Donizetti’s La Fille du régiment: Smiles and Tears

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On March 2, movie houses around the globe will screen Gaetano Donizetti’s opéra comique, La Fille du régiment (1840), live from the Metropolitan. The performance will star the soprano Pretty Yende and the tenor Javier Camarena. If until the late 1960s, general managers would want to stage the opera for a favorite soprano, since then it has been programmed subject to the availability of a tenor with a very secure upper register. Indeed, absent a tenor blessed with a high extension, La Fille du régiment will not be on the boards. 

The Met premiere of Donizetti’s work was staged in 1902 for Marcella Sembrich; it was revived in 1917-18 for Frieda Hempel. Our story begins in December 1940 when a new production was mounted for the company’s then reigning coloratura, Lily Pons. By that time, France had been at war with Germany for more than a year; the United States would enter the conflict a year later. Newspapers all over the country carried a photograph of the finale of La Fille du régiment in which, in place of the traditional French Tricolor, the flag of France occupied by the Nazis, French-born Pons waved the Cross of Lorraine of General Charles De Gaulle’s Free French. The Met orchestra played first “La Marseillaise” and then, as the Stars and Stripes were brought to the front of the stage and the Cross of Lorraine was dipped in tribute, “The Star Spangled Banner.” Some among those present were sure to remember that in 1918, three days after the Armistice, Hempel had interpolated the moving World War I anthem, “Keep the Home Fires Burning.” 

Pons was the Met’s preeminent coloratura from her 1931 debut to her departure from the company nearly three decades later. Through concerts, movies, radio, and recordings, her name had become a household word. Her rendition of “Salut à la France (Hail to France)” shows off the technique that captivated her fans. The cadenza at the aria’s conclusion, replete with a flute accompaniment reminiscent of the “Mad Scene” of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, exploits her fluency in embellishment and astonishing ease in alt, in the very highest notes of the soprano range.

Thirty years later, the Met revived La Fille du régiment. The new production brandished two superstars, the soprano Joan Sutherland and the tenor Luciano Pavarotti. On February 17, 1972, when Pavarotti nailed the nine high Cs of his first act aria “Ah, mes amis (Ah, my friends),” often omitted by less intrepid singers, the audience belonged to him, and since then audiences will not be denied the signature moment of the evening. And what is more, spectators, at least at the Met since Juan Diego Flórez’s stunning feat in 2008, consider an encore obligatory. Here is Pavarotti as he fires off his volley of high Cs in a live 1967 London performance..

The popularity of La Fille du régiment owes much to the virtuosic hurdles it poses to the principal singers. But Donizetti’s rich melodies and elegiac manner are also intrinsic to the score. At the end of Act I, Marie, the daughter of the regiment, bids a tearful farewell to her cherished troops. “Il faut partir (I must leave)” summons the soprano’s most long-breathed legato, an opportunity that Beverly Sills embraces in this 1970 live performance.

Tonio, the tenor role, also has a long moment of deep sentiment. In Act II, he pleads with Marie’s mother for permission to marry his beloved. Flórez’s elegant style is a perfect match for the elegant phrases of “Pour me rapprocher de Marie (To bring me close to Marie)” in this 2007 Vienna performance.

Maria Stuarda, Donizetti's Scottish Queen

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On February 20, 2016, the Metropolitan will broadcast the matinee of Maria Stuarda across the country and beyond via radio. The Met premiere of this 1835 work by Gaetano Donizetti took place in 2012, almost one hundred and eighty years after it was composed. The star of that occasion was Joyce DiDonato who scored a stunning success for herself and for the company. The previous season, 2011-2012, it was Anna Netrebko who played Donizetti’s queen in Anna Bolena (1830), and who collected equally enthusiastic reviews.   This current season has seen the revivals of both Maria Stuarda and Anna Bolena, and will see the Met premiere of Donizetti’s third “Tudor” opera, Roberto Devereux (1837), to be simulcast “Live in HD” on April 16, 2016. For the first time since Beverly Sills took on the challenge of all three Donizetti queens (Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII; Mary, Queen of Scots, the daughter of James V of Scotland; and Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry and Boleyn) at the at the New York City Opera in the 1970s, all three will be played by the same artist, Sondra Radvanovsky.   Only Maria Stuarda has been sung by both sopranos and mezzo-sopranos, in the case of the Met by mezzo DiDonato and this year by soprano Radvanovsky. A comparison of Beverly Sills in the nostalgic Act I aria and its agitated cabaletta, “O nube!...nella pace del mesto riposo,” with Janet Baker singing the same aria, gives a sense of the distance between this piece sung by a high soprano and by a mezzo. Baker takes the aria and cabaletta a half-step lower, and more obviously, Sills’ top notes are significantly higher and her embellishments far more intricate. That the Sills version is in the original Italian and the Baker in English only adds to the contrast. Were it Radvanovsky, a dark-voiced spinto soprano, in the place of Sills, the opposition would be less acute. We were in the house on February 1 for this season’s second performance of Maria Stuarda. As Maria, Radvanovsky met the formidable role with lustrous timbre, a dynamic range from silvery, floated pianissimo to rich, thunderous fortissimo, a thorough understanding of the bel canto style, and compelling acting. Sir David McVicar’s traditional staging was marred by his decision to endow Elizabeth with a pronounced limp and a masculine manner that flirted with caricature. The sumptuous costumes of John Macfarlane compensated somewhat for the drab sets. We signal two other productions of this work. We saw the first, a transmission of a 2008 La Scala performance in high definition, on a New York movie screen. The Maria Stuarda, Mariella Devia, an acknowledged exemplar of bel canto singing, and the Elisabetta, Maria Caterina Antonacci, a riveting singing actress, are equal to the high tension Donizetti supplied in this ahistorical meeting of the two queens. Here, in the final moments of Act I, Maria, no longer able to bear the humiliation meted out by Elisabetta, hurls the unforgivable insult that her cousin is the illegitimate daughter of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII.  The other performance we recall here is one we attended at Berlin’s Staatsoper in October 2006. If we complain above about the current Metropolitan design and direction, about its bland and entirely forgettable sets and sometimes misguided staging, we hasten to note that what made the German production memorable is better forgotten. The overture was played not by the orchestra clearly visible in the pit but by an antiquated, scratchy disc that turned on a decrepit record player. Our fear was that the whole of the score would be heard thus. But, happily, no. The orchestra finally took over and the singers sang live. The production was based on the premise that the titanic late-16th-century battle royal between Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots could be best understood by a contemporary audience as a version of the sibling rivalry between the aged sisters of the 1962 movie Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? The Bette Davis-like costume of the English queen, her smeared lipstick, her long braids, her sadism, and Mary’s Joan Crawford-like wig and outsized eyelashes, the wheelchair she leaves only for her bed or to crawl about on the floor are unmistakable signs of the production’s debt to Hollywood iconography. As you will see in this clip from the Berlin production, the Protestant Elizabeth has the last absurd gesture: she slits the Catholic Mary’s throat with a crucifix. The excellent soprano is Elena Mosuc.

New York City Opera Reborn?

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On March 9, 2015, we were at a benefit concert sponsored by NYCO Renaissance. The host organization attracted a large audience to celebrate the life and work of Julius Rudel and to raise funds for the rebirth of the New York City Opera. Founded in 1943, the City Opera folded in 2013 after an extended period of managerial and fiscal troubles.

The program dovetailed with City Opera’s original mission and with the repertoire that dominated when Rudel was general manager and principal conductor, the company’s “golden age,” 1957 to 1979. The second half of the program, in particular, featured young singers and American composers.

 

In acknowledgement of Rudel’s birthplace, Vienna, the program began with the overture to Die Fledermaus, conducted by Imre Palló, a rendition so detailed, so elegantly phrased that the familiar chestnut seemed reborn, a harbinger, we can only hope, for the company itself. And if the players, identified as the “New York City Opera Orchestra,” will indeed constitute its pit orchestra, we will have further cause to rejoice.

Outstanding among the younger artists was countertenor John Holiday who sang one of Caesar’s arias from Handel’s Giulio Cesare, recalling the unforgettable 1966 production that helped validate the company’s claim to a place in Lincoln Center. On that brilliant occasion, Beverly Sills, who you hear as Cleopatra in the clip that follows, was finally recognized as the star she had long been. She would go on to be the prima donna assoluta of the company until her retirement in 1979.

Soprano Joélle Harvey lofted floating pianissimos in an aria from La Clemenza di Tito, a Mozart work that Rudel led at City Opera several years before James Levine brought it to the Met. Here is Carol Vaness, who made her acclaimed company debut as Vitellia in that 1979 production. The recording dates from a 1989 performance in Chicago.

 

Other prospects for the new New York City Opera on the benefit program were tenor Joshua Guerrero who capped a zarzuela aria with ringing top notes, and baritone Michael Chioldi, a sonorous and idiomatic Scarpia in the “Te deum” from Tosca. Soprano Kristin Sampson offered the world premiere of a concert aria by Tobias Picker who was present at the benefit.

The first of the City Opera alumni to perform was the irrepressible Plácido Domingo, in the final baritone aria from Verdi’s Macbeth. He reminded the audience that it was he who opened the company’s first Lincoln Center season as the heroic tenor lead in Alberto Ginastera’s Don Rodrigo. Frederica von Stade was moving in excerpts from Ricky Ian Gordon’s A Coffin in Egypt and Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking. We hear her in the world premiere recording of Heggie’s opera.

The concert ended with the hopeful ensemble that concludes Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, “Make Our Garden Grow.”

The benefit sponsor, NYCO Renaissance, is one of two bidders for the rights to the “New York City Opera” name and to its scarce remaining assets. The other bidder is Gene Kaufman, an architect and opera aficionado whose organization, Opera New York, has put $1.5 million on the table, $250K beyond NYCO Renaissance’s offer. A hearing in Federal Bankruptcy Court about the two bids is scheduled for late April. 

Ironically, and alarmingly, just a week before the Rudel celebration, the Times reported  that the Metropolitan was obliged to pledge two of its bronze Maillol sculptures to renew a $30 million credit line for which it had already encumbered its Chagall murals. According to the report, the Met had suffered a loss of $21.9 million in the fiscal year ending July 2014 (see the featured article in the March 23, 2015 issue of the New Yorker for a detailed account of the Met’s current financial challenges). The juxtaposition of these two events, the NYCO fundraiser and the Met’s further borrowing difficulties, begs the question: Can New York, like London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, sustain more than one resident opera company, and if so, under what conditions? Necessary, if not sufficient, is a venue for the reborn City Opera much smaller and more acoustically friendly than the company’s former home at Lincoln Center, perhaps the Jazz at Lincoln Center Rose Theater proposed by NYCO Renaissance, the site of the recent gala concert. And equally necessary is a return to one of New York City Opera’s original missions, affordable ticket prices for the “People’s Opera” it was intended to be.