Enflammons son courroux: Les vêpres siciliennes in Frankfurt

Repression and resistance. Photo (c) Opera Frankfurt/Thilo Beu

The scenario of Verdi's Vêpres siciliennes, with pervasive corruption and radical resistance (and doubts about what forms resistance should take) is only nominally medieval; Verdi moved the action from the 16th century to the 13th in order that the opera might safely serve as a political rallying cry in his own day, and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have certainly offered all too many instances of similar oppression and violence. The music is itself permeated by this violence. Although written in the Meyerbeerian tradition of grand opera, the unsettled, unsettling orchestration and structure are unmistakably Verdi's own. The opening chords foretell no good; in this production, a gunshot proceeds them, explaining the foreboding. This deed is done in silence and darkness; but as it turns out, it is not (only) a characteristic abuse of power. When the thugs have gone, men and women of all ages materialize, at first singly and then in greater numbers, to furtively lay candles and flowers at the site of the murder. The photograph pinned above these tributes is that of Helene's brother, the murdered Frederic. (I give the French names, as Die Sizilianische Vesper was here given in its original language.) The production of Jens-Daniel Herzog for Oper Frankfurt sets the narrative amid Germany's own political upheavals of the 1960s and 70s; the turning points of the action, like the psychological states of the characters, are always attuned to what's going on in the orchestra. I personally found that Herzog's production made me more alert to the tensions among the revolutionaries, and to the musical representations thereof, than I'd been in previously listening to the piece. The political background never becomes more clearly defined than it is by Verdi and Scribe, but thanks to strong ensemble work and good relations between stage and pit, the emotional and psychological narratives of the piece were vividly realized.

Maria Stuarda: La vittima regia

A tale of two queens: Van den Heever and DiDonato in Maria Stuarda

Donizetti's Maria Stuarda is unabashedly a one-issue opera. The lineaments of the drama are clear (slimmed down from Schiller's play, with a libretto by Giuseppe Badari), but Donizetti is more interested in providing emotional confrontations than developing context for the political anxieties of Cecil and Elisabetta, or the ambitions of Leicester and Talbot. Even the fraught (and entirely fabricated) romantic triangle between Maria, her ardent lover Leicester, and his ex-lover Elisabetta (!) is presented without explanation, and practically without comment. The opera has the strengths of its selective focus: its tension is derived almost entirely from the uncertain fate of its titular protagonist, prisoner and political liability for the queen of England. As in the case of Anna Bolena, the complexities and obscurities of historical drama have been transmuted to create the ingredients of good Romantic drama: the wronged Maria suffers while the factions of the English court (represented by the sympathetic Talbot and the hostile Cecil) attempt to persuade the hesitating Elisabetta to determine her rival's fate once and for all. The work is well-structured, and the music often exciting, if predictable in the techniques it uses to generate excitement. The Met has given Maria Stuarda a sleek new production and a starry cast, showcasing it in this year's New Year's Eve gala. While I found the performance engaging, I suspect the piece might have been better served by a more irreverent approach to its Romantic conventions.