Verdi - Aroldo (Rimini, 2021)

Giuseppe Verdi - Aroldo

Teatro Galli di Rimini, 2021

Manilo Benzi, Emilio Sala, Edoardo Sanchi, Antonio Corianò, Lidia Fridman, Michele Govi, Adriano Gramigni, Cristiano Olivieri, Lorenzo Sivelli

Opera Streaming - 27th August 2021

A lot of time has passed since Verdi wrote Aroldo, and a lot of time has passed with Aroldo hardly being performed. A lot of time has passed also since its premiere in 1857 for the inauguration of the Teatro Nuovo in Rimini, so it's fitting that the opera should be performed there again for its reopening. The intervening years since Aroldo was first performed there have also seen a great deal of change and turmoil, including the destruction of the theatre during the war in 1943. Rebuilt after 75 years and now named the Teatro Galli, director Emilio Sala in some ways sees the fate of both theatre and opera intertwined or at least wants to use this production to bring together the shared history of the theatre and the legacy of this rare and by no means minor Verdi opera.

Aroldo may not be an entirely original work by Verdi, being a rework and rewrite of Stiffelio, but the history of the two works nonetheless span a pivotal period in the career of the composer. Stiffelio was written in 1850, just as Verdi was about to embark on his famous trilogy of Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and La Traviata, the work presaging themes and musical developments in these works, not least the protective father/daughter relationship of Rigoletto and with elements even of Germont's appeals to a fallen woman in La Traviata. Aroldo was then developed for Rimini in 1857 after these three masterpieces, with significant changes and a whole extra fourth act.

It's surprising then that Aroldo is not more widely recognised and is even less performed than Stiffelio. Even that work was only rediscovered relatively recently and successfully revived, a 1993 TV broadcast of a Royal Opera House production starring Jose Carreras and Catherine Malfitano a memorable discovery for me personally, remaining a personal favourite Verdi, but despite occasional revivals - usually for complete Verdi festivals - neither version has received due recognition as a strong work in their own right.

Part of the reason at least for Stiffelio's initial failure to gain a foothold in the repertoire is that it's quite different in several respects from the other early to mid-period Verdi works. It opens with wonderful solo trumpet led Sinfonia overture and it's overwrought drama is more of a domestic variety than that of any noble high society or great warrior leader. As a theme, guilt has more of a presence than the typical Verdi subject of revenge, although there's plenty of that too, albeit of a kind that fizzles out rather than end in bloodshed and tragedy. Unfortunately, the drama being based on a German Protestant minister, was also too different for Italian audiences and the censor not best pleased with a religious minister's wife being involved in adultery.

Verdi consequently reworked the opera in 1857, resetting it to England, the librettist Francesco Maria Piave extending and revising the opera with a fourth act, but Aroldo still retains much of the marvellous music and melodic invention of the original. Like most of Verdi's efforts to revise other works with concessions for ballet scenes in the French versions, chorus additions and cabaletta cuts made for the benefit of changing musical fashions, it's not a total success. As far as Aroldo is concerned, the reworking loses much that was fascinatingly different and already perfect in the original, but that doesn't make it the opportunity to compare a rare stage performance of Aroldo any less intriguing or exciting.

In the opening scene of Stiffelio, it is reported to the minister that a man has been seen jumping from the window of his wife Lina, leaving behind evidence that could identify him. The revelation, and the decision of Stiffelio to destroy the evidence without looking at it raises tensions from the outset, while here it's a little more subdued. Drawing from Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Harold: the Last of the Saxon Kings, Aroldo (Harold) returns from the Crusades and notices his wife Mina is not wearing her wedding ring, looking jumpy and guilty. Verdi raises the drama however more gradually and by the time of the slipping of a letter to her lover into a book, the drama has become more highly charged. 'Fatal, fatal mistero quel libro svelerà', buoyed by a chorus of scandalised onlookers is just as overwrought here as the original in Stiffelio. The extension however of the Act I conclusion 'Nol volete' after Mina's father's refusal to hand over the letter rather dissipates the tension that has been raised.

There is a similar picture throughout Aroldo. While the middle part of the work plays out much the same as in Stiffelio, with a duel and other situations for potential bloodshed averted, there is perhaps more of a similar sense of events heating up without ever quite boiling over. The intervening years between the two works that saw the creation of the mature Verdi's great masterpieces does indeed lead to evidence of a greater sophistication in the musical reworking, but Aroldo can also be seen consequently as being a little more conventional in the dramatic action than Stiffelio, with the rough edges that make the earlier work so interesting rather smoothed out even further in Piave's Act IV extension.

Under the direction of Emilio Sala and Edoardo Sanchi the 2021 production in Rimini does its best to reintroduce an edge by bringing the work together with the history of the theatre where it was first performed. It relocates the medieval English setting to the Italian war and colonisation of East Africa, changing references in the libretto from Palestina to Abyssinia and Eritrea. Instead of a storm in the new Act 4, projections and highlighted words align this with the bombardment of Rimini that destroys the town and the Teatro Nuovo on the night of 28th December 1943. The reconstruction of the theatre mirrors the rebirth of love between Aroldo and Mina, and the triumph of the divine. To further break down walls between the drama and real-life, the performers take this occasion to remove their costumes and wear their everyday clothes.

Reopened in 2018 after reconstruction, I imagine that the removal of the stalls seating to accommodate the orchestra was done more for the sake of social distancing. The opera is performed on the stage, the audience in the upper seating balconies. Aroldo is a typically demanding Verdi opera in the leading soprano and tenor roles. Lidia Fridman is quite impressive in the role of Mina, more than technically capable, she passionately throws herself into the role. Antonio Corianò struggles a little in the higher end of the dramatic tenor range, but is a good Aroldo. The performances are full of grand operatic gestures, but it's the nature of this opera and Verdi in general, and the Rimini production certainly matches the requirements at getting the quality of this work across very well indeed.

Links: OperaStreaming, Teatro Galli di Rimini

Verdi - La Traviata

Giuseppe Verdi - La Traviata

Teatro alla Scala, Milan - 2013

Daniele Gatti, Dmitri Tcherniakov, Diana Damrau, Piotr Beczala, Željko Lučić, Giuseppina Piconti, Mara Zampieri, Antonio Corianò, Roberto Accurso, Andrea Porta, Antrea Mastroni

ARTE Live Web Internet Streaming - 7th December 2013

Unsurprisingly, the opening night of the new season at La Scala was marked by controversy and the making of political statements. Not much changes then at the home of Italian opera, and even if much of the furore is unwarranted and probably manufactured, it's good to see an opera house being the place to air such passions. One would think that there was at least surely nothing to complain about in the choice of Verdi or in the superlative performance of La Traviata for the 7th December season opening night, but it seems that some people at La Scala would boo an empty stage.

The first political statement was of course made even before the evening began, and even before Daniele Gatti's call for a show of respect for the death of Nelson Mandela was met by a spontaneous round of applause rather than the expected minute's silence. It was the political choice of a Verdi opera to open the season, following the controversy of the year beginning with the other two-hundred year old birthday boy Richard Wagner, and the nationalistic approval of the choice was greeted with cries of 'Viva Verdi!' as the lights went down.

If the choice of Verdi seemed designed to appease the more vocal of the boorish loggionisti, the choice of director Dmitri Tcherniakov to mess with the maestro was almost certainly a move calculated to create controversy and generate headlines. Inevitably, despite this production of La Traviata being one of the director's most restrained, respectful and considered efforts, the headlines were indeed captured by a small group of idiots who were clearly intent on booing whatever the outcome. This resulted in Piotr Beczala vowing never to return to La Scala after the appalling behaviour of the audience, and Diana Damrau's Facebook page doing their best to distance the soprano from any controversy by noting that she was engaged to perform long before any production team was in place.

Was there any need for this? No, of course not. Any reasonable opera-goer would be floored by a La Traviata as good as this and be hard pressed to find any serious cause for complaint in either the cast, the performances or the staging. Indeed, you'd be hard pressed to find a better account of Verdi's masterpiece played anywhere in the world today. You're certainly not going to hear a Violetta Valery as good as Diana Damrau, and she was in superb form here, her singing not just flawless in terms of technique, but passionate, sensitive and dynamic in response to the drama. Damrau is one of the best sopranos in the world, but even she can't carry an opera on her own, and the supporting work and the direction all came together to make her performance shine all the brighter.

In terms of the production design, Tcherniakov is clearly aware that an opera like La Traviata doesn't need any 'concept' attached, and it doesn't have any weaknesses that need covered-over or updated. On the contrary, Tcherniakov's apparent hands-off approach actually went the opposite way as if to point out that the work is so strong that it doesn't need anything but the most basic of settings. It doesn't need the traditional elaborate costumes and plush interiors to depict the drama and the tragedy of human love, it just needs singers of great ability and attention paid to the dramatic tone. If you think a performance as good as this happens all by itself in a way that works seamlessly with all the other dramatic and performing elements, then you're seriously underestimating the role and the ability of the director.

I'll leave assessment of the interior design and the costumes to the fashion critics, and if you want to look for some of the director's more eccentric touches there may be something of a theme with dolls and angels, but however he did it, Tcherniakov's attention was clearly on matching the drama to the wealth of emotions and passions that are there in Verdi's extraordinary score. The most evident departures from the stage directions for example are in the gypsy entertainments at the start of Act II, Scene 2, where the director brings Alfredo in early and has the party songs directed at him as if they mean something. They don't quite match, and Alfredo looks rightly disconcerted here, as if everyone knows something about him and isn't letting him in on the joke - which in a way is true - but Willy Decker's production (seen most recently at the Met) plays on the same idea and does it much better.

The second part of Act II of La Traviata is indeed where all sorts of undercurrents and passions are expressed, words are spoken out of place and actions are misinterpreted and Tcherniakov managed to capture the unsettling quality of this key act in the above scene (one too often thrown-away or even, in more extreme cases, even cut), but he maintains the tension elsewhere in this scene in a variety of ways. The lights go out in an unsettling way a couple of times when Violetta arrives and when she steps forward to ponder the situation with Alfredo. It's difficult to find any more violent way of depicting Alfredo's public pay-back repudiation of Violetta than is already there in Verdi's music, but Tcherniakov convincingly shows an understanding Violetta attempting a conciliatory gesture, and the harsh dismissive gesture of Alfredo to an act of kindness makes this scene even more striking here.

Tcherniakov knows he can make this work because he has such a great cast who can not only sing well, but can act well enough to express the complicated mix of conflicting emotions that are at the heart of the work. Damrau commands the mixed emotions of every aria and cabaletta of every scene, from her impressive 'È strano ...sempre libera' that expresses childish excitement developing into rapturous joy tinged by fear and anxiety, through her fearful defiance and heroic capitulation to Giorgio Germont in Act II, to a simply stunning summation of the joy of living the moment of death in 'Addio del passato'. Surely one of the most challenging roles in the soprano repertoire, there are many who can do Violetta well, but few who can make this kind of impression and at the same time make the role entirely their own.

Alfredo can often be a thankless role, particularly if not given the same kind of attention by a director, but Tcherniakov would seem to have some sympathy for the character and his flaws and Piotr Beczala bravely (and thanklessly) puts all those characteristic out there on display. Alfredo is a bit wishy-washy at the start, and even with the Brindisi, Beczala seems only adequate to the role. Act II, Scene 1 is there for Alfredo's taking and the Polish tenor really develops into character here in such a way that his instability later in the Act becomes fascinating for how he deals with it. The potency of the characterisation and the manner in which in works with Damrau's Violetta makes the reappearance of Alfredo in Act III a moment of almost heart-stopping intensity. That's how it should be, it should set up the tragic conclusion to arrive with no sentimentality and no regrets, and this one is devastatingly good.