Since its inception in the early 17th century, opera is a divisive artform
in Italy. Over the centuries it had to be apologized for — in front of
highbrow intellectuals, who rather advocated the revival of “true”
Greek drama, as well as in front of the Church and of the State, no matter
whether a petty local lord or an occupant foreign power. Hence, from Monteverdi
to Verdi and later, originated all possible combinations of patronage and
censorship, celebration and criticism of the powers-that-be. Today, opera has
to be marketed as relevant to contemporary issues (which sometimes may apply,
and sometimes not) or construed in the specialized media as the battlefield
between preservationists and innovators, Werktreu and
Regietheater, senior and younger patrons, or whatever.
Good news is that the younger generation is back again in the opera houses.
Past are the days when middle-class preppies and undergraduates flocked to
jazz, rock, symphony, chamber or avant-garde concerts — nay, even to
early music, Gregorian chant and every sort of ethnic, folk and fusion events.
In a word: to everything but to opera, largely perceived as the preserve of
their reactionary parents and decadent grandparents. The throwing foul eggs at
people entering to a season premiere was the favourite sport for many
self-styled revolutionaries in their late twenties to early thirties, who had
been taught that Verdi, Puccini and Mascagni had ruined Italy, severing it from
the live streams of modern culture. Performing such stuff over and over for the
sole benefit of the selfish bourgeoisie was a huge waste of money, they
maintained. Leaving statistics aside — of which SIAE (the Italian
Authors’ Association), Federculture, and sundry agencies provide quite
enough -, any casual observer can testify that the panorama has widely changed
during the latest decade. Youngsters find that opera is “cool”,
discuss it on their blogs or social groups over the Internet, and can be seen
queing for it in larger numbers than ever during my operagoers’
experience, which started back in the mid-1960s.
And now to the bad news. It is no secret that Berlusconi’s regime,
whose consensus was shaped by — and survives on — telecracy, hates
most forms of live show such as drama, ballet, and opera. Particularly opera.
Countless times the mercurial Prime Minister and his loudspeakers exposed opera
houses as dens of “Communists”, “privileged lazybones”,
“unproductive beggars” etc, who do not deserve public support and
should apply to the market in order to survive. Since 1985, nearly one half of
the State funding for the whole sector of live show, mainly channeled through
FUS (Fondo Unico per lo Spettacolo), was divided among the Big 13, now 14,
largest opera houses nationwide. At nominal value, the amount of FUS sank from
Euro 464.49 million in 2005 to a projected 258.61 for 2011 (-44 per cent). Even
worse, during the same period, its percentage on the gross national product
decreased from 0.032 to 0.016, a round minus 50 per cent. Worser and worser,
further heavy cuts were announced, then promised to be withdrawn, then
restated, and finally cancelled under a surge of bipartisan protest leading to
the resignation of Culture Minister Sandro Bondi on March 23. Such erratic
policies caused opera managers to live day-by-day without being able to
effectively plan their seasons, prevented private money from joining in, raised
havoc among both the workers and the goers, encouraged the less responsible
unions. If the government’s aim was to disrupt the national opera system,
it was a brilliant strike.
However, signs of resilience are showing up. Fundraising campaigns are
reportedly proving successful — as in Florence, Venice, Naples. Economies
on salaries and disproportionate fringe benefits are being implemented through
in-house negotiations — as in Bologna, Palermo, and elsewhere.
Innovative, if sometimes controversial, means of accruing earned income through
rental of the premises for publicity and social events are avidly sought after.
Coproductions, both on national and international scale, are in full bloom. The
celebrations for the 150enary of Italian unification even brought forth the
commission of new operas, whose subject matter was expected to be more or less
closely related to the occasion. The appointed composers reacted to the brief
with widely different approaches: from critical adherence, through subversion,
to open disregard — but none of them (predictably and perhaps
fortunately) fell into the trap of patriot rhetorics. Neither the current state
of the country, nor the above-mentioned confrontation opposing the political
establishment to the world of opera and of high culture at large, would have
justified such a surrender. Thus the post of musician laureate, left vacant by
serious professionals, was occupied by Giovanni Allevi, the self-styled
“new Mozart” and pop icon of the piano, with an equally self-styled
“arrangement” of the national anthem Fratelli
d’Italia, which is being broadcast over and over on all TV channels,
both public and commercial.
* * *
In January, Palermo’s Teatro Massimo started the row of Risorgimento
operas with Senso by Marco Tutino. With its scarce two hours of music,
Senso mimics a romance film rather than the celebrative grand opera
one would expect for a national festival. Epic it is not, as the storyline
relies on Camillo Boito’s short novel of the same title (1883), not
dealing with the glorious days of 1861, but with the catastrophe of 1866, when
Italy’s newborn regular army tested its inefficiency against the rusty
military apparate of the Austro-Hungarian empire, so that rescue came from both
the Prussian ally and Garibaldi’s volunteers. Movie-oriented it is
indeed, inasmuch composer Tutino and librettist Di Leva could not dispense with
Luchino Visconti’s masterly film treatment of 1954. In fact, they
conflated novel and film into a palimpsest of sorts, where patriotic feelings
are the preserve of Italian tavern maids and of Roberto Don‡, a naive young
nobleman, while old count Serpieri voices high-class opportunism and yields to
the change he cannot avoid.
So much for the historic background. Away from Visconti’s high
dramaticism about conflicting loyalties (the core of most opera seria
plots), and back to Boito’s cynical approach, the focus lies here in the
sexual crave of countess Livia Serpieri, pushing her to utter degradation as
she gets financially exploited, deceived and abused by the Austrian lieutenant
Hans B¸chner, a magnificent lover but a pathological coward. After causing him
to be court-martialled in revenge, Livia returns to her usual lifestyle of
luxury and futile flirting.
Oui, c’est de la dÈcadence. At any rate, one must concede
that verse, music and staging are well attuned to it. Tutino’s
strongpoint as an operatic composer is to produce music always fitting the
given subject, if somewhat impersonal in style. Early in the 1980s, while still
a fresh graduate from the Conservatory of his native Milan, he was among the
founders of the “neo-romantic” school, campaigning against
avantgarde and claiming the right to write entertaining music. What’s
more, he actually succeeded in writing some. Such titles as Pinocchio
(1985), La lupa (1990), Federico II (1992), Il gatto con
gli stivali (1994), Le Bel indiffÈrent (2004), made him probably
the most performed among Italian living composers worldwide.
The score’s popular highlights are quotations, more or less
harmonically skewed, from the Vienna waltz, Verdi’s Trovatore, a
Venetian boat song, a folk serenade from the Trento area and, most notably, the
above-quoted national anthem Fratelli d’Italia (an actual battle
hymn from the late 1840s), here turned with eerie effect into the minor key
— the same procedure Mahler applied in his First Symphony, 3.rd movement.
Most outright lyric passages are found in the Puccini-esque Act II (of two,
framed by perfunctory short sections called “Prologue” and
“Epilogue”). Here, Livia’s complaint aria “Da quante
notti non dormo”, Roberto’s disdainful “Non voglio
capire”, plus a row of finely-wrought ensembles and choral scenes, add
some pepper to the seamless stream of declamato, which makes the main
fabric of Tutino’s discourse, albeit sustained by clever orchestral
textures. To all that, Hugo de Ana’s pictorial taste provided a backdrop
of unparalleled splendour, featuring acrobatic copulations between both
principals among sets of mirrors, Baroque architectures, gilded furniture and
costumes inspired to such period painters as Silvestro Lega and Giovanni
Fattori. The whole company was up to the task, with soprano Nicola Beller
Carbone as a sexy and vocally wanton Countess, (anti)-Heldentenor Brandon
Jovanovich duly beefy both in his utterances and nude looks, and second soprano
Zuzana Markov· as the passionate chambermaid Giustina. Conductor Pinchas
Steinberg bravely steered the home ensembles clear of the problems which any
new score must set, particularly when confrontation runs high between personnel
and management (a speech delivered before the curtain by a quartet of union
representatives witnessed to that).
* * *
Scene from Risorgimento! [Photo by Rolando Guerzoni]
Then, in March-April, Modena’s Teatro Pavarotti and Bologna’s
Comunale joined forces for a diptych including Lorenzo Ferrero’s new
one-acter Risorgimento! and Dallapiccola’s Il
prigioniero (1949). The extramusical ground for the association was the
theme of struggle against oppression, as Italians use to label the anti-Nazi
movement “Resistenza” as “Second Risorgimento”. Subject
for Risorgimento! is the time-honoured gimmick of an opera rehearsal,
in this case of Verdi’s Nabucco at La Scala in February 1842.
The characters are partly taken from history: the impresario Bartolomeo
Merelli, primadonnas Giovannina Bellinzaghi and Giuseppina Strepponi (later
Verdi’s wife). Verdi himself, who is shown in multiple sosias and in
various ages, does not sing but delivers a final speech about how the hopes of
his revolutionary youth were disappointed. Despite a clumsy libretto, Ferrero
succeeded to write entertaining music, navigating between quotations from
authentic period material, ironical neo-romantic numbers vaguely resembling
arias, cabalettas and ensembles, dances, large orchestral outbursts accompanied
by epic projections and thundering battle noise. The up-and-coming soprano
Valentina Corradetti got the best of the double bill, first as a passionate
Strepponi in the new score and later as The Mother in Dallapiccola’s
austere 12-tone masterpiece. At Modena and Bologna, two neighbouring affluent
towns in the opera-avid Po Valley, full houses granted an equally warm acclaim
both to the modern and the post-modern composer. During the same weeks, a
comparable success was harvested in Ravenna, Ferrara and — again —
Modena by a production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare featuring
Ottavio Dantone and his period band Accademia Bizantina, lots of countertenors
and a flamboyant Regietheater staging. There is definitely neither
dearth nor scarce diversity of offer in this area, where opera-going is a
traditional part of lifestyle, exactly like fine food and progressive political
leanings.
* * *
From light-hearted deconstruction to outright off-topic, La Scala mounted
Luca Francesconi’s Quartett as a grand peep-show signed by ¿lex
OllÈ, co-director of La Fura dels Baus. A 3-ton parallelepiped hovered above
the stage, disquieting projections showed cosmic forces at work and destitute
human masses, yet the audience’s eyes were mesmerized on the gruesome
action taking place within a dark room or prison of sorts. Heiner
M¸ller’s duodrama, telling the mutual destruction of the selfish
characters loosely taken from De Laclos’ Liaisons dangereures,
was rounded up by Francesconi with an even bloodier finale borrowed from the
same M¸ller’s Hamletmaschine. However, his own libretto
arrangement in English missed most of the original verbal violence, rather
sounding as a carnival of Oscar-Wilde-style paradox: “Love is the domain
of the servants”… “Fear makes philosophers”…
“Virtue is an infectious disease”… Each language has its
Geist; how would that sound like in Italian, one wonders. Happier
notes came from the music itself. Above the prevailing discourse in atonal
conversation-style on gigantic intervals, the solo voices soared in concise
florid passages, hints at artificial Baroque belcanto, fragmentary arias and
duos. An astounding multimedia experience was provided by the electronic
equipment from the Paris IRCAM, which mixed and projected all around various
sources: the soloists onstage, a small ensemble in the pit, a large orchestra
plus choir secluded within the house’s sixth storey. Terrific singing and
red-hot acting by Allison Cook as the Marquise and Robin Adams as the Vicomte.
After a cold reception on the premiere, the 6-night run ended in success
— not necessarily de scandale.
* * *
Scene from L’Italia del destino [Photo by Gianluca Moggi]
Regrettably, no more than two nights were scheduled at Florence’s
Maggio Musicale for the last of commissioned operas: L’Italia del
destino, Real-Italy in un atto by Luca Mosca. The original plans
were, once more, about the background of an opera rehearsal; this time
Verdi’s La forza del destino. Then, as Mosca’s favourite
librettist Gianluigi Melega was joined by further collaborators, it came to
both an actualization of the subject matter and a downsizing of the production.
It is doubtful whether the culturati and glitterati flocking in for the
premiere at the cosy Teatro Goldoni, an auxiliary venue of the Maggio in
downtown Florence, ever experienced first-hand contact with such trashy formats
as Il Grande Fratello (The Big Brother) or L’Isola dei
Famosi, the tremendously successful reality shows flooding the Italian TV
channels 4-5 hours a week. More likely, they would read the scornful reviews
that quality newspapers devote to the issue: paper arrows hardly able to
compete with the barrage fire deployed by millions of remote controls. Thus the
operatic reenactment of one such show — a parade of crass ignorance,
exposed flesh, talentless wannabes craving for celebrity and fast money —
is turned into a modern version of Commedia dell’Arte, with
stock characters, long tirades and very little action. Some dramatic excitement
is provided only in the finale, where the Presenter (a cross-dressed summary of
the mad scientist Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show plus
the Master of Ceremonies in Bob Fosse’s Cabaret) is morphed into
Lord Darth Vader from Star Wars, literally slaughtering all the
contenders with his laser sword. In his own closing words: “Perdiamo
tutti” (We all loose). A good point, but otherwise the libretto, rich in
metaphors, quotations, clever rhetoric devices, is exceedingly verbose and does
not hurt as an effective satire should. With a drastical pruning, it could work
better. Mosca’s music sticks to the subject with nearly 100 minutes of
astringent sound, hectic rhythm and tempo changes, trivial jingles and sudden
projections to the foreground from individual instruments, particularly
woodwinds, like in a madcap sinfonia concertante. Accuracy and
relentless attention was shown by the 17 choice instrumentalists from the
Maggio house orchestra, led with firm pulse by specialist Marco Angius. Lacking
memorable solo numbers, Mosca’s usual leaning toward displays of agility
provided opportunities for Roberto Abbondanza, Alda Caiello, Sara Mingardo and
Daniela Bruera to show their well-known versatily in the most diverse singing
styles. Inventive scenery (by Davide Livermore) featuring tributes to the
op-art and Escher’s impossible perspectives, while Gianluca
Falaschi’s garish costumes amounted to a ghastly apotheosis of
Kitsch.
Carlo Vitali© Friedrich Berlin Verlag (by kind permission) (condensed from issues 3 and
7/ 2011 of Opernwelt
(Berlin, Germany))
Marco Tutino: Senso
Conductor: Pinchas Steinberg; Direction, Stage, Costumes: Hugo de Ana. Cast:
Nicola Beller Carbone (Countess Livia Serpieri), Brandon Jovanovich (Lieutenant
Hans B¸chner, Giorgio Surian (Count Serpieri), Dalibor Jenis (Marquis Roberto
Don‡).
Palermo, Teatro Massimo, 28 February 2011.
Lorenzo Ferrero: Risorgimento! (with Luigi Dallapiccola:
Il Prigioniero)
Conductor: Michele Mariotti; Direction: Giorgio Gallione; Stage: Tiziano
Santi; Costumes: Claudia Pernigotti.
Cast for Risorgimento!: Alessandro Spina (The Piano Coach), Annunziata
Vestri (Giovannina Bellinzaghi), Alessandro Luongo (Bartolomeo Merelli),
Valentina Corradetti (Giuseppina Strepponi), Leonardo Cortellazzi (Luigi
Barbiano di Belgiojoso), Umberto Bortolani (Giuseppe Verdi, spoken role).
Cast for Il Prigioniero: Solisten: Chad Armstrong (The Prisoner), Valentina
Corradetti (The Mother), Armaz Darashvili (The Gaoler, The Grand Inquisitor),
Dario Di Vietri, Mattia Olivieri (Two Priests).
Modena, Teatro Pavarotti, 27 March 2011.
Luca Francesconi: Quartett
Conductor: Susanna M‰lkki and Jean-MichaÎl Lavoie; Direction: ¿lex OllÈ;
Stage: Alfons Flores; Costumes: Lluc Castells; Computer Sound Design: Serge
Lemouton. Cast: Allison Cook (Marquise de Merteuil), Robin Adams (Vicomte de
Valmont).
Milan, La Scala, 28 April 2011.
Luca Mosca: L’Italia del destino
Conductor: Marco Angius; Direction and Stage: Davide Livermore; Costumes:
Gianluca Falaschi. Cast: Daniela Bruera (La Cameriera/ The Chambermaid), Alda
Caiello (La Stilista/ The Stylist), Cristina Zavalloni (Sexilia), Sara Mingardo
(La Diva/ The Diva), Davide Livermore (Il Cantante/ The Pop Singer), Chris
Ziegler (Il Palestrato/ The Bodybuilding-Freak), Roberto Abbondanza (Il
Creativo/ The Creative), Sax Nicosia (Il Moderatore/ The Presenter, spoken
role).
Florence, Teatro Goldoni, 15 May 2011.
image=http://www.operatoday.com/TMassimo-2011-SENSO_BELLER-.gif
image_description=Scene from Senso [Photo by Franco Tutino]
product=yes
product_title=Risorgimento 150 years after: How the saga of Italian unification in 1861 is
being (half-heartedly) celebrated by opera composers
product_by=By Carlo Vitali [© Friedrich Berlin Verlag (by kind permission) (condensed from issues 3 and 7/ 2011 of Opernwelt (Berlin, Germany))]
product_id=Above: Scene from Senso [Photo by Franco Tutino]