Giuseppe Verdi - La Traviata
Den Norske, 2018
Julia
Jones, Tatjana Gürbaca, Aurelia Florian, Matteo Lippi, Yngve Søberg,
Caroline Wettergreen, Martin Hatlo, Jens-Erik Aasbø, Johanne Højlund,
Rolf Conrad, Eivind Kandal, Pietro Simone, Ole Jørgen Kristiansen
OperaVision
I
imagine I'm not the only person to get jaded and avoidant of La
Traviata, particularly when it's performed in sanitised Belle Époque
period. If you've been listening to a lot of early Verdi in the
meantime however - which we've had more of an opportunity to explore in
recent years - it is interesting to come back to La Traviata and see it
in a context that highlights the level of mastery and developing
maturity Verdi had reached. At this stage in his career, Verdi is a
musician in complete control of the musical and dramatic expression of
his medium, pouring all those considerable forces into a subject that he
clearly feels strongly about. There's no two ways about it, La
Traviata is a remarkable work, a superb example of craft and passion,
and perhaps even genius.
While you might have endured
numerous stuffy and unimaginative copy-cat productions - which it has to
be said are still capable of delivering a devastating emotional impact -
there have been other more adventurous productions of La Traviata
willing to explore the work's themes further, testifying to the strength
of the musical and structural composition and the presence of universal
and contemporary themes within it. The need to fit into a social
milieu, society's insatiable hunger for gossip and scandal, and the
question of women's rights and the cruelty of their treatment is ever
more important in our own times.
Other than it being in
modern dress in a very stripped back minimalist set, the Den Norske
production directed by Tatjana Gürbaca doesn't initially appear to have
much more to add to these themes other than emphasis in certain places.
This director however was capable of using selective emphasis well in a
similarly minimalist production of Parsifal for Antwerp, so there is some promise of looking at La Traviata afresh. There's a silent pantomime
during the overture, with men dropping trousers during Violetta's wild
party, Alfredo is there in casual dress in contrast to the other
formally-dressed guests, Violetta and her maid Annina collect money out
of the pockets of the stupefied drunk revellers, but there's not really
much here to make anything new of the run though the Brindisi, the
'Sempre libera' etc. It's admirable, but uninspiring.
All
this takes place on a platform stage on top of the theatre stage with little in
the way of props, and by removing the accoutrements the work is able to
work purely on an emotional plane and move swiftly onto Act II with
barely a pause. Alfredo brushing away the debris from the party becomes
then another way of showing the two of them wanting to make a 'clean
sweep' of the past, even as their old friends look on from the
sidelines, sceptical and delighting in the unfortunate turns that
prevent the wayward couple thinking that they can exist and succeed
outside of the orbit of social expectation and its approval.
There
are other hints why society's conventions and expectations might drag
them down, and they could strike you as a little jarring as this act and the
rest of the opera progresses. Alfredo is unexpectedly physically rough
with Violetta's maid Annina, but that could be seen as foreshadowing his
later abusive treatment of Violetta at Flora's party and hint at an
underlying distasteful attitude towards women in general. That is
somewhat over-emphasised by the Matador song at Flora's party, which may
well be a display of machismo, but using it as an excuse for the guests to
physically maul Violetta feels uncomfortable and doesn't seem merited by
the situation, particularly as everyone is later appalled at Alfredo's
unacceptable behaviour towards her. Outwardly at least.
A similar
kind of discrepancy between outward polite behaviours really hiding less
pleasant or perhaps just old-fashioned attitudes towards women is not
unexpectedly also brought out in the behaviour of Giorgio Germont.
During 'Pura siccome un angelo' his daughter is present on the
stage, which isn't new, but there's an interesting spin here in how
Germont's pleading to Violetta to step aside for the sake of his
daughter is played as his daughter taking her place, to be stripped and
abused by society. This and a whole family gathering gets across much better the idea of the
perpetuation of attitudes towards women and of the hypocrisy that
underlies them. By Act III, the stage has fractured, Violetta largely
alone on an island of the stage. Violetta's efforts to resist the tide
of social attitudes and achieve happiness is doomed to failure and her
sacrifice is played up as a kind of martyrdom, which to a large extent
it is intended to be.
Such ideas are good at relating the
sentiments and the gender politics of the work to the present, but
musically there's less room for invention and interpretation under the
musical direction of Julia Jones. The effectiveness of Verdi's
composition is plainly evident however in how this gains force as the
opera progresses. The flow of the work in that regard is impressive
here and the singing is effective. Aurelia Florian is challenged by the
extravagant high notes and coloratura, but builds on the character of Violetta, as you have no option but follow her course, and she does carry a strong
emotional expressiveness throughout. Matteo Lippi is likewise very
expressive in the romantic Italianate style that you would expect for
Alfredo. Some interesting ideas and meaningful emphasis is applied here
in the Den Norske production and Verdi's masterpiece is undeniable,
but I don't feel I need to hear La Traviata again for another while yet.
Links: Den Norske Opera, OperaVision
Giacomo Puccini - Tosca
Den Norske Opera, Oslo - 2017
Karl-Heinz Steffens, Calixto Bieito, Svetlana Aksenova, Daniel Johansson, Claudio Sgura, Jens-Erik Aasbø, Pietro Simone, Ludvig Lindström, Thorbjørn Gulbrandsøy, Aksel Johannes Skramstad Rykkvin
Opera Platform
One of the criticisms that can perhaps be legitimately be made against Tosca is that it is indeed little more than a cheap violent thriller, or a "shabby little shocker" as Joseph Kerman once characterised it, a term that it now wears as a badge of honour. Kerman's other criticisms against it for breaking the so-called rules of opera composition are rather more dubious subjective opinions based on a personal interpretation of what opera should be, but Tosca certainly is a dark, violent piece of verismo whose shock value threatens to submerge any human qualities that might be found in the opera, if indeed you think there are any. You could pretty much say the same about Calixto Bieito's production of Tosca for Den Norske Opera's production in Oslo.
Bieito's rather bleak outlook on the opera then might well be the only really valid way of approaching this work. To take it seriously as a historical piece or even as a strictly realist piece of drama, it's obviously absurd and quite overblown. Whether Tosca has any real commentary to make on historical events or whether it has any insightful point to make about ordinary people caught up in a political nightmare is doubtful. It's safer to think of Tosca as purely a political thriller and nothing more, and on that basis it is undoubtedly a thoroughly effective piece.
Similar criticisms could be made about Puccini's final unfinished opera Turandot, which is a work that seems perversely cruel and rather heavily scored out of all proportion to the opera's fairy-tale setting, and Calixto Bieito likewise focussed on the sinister authoritarian undercurrent that runs through that work in his production of it. Bieito's Tosca is more or less a companion piece to that Turandot, a study in the corruption and brutality of totalitarian rule that crushes individual freedom, going further to explore the repression of the arts within such a regime and the duty of the artist to speak out against it.
"Your silence will not protect you", states the placard wielded by political prisoner and fugitive Angelotti before the Oslo production of Tosca starts, and more so than in Bieito's Turandot where a similar warning was made about the silencing of dissent by artists who dared speak out against a cruel regime, Tosca does indeed deal with two artists - the opera singer Tosca and the artist Cavaradossi - who find themselves forced to take a stance against a cruel regime and address the real issues of its corrupt activities when those issues are brought to their door.
Director Calixto Bieito does his best to make that situation as shocking and as sinister as it is possible to make it on a stage and within this particular work. The audience are subjected to an onslaught of violence for the full three acts of the opera, with no interval to provide a breathing space. It's somewhat stylised and representational, but it still carries the requisite shock value. The Madonna painted by Cavaradossi is not a painting but a real woman, stripped naked, her robe held out as a 'fan' for Tosca to discover. Cavaradossi is brutally tortured on-stage, Bieito makes use of dwarfs in school uniforms for henchmen, and even introduces a son for Scarpia, another schoolboy who licks lasciviously on a lollypop. There's no innocence to be found anywhere here.
Least of all in Scarpia. And, as you might expect, Bieito makes him as vile a character as possible, pawing over Floria Tosca and another woman who we presume is his wife, and Claudio Sgura does his best to make him as repugnant as possible. That's to be expected, but Bieito also seems to want to explore how this corruption also extends to destroy the purity of the artist and how this might even be a necessary thing. This Floria Tosca goes rather further than most before killing Scarpia (bizarrely with his own spectacles rather than a knife) and is fired up by the experience. As Cavaradossi observes those "sweet hands pure and gentle" have "dealt out death".
For Bieito's emphasis to work - if it is even possible to truly depict the horror of a totalitarian state on a live theatre stage and in an opera like Tosca - it needs a Tosca who can respond to it on those terms, reacting to the violation of her integrity with horror and then come to terms with opposing it, even if that endeavour in Puccini's opera is ultimately futile. That, on top of the kind of the role's singing demands is a lot to ask of any soprano, and Svetlana Aksenova struggles somewhat. Aksenova doesn't have quite a big enough voice or personality to carry such a role, but sings well nonetheless. Her acting performance however lacks conviction to such an extent that when Scarpia says his is fired up by the new woman who has explosively adopted a new role he has never seen before, you do wonder what he's talking about.
Aksenova however does come more into the part in Act III when the trauma of the experience seems to tell on Tosca, and it's in this act that the effectiveness of Bieito's direction of the work becomes evident in its relationship with the music. You can't really put the true violence of Tosca on the stage; it's too brutal and it needs the medium of music to translate it. Karl-Heinz Steffens's conducting is a bit light in places when you need more forceful hand and a greater dynamic between the verismo violence and the more idealised human sentiments, such as those sung so beautifully by Daniel Johansson in Cavaradossi's 'E lucevan le stelle'. Half measures won't do and I don't think you can overstate in Tosca; the contrast needs to be there to show the force with which those gentle human sentiments will inevitably be crushed.
Puccini shows no mercy for any of his characters and neither does Bieito. The lighting is harsh permitting no soft colours, the stark bright spotlights picking out the characters in the darkness and throwing shadows. There is no place to run and no place to hide on Susanne Gschwender's sets. Nor is there a place to jump. You can hardly expect Bieito to be as crude as actually having Tosca leap from the Castel Sant' Angelo, but whether it's an acknowledgement that there's only so far you can push such 'realism' before it becomes sentimental or whether the director believes that both Tosca and Cavaradossi have to live at least long enough to acknowledge their actions, Bieto spares them the final famous denouement, but not their torment. Ultimately however, it's Puccini's extraordinary building and contrasting of the musical forces that determines their fate and Bieito follows it to its appropriately devastating conclusion.
Links: Den Norske Opera, Opera Platform
