Verdi's Luisa Miller: Masterwork on the Cusp

 

William Shakespeare and Friedrich von Schiller were among Verdi’s favorite authors. The Bard of Avon inspired three of the composer’s librettos (Macbeth, Otello, Falstaff); the giant of German Classicism and Romanticism provided subjects for no less than four of his operas: Giovanna d’Arco (Die Jungfrau von Orleans), I Masnadieri (Die Räuber [The Robbers]), Don Carlos, and Luisa Miller (Kabale und Liebe [Intrigue and Love]). Only Don Carlos (known familiarly with its Italian title Don Carlo) has secured a place in the core repertoire of the world’s major lyric theatres.

Luisa Miller premiered just two years before the beloved Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata, vintage 1851-53. Yet with its strong narrative and rewarding roles for five soloists, the opera deserves greater popularity. Its thrilling score culminates in a final act among Verdi's greatest creations.

The Metroplitan Opera did not stage Luisa Miller until 1929; its stellar cast—Rosa Ponselle, Giovanni Lauri-Volpi, Giuseppe De Luca—was able to earn but a paltry six performances in two seasons. The opera waited until 1968 to enter the company’s repertoire with some regularity.

In Act II, in order to save her father, Luisa, a commoner, is forced to write a letter renouncing her love for Rodolfo, the son of the ruling nobleman. She prays that God not abandon her. Adriana Maliponte conveys the pathos with fervor, musical precision, and rich tone, capping the aria with a breathtaking cadenza.

Carlo Bergnzi sings the opera’s most famous aria, “Quando le sere al placido (When in the evening, beneath a starry sky),” recalling the happiness of Rodolfo's love for Luisa. The tenor’s affinity for Verdi and command of the requisite style are fully evident in this commercial recording.

 

Act III contains one of Verdi’s most touching soprano-baritone duets. Severely put upon by the local aristocracy, Luisa and Miller, her father, contemplate a life exiled from their homeland (“Andrem raminghi e poveri, ove il destin ci porta [We’ll wander, poor, wherever destiny leads us].” Here, from a recording of the complete opera, are Anna Moffo as Luisa and Cornell MacNeil as Miller, both in peak form and sensitive to the pathos of the scene.

Rodolfo, mistakenly believing that Luisa has betrayed him, poisons himself and his beloved. In this extract from a complete recording, Luciano Pavarotti and Sherrill Milnes voice the anguish of Rodolfo and Miller, Montserrat Caballé invests the dying Luisa with ethereal pianissimi. Luisa’s phrases, lofted heavenward, prefigure the demises of Verdi’s Leonoras in Il Trovatore and La Forza del destino.

 

 A number of commercial recordings and excellent live performances are available on YouTube.

 

 

 

Mascagni’s L’Amico Fritz and Lodoletta: “commedia lirica” and “dramma lirico”

With Cavalleria rusticana (1890), his first opera and the liminal title of Italian verismo, Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945) was assured a place of privilege in operatic history. In a single act, the composer distilled the unbridled passion—and jealousy—of a woman betrayed. Revenge followed, and with it the offstage duel fatal to her guilty lover. So goes life in a Sicilian village in the late 19^th century as depicted in the libretto based on the Giovanni Verga novella (1883). That more than one reviewer credited the success of the piece to its high drama rankled the composer.

In response, Mascagni next chose “a simple libretto, something almost insubstantial, so that the opera will be judged entirely on its music.” Like Cavalleria, L’Amico Fritz (1891) has a rural setting, sylvan Alsace. But here, the similarity ends. In Fritz, a “commedia lirica,” the eponymous hero is a confirmed Jewish bachelor and wealthy landowner. David, the local rabbi, takes it upon himself to awaken his “friend’s” love for Suzel, the daughter of one of his tenants. The happy ending promises the couple an imminent wedding.

L'Amico Fritz enjoyed enormous acclaim at its Rome premiere, was soon conducted by none other than Gustav Mahler in Hamburg and was taken up quickly by other European companies. Yet the work failed at the Met in 1894. Since then, L’Amico Fritz has been heard a mere handful of times in New York, has survived on the margins of the core repertoire in Italy, and is only occasionally presented elsewhere. Perhaps, bent on an “insubstantial” plot so as to privilege his music, and as a rebuke to the critics of his first opera, Mascagni compromised the afterlife of his second.

If productions are rare, recordings of L’Amico Fritz are plentiful: we have at least ten editions on CD or DVD, some taken from live performances, two produced in the studio. The most popular excerpt, the Act II “Cherry Duet,” is on YouTube in a plethora of versions. Here, drawn from a 1969 complete studio recording, are Luciano Pavarotti and Mirella Freni at their peak. Fritz and Suzel, still hesitant to express their feelings for each other, sing instead the praises of music and Springtime.





Earlier, Suzel offers a bouquet of violets to Fritz along with her Act I “Son pochi fiori (Just a few flowers).” In a clip from a 1980 studio recording Leona Mitchell lends her rich, well-equalized timbre to both the aria’s dramatic opening and its expansive conclusion.








Between 1890 and 1935 Mascagni published fifteen operatic scores, many bearing labels that signal their diverse genres—lyric comedy, tragedy, drama, melodrama, idyll, among others. His 1917 “drama lirico,” Lodoletta, is based on Ouida’s 1874 novel, Two Little Wooden Shoes. The title character, a Dutch orphan, and Flammen, a French painter exiled in Holland, are chaste lovers. When Flammen is pardoned, Lodoletta follows him to Paris in Act III and, mistakenly thinking him unfaithful, dies in the snow on his doorstep.

Lodoletta, moderately successful at its Rome premiere, was greeted with even less enthusiasm elsewhere. The Met’s most bankable cast notwithstanding--Geraldine Farrar, Enrico Caruso, Pasquale Amato--the opera managed to string together very few repetitions in two seasons. A single aria, Lodoletta’s “Flammen, perdonami (Flammen, forgive me),” is familiar to contemporary operaphiles in the excellent renditions of Freni, Renata Tebaldi, Renata Scotto, and Renée Fleming.

And then there is Mafalda Favero. Favero and Jussi Björling made their Met debuts in a 1938 La Bohème. The tenor went on to a long career with the company; the soprano, detained in Italy by World War II, never again returned to the United States, alas. Favero’s 1941 recording of “Flammen, perdonami” is unforgettable. The exceptional clarity of her diction captures the crushing pathos of the dying Lodoletta.

Accessible on YouTube is a complete recording of L’Amico Fritz conducted by the composer and starring Ferruccio Tagliavini and Pia Tassinari. Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu are Fritz and Suzel in a more recent album. Strongly recommended is the “Cherry Duet” sung by Favero and Tito Schipa and also by Tagliavini and Magda Olivero.

Rigoletto on Film: I

 We choose Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto, staged by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle (1932-1988), as the first entry of our new format (http://operapost.blogspot.com/2020/08/operaposts-second-stream.html). Rigoletto was the sixteenth of Verdi’s twenty-eight operas, and the first of the extraordinary trio (together with Il Trovatore and La Traviata) composed between 1851-1853. The opera was wildly successful at its Venice premiere and has been a fixture of the core repertoire of the world’s lyric stages ever since.

 Ponnelle was among the most inventive and successful director/designers of his generation. He worked extensively in Europe and in the United States, leaving a rich legacy of opera on television and film much of which is available for purchase as DVDs and accessible for streaming on xxYoutube. His stunning cinematic adaptations also include Madama Butterfly and Le Nozze di Figaro.

The question raised most urgently by our subject is this: How and to what effect does the experience of opera on film, or better, opera as cinema, that is freed from the constraints of the proscenium, differ from that of opera viewed and heard in the opera house or, indeed, in the movie house during a live telecast? Cinema’s camera movement and the processes of studio editing focus and refocus our gaze to a far greater degree than can lighting and direction for the stage or the movement afforded stage-bound television cameras.

Two elements of cinema privileged in its powerful vocabulary begin to answer the question: cinema’s ability to effect radical as well as subtle shifts in point of view both through camera distance and angle and through editing; its capacity to shoot both natural and built environments. These devices, mediated by the masterful hand of Ponnelle, further the suspension of disbelief. They conspire to counter the artifices of sung dialogue, of stage sets, and of the compression of a breathless narrative that unfolds in what appears to be a matter of days. Camera movement and editing prevail in many scenes, most emphatically in this nine-minute Act 2 sequence that captures the complexity of Rigoletto’s being.

 In this clip, Rigoletto swings from despair at the disappearance of his daughter, to rage at the courtiers who tricked him into abetting her abduction, to contrition as he pleads for her return, to horror on discovering that she has been raped by his master, the Duke of Mantua. The musical and dramatic gestures, thrilling hurdles for the baritone (here the excellent singer/actor Ingvar Wixell), find their reflection in Ponnelle’s visual gestures. The tragic figure of the court jester as he staggers across the curved balcony is intercut with shots of the courtiers who stare from below. Roving cameras catch the action in the foreground without losing sight of the elaborate architecture of the background, the late 16^th-century Teatro all’Antica of the northern Italian town of Sabbioneta. At the very moment Rigoletto grasps that his beloved Gilda has been deposited in the Duke’s chambers, that the trap has succeeded, he is himself trapped by the camera against an unyielding wall. Shot and counter-shot of the Duke’s curtained bed and Rigoletto’s fury conspire with the music and libretto to tell the painful tale. Then, in a shot of prolonged duration, Rigoletto, proceeding on his knees from courtier to courtier, begs for their pity. The bed curtains part to reveal the Duke’s brazen leer in shocking closeup. The image of Gilda, face down on the bed, unleashes her father’s wrath, now laced with shame. That same image excites the courtiers’ obscene curiosity. In the end, the series of angle/reverse angle shots positions Rigoletto as dominant. He dispatches his tormentors who exit in a mocking dance.

In our next post, again devoted to the Verdi/Ponnelle Rigoletto, we will look closely at the film’s climax for the effect of location shooting on the experience of the operaphile at the movies.

 

A New Turn for OperaPost: Opera on Film

In this time of darkened theatres whose reopening for the 2020-2021 season is very much in question, especially in the United States, we propose to add a second format to our blog. Ours is an attempt to compensate, in some small way, for the irreplaceable live performance.

By opera on film we mean not the telecast of staged performances, such as the Met Live in HD, but performances that are genuinely cinematic, that is freed from the confines of the stage and directed and produced as movies. Two weeks in advance of publishing a new post, we will provide a link to the subtitled opera on film that we have chosen for its musical and dramatic qualities. Our intention is to give those who wish sufficient time to view the movie before receiving our post. 

Our first entry will be Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's 1983 film of Verdi's Rigoletto. Director Ponnelle's locations are the historical sites of Parma and Mantua among Northern Italian cities. The first-rank cast principals are Luciano Pavarotti, Edita Gruberova, and Ingvar Wixell. Riccardo Chailly conducts the Vienna Philharmonic.

And here is the link.

Rigoletto

So, happy viewing and listening. We would appreciate your comments regarding our blog's "new turn" and the Rigoletto post that will be published on or about August 22.

The Verdi Requiem: "Opera in Ecclesiastical Dress"

Note to those who receive new posts via e-mail: You must click on the title of the new post, highlighted above in blue, in order to access moving images and sound.

On December 2 the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast was devoted to the company’s 53^rd iteration of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem. The Requiem was first performed at the Met in 1901 on the occasion of the composer’s death; he had died earlier that year. Among those similarly honored in memoriam have been John Kennedy in 1964 and Luciano Pavarotti in 2008. This season’s edition was dedicated to the recently deceased baritone, Dmitri Hvorostovsky.

Verdi’s masterwork has a complex genesis. It was born when Verdi proposed that a requiem mass be forged in tribute to Gioacchino Rossini who died in 1868. Each section, according to the plan he presented to his editor, Ricordi, would be assigned to a contemporary Italian composer of opera or sacred music, thirteen in all, and all now largely forgotten with the exception of Verdi himself. The Rossini requiem was scheduled for premiere in 1869, then cancelled and not performed until 1988 in Stuttgart; it has been recorded and can be accessed on Youtube. Just a few years later, with the 1873 death of Alessandro Manzoni, author of the epic nineteenth-century novel I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), Verdi determined to compose a requiem on his own. He conducted his opus in 1874 on the first anniversary of Manzoni’s death in the church of San Marco in Milan. The second performance took place soon thereafter at La Scala. Verdi toured his Requiem to theatres and auditoriums in Paris, London, and Venice.

In fact, the Requiem, scored as for grand opera, replete with a large orchestra and chorus and four soloists, had not been meant for a liturgical setting. As Verdi contemporary, conductor Hans Von Bülow, quipped, here was an “Opera in ecclesiastical dress.”

Towards the end of second section, the “Dies irae,” is the tenor aria “Ingemisco” which carries with it the indelible imprint of Verdi’s late manner. The despair of the sinner, mitigated by his hope for redemption, is powerfully expressed through the repetition of first-person pronouns.

Ingemisco tamquam reus,                                          I groan, as one who is accused,

culpa rubet vultus meus,                                            guilt reddens my check;

supplicanti parce, Deus.                                              spare Thy supplicant, O God.

Qui Mariam absolvisti,                                                Thou who absolved Mary,

et latronem exaudisti,                                                 and harkened to the thief,

mihi quoque spem dedisti.                                         Has given hope to me.

Preces meae non sunt dignae,                                    My prayers are worthless,

sed tu bonus fac benigne,                                           but Thou, who art good and kind,

ne perenni cremer igne.                                              Rescue me from everlasting fire.

Inter oves locum praesta,                                           With Thy sheep give me a place,

et ab hoedis me sequestra,                                         and from the goats keep me separate,

statuens in parte dextra.                                            Placing me at Thy right hand.

We have chosen the “Ingemisco” from a 1970 performance of the Requiem conducted by Leonard Bernstein. The singer is Placido Domingo early in his long career, his voice fresh, clarion, and alert to the drama.

Immediately following “Ingemisco” is “Lacrymosa,” scored for the four soloists and chorus. The text of the prayer is drawn not from scripture but from a poem by a 13^th-century Franciscan monk, Thomas of Celano, and the infinite sadness of the music is intoned not by a single voice but by the weaving of multiple voices conventional in liturgical music.

Lacrymosa dies illa,                                                     Tearful that day shall be

qua resurget ex favilla,                                               when from the ashes shall arise

judicandus homo reus.                                                Guilty man to be judged.

Huic ergo parce, Deus,                                                Spare him the, O God,

pie Jesu Domine,                                                         gentle Lord Jesus,

dona eis requiem. Amen.                                            Grant him eternal rest. Amen

This “Lacrymosa,” recorded in 1967, is sung by a quartet of singers at their peak, Leontyne Price, Fiorenza Cossotto, Luciano Pavarotti, and Nicolai Ghiaurov. Herbert von Karajan conducts the chorus and orchestra of La Scala.

The Requiem concludes with “Libera me,” a prayer not integral to the mass itself; it is intended to be pronounced after the funeral. Like “Ingemisco,” “Libera me” is a first-person supplication, an expression of individual terror in the face of death and the wrath of God.

Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna,                      Deliver me, O Lord, from eternal death

in die illa tremenda,                                                    on that dreadful day,

quando coeli movendi sunt et terra,                          when the heavens and earth shall be moved,

dum veneris judicare saeculum per ignem.               when Thou shall come to judge the world by fire.

Tremens factus sum ego et timeo,                             I am full of fear and I tremble,

dum discussio venerit atque ventura ira.                  awaiting the day of account and wrath to come.

Dies irae, dies illa,                                                       Day of wrath, day of mourning,

calamitatis et miseriae,                                               day of calamity and misery,

dies magna et amara valde.                                       that day great and most bitter.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,                      Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord,

et lux perpetua luceat eis.                                          and let perpetual light shine upon them.

Verdi is at his most operatic in this, the last section of the Requiem. The composer awards the highly emotional aria to the soprano. He demands a two-octave range deployed in extreme contrasts of high and low, loud and soft. The “Verdi soprano” descends to her low C again and again; she caps the piece with a high C unfurled above the thundering chorus; she floats the middle section in an ethereal pianissimo, ending with an octave vault to a perilous high B-flat. In a concert from the 1982 Ediburgh Festival, superlatively conducted by Claudio Abbado, we hear Welsh soprano Margaret Price. When at her best, as Price is here, there was no one better. She invests her famously pure timbre with a dramatic urgency that conveys the full measure of fearsome awe at the final judgement.