In
a post published in March 2015, we wrote of a gala concert at the Rose Theatre,
a venue within the Time-Warner complex on Columbus Circle. Here was an occasion
to support the rebirth of the New York City Opera founded in 1943 and dissolved
in 2013. At the time of the concert, sponsored by the NYCO-Renaissance, it
was not clear whether that ultimately successful group, led by Michael Capasso,
or another, would inherit the name and the meager remaining resources of the
once proud City Opera which had been for decades the second lyric stage of the
nation’s cultural capital.
The
relaunch of the company began inauspiciously in January 2016 with a poorly
received production of Puccini’s Tosca. Subsequent
offerings have, for the most part, shied away from the core
repertoire, leaving the canon to the powerful grasp of the Metropolitan. And
in so doing, the New York City Opera redux has subscribed to the mission that
served its predecessor well for so long.
This
season opened with the coupling of the standard rep I Pagliacci with Rachmaninoff’s rare
one-act Aleko. There followed Tobin Stokes’s contemporary chamber
opera, Fallujah, and a very successful revival of Leonard
Bernstein’s Candide. The run of Respighi’s La Campana
Sommersa (The Sunken Bell) has
just concluded. The season will end with the New York premiere of Peter Eötvös’s
Angels in America.
La
Campana Sommersa, one of Respighi’s twelve operas, has not been heard in New York in
nearly ninety years. It was one of four contemporary premieres that the
then Metropolitan general manager, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, presented in the
1928-1929 season, a record the company has not duplicated and that the reborn
City Opera can look to for inspiration.
The source of La Campana sommersa was the 1896 play Die versunkene Glocke by the German
dramatist, Gerhart Hauptmann. One of the most prestigious voices in early 20th-century
literature, Hauptmann won the Nobel Prize in 1912. At the time of the Met
premiere of La Campana sommersa New
York was familiar with the theatre of Hauptmann and with the music of Respighi.
The composer enjoyed world-wide acclaim in the concert hall. Conductors determined
to flaunt a great orchestra in a virtuoso show piece had only to program
Respighi. No less a champion than Arturo Toscanini included the symphonic poem The Pines of Rome in his first concert
with the New York Philharmonic in 1926, as did Andris Nelsons in his inaugural
concert as music director of the Boston Symphony in 2014.
A philosophical fairy tale that foregrounds
an interspecies love affair, the plot of La
Campana sommersa is reminiscent of Dvořák’s Rusalka. Enrico, a master-forger, injured when his new bell is
toppled into a lake by a mischievous faun, regains his health through the
mediation of Rautendenlein, a water sprite. He is enchanted by the elfin
creature, abandons his wife and children, and forges a new bell and a
mountain-top temple for the worship of the Sun and the eternal youth of
Humanity. He is gripped by remorse when his children bring him an urn filled
with the tears of his wife, who has drowned herself in the lake. As the opera
ends, Enrico desperately searches for Rautendelein who bestows a kiss on him as
he dies. The subject is rich in vivid contrasts. Human beings share the world
with sprites, elves, and fauns; Enrico works with iron and stone, Rautendelein
is a creature of the water; responsibility to family and community cede to the
desires of the artist; Christianity is at war with Paganism. While the uneven
score and murky libretto go a long way towards explaining the opera’s neglect,
we were struck by the opulent orchestration and the dramatic force and
expressive vocal line of two episodes in Act III. The excerpts that follow are drawn
from a 1956 RAI transmission conducted by Franco Capuana.
First we hear the confrontation between
Enrico and a Christian curate. The master-forger, his voice echoing his bells,
joyously sings of his vision of the new temple. The horrified cleric accuses him
of heresy and reminds him of wife and family. The tenor is Umberto Borsò, the
bass Plinio Clabassi.
There follows an ecstatic love
duet between Enrico and Rautendelein. The soprano is Margherita Carosio, one of
Italy’s most popular lyric-coloraturas of the inter-war and immediate post-war
periods.
Two complete performances of La Campana sommersa are available on
Youtube.