Grand Inquisitor quells it with threats against those who lift their hand against God’s anointed rulers.

Elisabeth and Carlos meet outside the convent.
As they take a sad leave of each other, Philip emerges from the shadows and demands that the Grand Inquisitor arrest him as a heretic.
At that point, a mysterious cowled monk – who may or may not be Carlos’s saintly grandfather, Charles V – emerges and leads Carlos into the safety of the monastery.

What to listen for

Every role in this opera is wonderful both to sing and to act: Elisabeth requires no extreme high notes or coloratura, and the only drawbacks are the problem of spinning high-lying pianissimi in her first brief aria, ‘O ma chère compagne’, sung to her banished lady-in-waiting, and the long wait for her big
moment: the magnificent ‘Toi qui sus le néant’ does not come until Act V.
Eboli is a classic example of a role which contains arias of such different character and style – the sly, flirtatious ‘Veil’ song in Act II, and the boldly emotional ‘O don fatal’ in Act IV – that almost all singers excel in one at the expense of the other.
But the character is superbly drawn, and ‘O don fatal’ can bring the house down.

Carlos and Posa are not as demandingly hefty as the leading tenor and baritone roles in
Forza,
Aida
or
Otello,
and both are well suited to good-looking younger singers who can make much of their thwarted idealism.
Philip is a dream role for any bass: not just a regal cipher, he is a man tortured by the conflicts between his personal morality and political considerations, as well as his unhappy marriage – all embodied in the first scene of Act IV, where his monologue, ‘Elle ne m’aime pas’ is succeeded by his epic confrontation with the Grand Inquisitor.

The orchestration is notable for masterly use of the lower strings, and only in some pompous and inappropriate jauntiness in the scene of the burning of the heretics does Verdi’s inspiration falter.

In performance

Two magnificent interpretations have dominated the staging of this great opera.
Luchino Visconti’s 1958 production of the Italian version at Covent Garden was an exercise in old-fashioned historical realism, and although its painted flats came to look unsophisticated over the years, the sense of courtly grandeur and dignity encasing the characters’ turbulent emotions remained enormously impressive.

Luc Bondy’s staging of the French version, first seen at the Châtelet in 1996, was more austerely stylized, although still suggestive of the sixteenth-century historical period.
More focused on the intense personal conflicts than on the broader political drama, it brought a dreamlike quality to the scene in Philip’s study and an intense poignancy to the thwarted love between Carlos and Elisabeth.

Recordings