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Verdi, Simon Boccanegra : Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner. Royal Opera House, London 7.5.2008 (JPr)

 

Lucio Gallo as Boccanegra

Simon Boccanegra is set in Genoa, Italy's greatest seaport on the Ligurian Sea which has had a venerable history:  still today it is a place from which goods are shipped to Northern Italy and then onwards to Central Europe. When Simon Boccanegra was its first Doge, Genoa was competing with other Italian city-states for dominion over the trade routes. The sea is crucial as background to the story and Verdi tells us as much in the score, particularly in its more worthy 1881 version than the 1857 original opera.

The first version had been a disaster for Verdi and more than twenty years later he gave it a second ‘world première’ at La Scala Milan. With Piave his original librettist long dead,  he turned to Arrigo Boito who was to help him create his masterpieces Otello and Falstaff that were to follow. Even Boito realised the difficulties facing them when he wrote to Verdi ‘Our task, my Maestro, is arduous. The drama that we are working with is lopsided like a table that wobbles, but no one knows which leg is the cause, and whatever is done to steady it, it still wobbles. I don’t find in this drama a single character of which one can say: it’s sharply delineated! No event that is really fatal, that is indispensable and potent, generated by tragic inevitability. I make an exception of the prologue, which is truly beautiful …’.

For me the Prologue is still much too clunky and ponderous but the addition of the more exciting Council Chamber scene at the end of Act I does provide a more dramatic watershed to the work.  I do wonder however, why in the twenty-first century this sort of blood and thunder music remains so popular. The opera was first put on at Covent Garden only in 1965 and I think there is a very good reason for that since, despite the later revisions,  I still concur with most of Boito’s ‘tables that wobbles’ comments quoted above. I always wonder why early Verdi is so frequently performed now  - and will undoubtedly be seen even more in the anniversary year of 2013 -  while early Wagner is ignored. Rienzi, Wagner’s 1842 opera about another fourteenth-century Italian patriot (who is actually mentioned in Simon Boccanegra) is  the superior work to my mind. It is of course written in a conventional Meyerbeer-like idiom but it is very similar to early Verdi. I hope Rienzi will get more exposure in Wagner’s anniversary year, which is also of course 2013.

In the 1881 version of Boccanegra there is no overture, something present in the earlier one. Instead there is a simple prelude with a theme that gently imitates the sea  - something that does permeates the atmosphere of the whole work. Elsewhere the depiction of the sea is even clearer. At the opening of Act III and with a surging orchestra as here under the impressive baton of John Eliot Gardiner, the motion of the waves matches not only a storm brewing in the port but the psychological tension of the drama. Verdi will soon employ this duality again in his forthcoming masterpiece Otello. (And not only that, but the opening of the additional Council Chamber scene sounded in this performance as if it was a first draft for the scene in the great hall of Otello’s Cyprus castle.) More gentle waves, sea breezes, and even birdcalls in two clarinets are heard at the opening of Act I which updates the story 25 years from the time of the Prologue to reveal a palace garden that should have an outlook over the water. Here Amelia Grimaldi reflects on her love for the young patrician, Gabriele Adorno in a gorgeous evocation of nature. Later in Act III, when the dying Doge is in his palace reminiscing about the sea and his past triumphs, Verdi’s musical accompaniment seems to evoke a breeze from the Gulf.

Was this a new production or a revival? Most of the sets and designs were first used for Ian Judge’s staging of the 1857 version for Covent Garden’s Verdi Festival in 1997 which also allowed performances of the 1857 version to be scheduled with the 1881 one in a production by Elijah Moshinsky from 1991. Ian Judge’s production was subsequently revised for performances given by Washington Opera -  whose artistic director is Plácido Domingo who was Judge’s Adorno. Regrettably though, with what is basically a single set behind a broken picture frame as a false proscenium featuring a large concave panorama of fifteenth-century Genoa,  there is precious little ‘nature’ on show. The garden becomes an isolated branch hanging down and elsewhere there is a seldom changing picture in John Gunter’s tilting sets and Deidre Clancy’s costumes which together illustrate a mixture of medieval Genoa and the period when the opera was written. As an example,  costumes for the citizens were inspired by the nineteenth-century Italian pointillist painter Pellizzia da Volpedo. Rich red drapes came and went in the set as  did a throne, stools, a table, large candlesticks and a few objects hanging from the flies but these were the only visual differences between one scene and the next. Perhaps the tilted set does hint at political instability but where was Verdi’s sea? Occasionally the panorama lifted to show a backdrop of some choppy waters but that was all of  it. The static painterly quality of the production was best used for the transition between Prologue and Act I when the crowd surrounding Boccanegra melts away the 25 years gap in events to reveal Amelia in the garden.

There are other unusual aspects of this work,  particularly for Verdi,  in its lack of any formal arias for Boccanegra, the rather insignificant role for the tenor and only one important female role. But the heart of the opera is the additional Act I Scene 2 duet between Boccanegra and Amelia and the Council Chamber scene. Here is the drama, lyricism and tunefulness of mature Verdi; the rest I can take or leave.

This is very much an opera that depends on its five principal singers. To my mind they were  left alltoo much to their own devices and perhaps there was a language barrier between Ian Judge and his United Nations cast.  Only rarely did two characters sing together without  being on opposite sides of the stage and what movement there was seemed to be just filling the gaps between one ‘stand and deliver’ moment and the next. Virtually the first time anyone held someone else was when Boccanegra slumped dying in Fiesco’s arms in Act III.

Anja Harteros as Amelia
 

There was undoubtedly some very fine singing; notably from Royal Opera debutant Anja Harteros, the German winner  of the 1999 Cardiff Singer of the World competition. Picture a younger Angela Georghiu and you will imagine how striking she looked in her gold and blue dress, especially with the voice to match. She has a flexible bright tone  - secure throughout its whole  range - which  adds an interesting mezzo quality to her  soprano and her delicate thrill on ‘pace’ at the end of Act I was perfect. It was also as unexpected within the context of the music heard so far,  as was Boccanegra’s earlier sotto voce ‘Figlia!’ (‘Daughter!’) after their reconciliation.

The men were more of a mixed bunch; it was nice to see one of the Jette Parker Young Singers, Krzysztof Szumanski rallying the crowd as a fervent Pietro in the Prologue. Italian baritone  Marco Vratogna was a shaven-headed Iago prototype as the suitably conspiratorial Paolo Albiani, earning him some playful (I hope?) booing for his villainy rather than it being any reflection on his singing, which certainly deserved the cheers he got. Obviously American tenor Marcus Haddock had a fairly thankless task yet in this two-dimensional production he was simply too stentorian, bland and one-dimensional in his performance. The Italian bass Ferruccio Furlanetto was available because he is in London rehearsing for his role of Philip II in the forthcoming Don Carlo and he was a sheer luxury as a replacement for the ailing Orlin Anastassov as Fiesco, the most fleshed-out and three-dimensional of the characters in this opera.  For me,  he had been one of the disappointments in a recent Verdi Requiem I reviewed but clearly here he was in his operatic element. His huge experience in the part showed,  as his every utterance throughout the opera resonated with the world-weariness of a life of heartache and loss,  until his joyous reunion with his long-lost daughter right at the opera's end>

I am in a bit of a dilemma about Lucio Gallo’s Boccanegra. He sang quite nicely in a few quiet reflective moments and when being forcefully authoritative,  such as in his appeal ‘I call for peace and love’ during the Council Chamber scene,  and he also died with emotional effectiveness in Amelia’s arms. Elsewhere there seemed to be pitch problems and he sang disappointingly flat. His voice reminded me of some other baritones who  are ‘lazy tenors’ which of course connects curiously with the fact that when this production next returns to Covent Garden, Plácido Domingo will sing his swansong to the house as Boccanegra.

The orchestra and chorus were on excellent form and John Eliot Gardiner gave a finely nuanced reading of the score dwelling on its elemental nature more that the production  did. He also remained responsive to the other emotional undercurrents in a score which is far from being one of Verdi’s most subtle.

Jim Pritchard

Pictures © Catherine Ashmore

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