Giuseppe Verdi - Luisa Miller
Opéra Royal de Wallonie, Liège, 2014
Massimo Zanetti, Jean-Claude Fall, Patrizia Ciofi, Gregory Kunde, Nicola Alaimo, Bálint Szabó, Luciano Montanaro, Alexise Yerna, Cristina Melis
Culturebox, Medici.tv - 4 December 2014
The subject of Luisa Miller is a typical one for Verdi, almost prototypical in fact in the manner in which Friedrich Schiller's original story has been reduced in scope from a more political and social intrigue down into a domestic drama that best suits Verdi's requirements. Luisa Miller is almost opera semiseria in nature, with its Tyrolean setting and overprotective fathers concerned about the reputations of their daughters, but there's nothing backward looking in Verdi's musical treatment of the subject. It's not perfect, but Luisa Miller is a work that is leading the way towards some of the composer's greatest achievements.
At the heart of Verdi's opera is indeed that familiar configuration of fathers who want the best for their children, and there are two of them here. Miller wants his pure and beautiful daughter Luisa to marry a man worthy of her and hopes she has chosen well in Carlo, but he can't help but worry about the stranger's unknown origins, and wishes she'd marry a stable, ambitious man like the Count's steward Wurm instead. For his part, Count Walter wants his son Rodolfo (who is indeed the same Carlo who is engaged to Luisa) to marry well into wealth and prestige, and has even arranged a suitable match for him with the Duchess Federica.
There's a further dark secret yet to be uncovered of course, but essentially the drama of Luisa Miller centres around this unfortunate complication of romantic interests and family responsibilities. True, everyone is acting out of consideration for what they believe are the best interests for themselves and the ones they love, but it only needs a despicable figure like Wurm (Wurm by name, worm by nature), and of course the aforementioned dark secret, to stir this up into the kind of boiling melodrama that Verdi does so well. Discovering through Wurm that Carlo is really the Count's son, Miller is convinced that he is just a heartless seducer whose intentions can't possibly be honourable. He's obviously familiar with opera semiseria works set in Tyrolean locations (Linda di Chamounix, Clari), where that would usually be the case.
That's still not much of a subject for a composer like Verdi who at this stage was approaching his best mature works in Rigoletto and La Traviata. Luisa Miller in many ways resembles and could almost be seen as a dry run for Rigoletto, where the Duke is indeed a seducer in disguise. The closing scene in particular where Miller regrets his over-protectiveness while holding his dying daughter in his arms has strong echoes with the conclusion of Rigoletto, and to be honest, his setting and scoring for this scene, as well as the dark moments leading up to it, are scarcely any less stirring than Verdi's arrangements for the more famous work.
Verdi's strengths as a composer are already in place on the family and domestic drama, but what works much better here than in some of Verdi's earlier works is how he integrates or makes use of the political side of the drama. The overt political references might have been dropped from Schiller's 'Kabale und Liebe', but with censorship always a problem that Verdi had to work around, the composer was able to cleverly find other ways to put real contemporary social and revolutionary sentiments into his work in a way that sets them apart from the ancient historical subjects of earlier works like Nabucco, Attila and Joan of Arc. In Rodolfo and Luisa's situation there is a struggle against social class prejudices and the injustice of a controlling patriarchy that ends up only causing division and suffering for all. Without needing to make explicit references, Verdi is nonetheless able to convey the full strength of feeling that lies behind these sentiments.
Pouring all those sentiments into a small family drama does admittedly risk turning the work into an overblown melodrama. There's not quite the same scale or sensitivity of handling here in Luisa Miller that you will find in Verdi's mature works and particularly in later ones like Don Carlos and Aida where the characterisation is more nuanced, where the subjects of love, injustice and the abuse of authority are more fully integrated into the whole. Played right however, with an eye towards how Verdi gives voice to those small dramas writ large in the eyes of the people concerned, and bearing in mind where the composer is heading towards, Luisa Miller can be played effectively on the stage. The Opéra Royal de Wallonie in Liège are traditionally very strong at giving lesser-known and under-appreciated Verdi and Rossini sympathetic productions that play to the strengths in such works, and their Luisa Miller is no exception.
The key to the success of this production is in the casting. There are some notable names in the main roles - Patrizia Ciofi, Gregory Kunde and Nicola Alaimo - but the secondary roles are also marvellously played and sung. While the principals evidently have important parts to play, there's a recognition that some sympathy towards the fathers Count Walter and Miller, and a little understanding of their position, gives the drama a little more conviction. Both fathers are well-meaning, convinced that nothing good will come of their offspring's scorn for their wisdom. This is the conflict that drives Luisa Miller, and it helps if you have singers who can bring that out. You can see that Luciano Montanaro's Count is motivated by love for his son, while Nicola Alaimo's light, lyrical delivery has all the necessary warmth and feeling for his daughter, particularly in the critical closing scene.
Wurm is basically a cartoon villain and doesn't need to have the same consideration applied, but Bálint Szabó's performance is nicely understated and supportive of the overall tone of the production, never letting it slip over into caricature. Again, smaller details count as well for the Duchess and Cristina Melis gives a well-measured performance that makes Federica's transition from seductiveness to the bitterness of a woman scorned seem perfectly natural. And what a great Verdi singer Gregory Kunde proves to be as Rodolfo. It's rare to get the right mix of sheer passion balanced with perfect control of the technical requirements for such a role, but Kunde has all that and the acting ability to bring them together to really make you care about what happens. Ciofi's performance as Luisa is also heartfelt, although as I've found before, her voice is a little too light to carry the lower end weight of such an intensely dramatic role.
Musically, Massimo Zanetti's conducting pitches the work perfectly in terms of its dramatic and its emotional content. Every scene carries the necessary impact. Jean-Claude Fall's stage direction and the sets emphasise the divisions well, the bright open blue skies and Tyrolean woodland exteriors contrasted with the dark rooms of the Count's mansion (a hydraulic system very smoothly and cleverly flipping over from one scene to the next). There's no big concept here, the period aiming for modern without stretching beyond the requirements of the libretto. Guns are used instead of swords, but this doesn't present much of an issue, and with pistols brandished in those dark interiors, it even gives a tense Godfather-like feel to the work which is not out of place. It also helps deliver a powerful conclusion which recognises the importance of Verdi ending on a note of high drama.
Links: Culturebox, Medici.tv, Opéra Royal de Wallonie
Giacomo Meyerbeer - Robert Le Diable
Royal Opera House, Covent Garden - 2012
Daniel Oren, Laurent Pelly, Bryan Hymel, John Relyea, Jean-François Borras, Marina Poplavskaya, Patrizia Ciofi, Nicolas Courjal, Jihoon Kim, Pablo Bemsch, David Butt Philip, Ashley Riches, Dušica Bijelić
Opus Arte - Blu-ray
The folly and the controversy surrounding the Royal Opera House's production of Meyerbeer's Robert Le Diable have been extensively reported elsewhere, from the cast changes and departures through to its critical mauling in the press. While I've no doubt that a full evening of a misconceived five-act Meyerbeer opera could well have been a painful experience live at the Royal Opera House, a filmed recording of the production is however another thing entirely. That's not to say that some of the problems with the production are any less evident, but there are compensating factors that one can perhaps better appreciate from the comfort of one's own living room.
Even the undoubted weaknesses in the production can be offset to a large degree in this case just by the rare opportunity to see one of the greatest works of 19th century opera performed on the stage. Meyerbeer was one of the most important and composers of his time, an influence on both Verdi and Wagner, but his extravagant style and grandeur hasn't remained fashionable, and even his greatest works - huge successes in their day - have fallen from the popular repertoire. Such is the case with Robert le Diable, a work which drew wide acclaim from fellow composers, critics and achieved wide popular international success following its premiere in 1831. The work was last performed at Covent Garden however in 1890, and it hasn't been performed much anywhere in the world over the last century.
The fundamental difficulty with putting on a staging a work of 19th century Grand Opera does indeed have to do with it being at odds with popular tastes and fashions. It's not so much a reflection on the quality of the work as the fact that modern audience has very different expectations from opera, and the old-style can be hard to swallow for a modernist, post-modernist, post-post-modernist audience. It's like expecting a reader of Harlan Coben thrillers to adapt to reading Walter Scott, or for readers of Ian McEwan to engage with the themes of Victor Hugo. The challenge that faced director Laurent Pelly then is not an enviable one. He may not entirely have succeeded, but although his production for the Royal Opera House was heavily criticised in a way Pelly does capture the spirit of Meyerbeer to some extent. Perhaps it's more of a case that audiences still aren't ready for Meyerbeer.
Which is understandable, but a pity nonetheless. If nothing else Robert le Diable is an opera experience like no other. Musically and in terms of plotting it's not the most sophisticated, but Meyerbeer packs the five acts of the opera so full of melodies and dramatic development, underlining it with grand choral refrains, lyrical expression, comic interplay and over-the-top gothic imagery with some ballet sequences thrown in for good measure, that it's never anything less than pure value-for-money entertainment. Pelly's production, unfairly criticised I feel, attempts to put all the colour and the darkness of the work up there on the stage in the sets and costumes, and he does so rather well. It's faithful to the spirit of the work, playing it straight where it ought to be, exaggerating in other places, but never stooping to making fun of the melodramatic developments and wild declarations.
Aiming for the middle ground between period fidelity and modernism, there's a "cardboard cutout" feel to the scenery then that is reminiscent in places of David Hockney's designs for the Glyndebourne production of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress. It's like an ancient black and white engraving that has been garishly hand-coloured, or even a medieval tapestry that might lack realistic detail and proportion, but nonetheless has the power to evoke the history and the values of another period far from our own. Sometimes this works exceptionally well (Act III's vision of Hell on a mountain pass like something out of an Hieronymus Bosch painting), at other times the imagery feels a little forced (the ultimate battle between the good of Alice and the evil of Bertram in Act V), and sometimes it's just a little too kitsch and reminiscent of Monty Python and the Holy Grail to take seriously (the colour of the medieval tournament in Act II).
In most cases however, even those mentioned above, these are valid responses to the nature and tone of the material itself. Stravinsky and Meyerbeer may have little in common (Gounod's Faust might be a better model to consider), but Robert le Diable does indeed relate an exaggerated morality tale of the battle between good and evil similar to the one in The Rake's Progress. Here, Robert of Normandy is rumoured to be the son of beautiful princess who married a demon from Hell. Robert however has the choice to follow a path of righteousness, and demonstrates his leniency by sparing the life of the minstrel Rimbaut who relates the story of Robert the Devil to assembled knights at an inn in Palermo. He could choose also to win the hand of Isabelle in the traditional way through a tournament, but despite the warnings of his late mother and his foster sister Alice, is laid astray by the machinations of his companion Bertrand, the real devil of the work. If he steals a magic branch from the tomb of Saint Rosalie, he can win Isabelle by other means.
Barring some questionable choices - I'm still in two minds about the choreography of the zombie sisters of St Rosalie during the opera's most famous/notorious Dance of the Nuns ballet - Pelly's staging is sympathetic to the shifts of tone in the work itself and gets fully behind it, never attempting to make it into something else entirely with conceptual cleverness. Daniel Oren too shows great feeling for the work, its rhythms and variations, and - regardless of what you think of the merits or otherwise of Meyerbeer's score - it's simply a delight to see this type of work being put through its paces. There is however one other problem associated with putting on a Meyerbeer opera that the best efforts of the conductor, director and the Royal Opera House seem powerless to influence. It seems like we really don't have the singers for this type of work any longer.
It's understandable that singers who would be suited to or capable of singing Meyerbeer are obviously more focussed on the greater career opportunities afforded by singing Wagner or bel canto. Even good Verdi singers are thin on the ground nowadays and the demands of Meyerbeer are often greater. Singing the title role, Bryan Hymel proves that he is up there and his performance is not only commendable, it's almost heroic. His voice might not be to everyone's taste, and it does start to grate and go a little bit wayward as the opera progresses through the final acts, but the effort is considerable. No less demanding is the role of Bertram and John Relyea handles it superbly and with great character. Despite her commitment, Marina Poplavskaya however is terribly miscast here, as is Patrizia Ciofi, who really doesn't have a large enough voice for this style of work, her singing sounding like a whimper that is lost in the orchestration and big choruses.
It's this aspect of the production that is the most problematic. While there are advantages to watching Robert le Diable on the screen that allow one to better to appreciate the full Meyerbeer experience that Oren and Pelly recreate, it only emphasises the unsuitability of some of the singing. There's no doubting the commitment of the performances however, and for all its flaws this is a sincere and a valiant effort to stage one of the great opera masterworks of yesteryear. The recording of the work and its presentation on the Opus Arte Blu-ray (which comes in a die-cut slipcase) is of course of the highest quality in both image and sound. The extra features however are slim, with only a Cast Gallery and a five-minute presentation on the legacy of the work, which does nonetheless give you an idea of the challenges of putting on this work. There's an essay and a full synopsis in the enclosed booklet. The disc is BD50, Full-HD, Region-free, with subtitles in English, French, German, Japanese and Korean.
