Verdi - Un giorno di regno (Garsington, 2024)

Giuseppe Verdi - Un giorno di regno

Garsington Opera, 2024

Chris Hopkins, Christopher Alden, Joshua Hopkins, Henry Waddington, Grant Doyle, Madison Leonard, Christine Rice, James Micklethwaite, Oliver Sewell, Daniel Vening, Robert Murray

OperaVision - 5th July 2024

One of the great things about opera, or an opera, is that it is never something done, recorded, wrapped up and archived, but always something waiting to be rediscovered and revitalised for a new age. An opera that is deemed a failure by the critics and public on its opening night two centuries ago can be revived and lauded as a masterpiece today. Similarly, an opera that once drew acclaim and sold out theatres for years can fall out of fashion or get lost and forgotten as musical tastes and style moves elsewhere. Verdi's Un giorno di regno, ossia Il finto Stanislao, the composer's second opera, was by any measure a complete failure, its initial run at La Scala in Milan in 1840 cancelled after one performance. Written in the period following the death of his wife and two children, the composer himself disavowed the work, but although it is unlikely to ever be considered a masterpiece today, that doesn't necessarily mean that we should accept an initial judgement of the work as the final word on it.

Another early Verdi opera Alzira (1845) was also judged by the public, critics and composer alike as a failure, but I've certainly seen one successful production (Buxton, 2018) that if not revealing it to be a lost masterpiece, at least shows it is better than the reputation that has clung to it, and is at least as good as any of Verdi’s early works. The difference between Alzira and Un giorno di regno however is that the former - albeit in an exotic location - is very much in the familiar Verdi idiom of a nation under an oppressive rule, while the latter is the composer’s first attempt at writing comedy, something he concluded he just wasn't very good at. It would only be at the end of his career over 50 years later that he would attempt comedy again in his final opera Falstaff, and at that stage there is little dispute that he was able to create a comic masterpiece.

But in 1840 it's clear that in Un giorno di regno ('A One-Day Reign', or 'King for a Day') Verdi was working outside of his yet to be fully established comfort zone. The plot isn't really worth relating in any detail or indeed following closely as the opera itself progresses. It involves a French officer Cavaliere di Belfiore "for complex reasons of state" impersonating the Polish king Stanislaus for the day as a guest at the home of the Baron of Kelbar, where a double wedding is soon to be held. His daughter Giulietta is to be married against her will to the financier La Rocca, separating her from the distraught but penniless Edoardo. The Baron's niece, the Marchesa del Poggio, is also to be married to a mystery groom since her lover Belfiore seems to have disappeared, but doesn't the king look suspiciously like him?… In the tradition of such tangled relationships and disguised identities, chaos and hilarity ensue. Except of course historically we know that wasn't the case.

Where you might expect a lightness of comic touch in the situations of the fake Stanislaus sorting out the romantic complications and making fools of the greedy rich elite, Verdi wades straightaway into Un giorno di regno with highly dramatic scoring, heroic proclamations and booming choruses. Any good production of an opera however (as with the Buxton Alzira) can choose to shift the focus over to the strengths of the work and mitigate against its weaknesses. You would presume that would have to be the intention and approach of any company brave enough to tackle Un giorno di regno, and that indeed is exactly what Garsington do here under the direction of Christopher Alden.

The strengths of this opera however are actually in the music, it's just that the weakness in the plot or perhaps it's the unsuitability and disparity between the tone of the music and the comic plot that makes things a little difficult for a director. But clearly not insurmountable and the way the Garsington production handles this is quite clever and entertaining. You can do a lot by playing up the visual comedy, all the actors well-directed here to puff up the absurdity of their characters - not in a parodic way (well, just a little), but rather as a broad comedy. It's not meant to be subtle; it is still early Verdi after all. As for the huge choruses, the early chorus of nationalistic pride here is depicted as the king's secret service bodyguards, dressed in black suits and sunglasses, all donning the colours of the national team to celebrate a news report of the Polish football team’s success. That fits perfectly. The TV news reports (the channel Forte News with its amusingly tag line of 'Loud. In 4/4 time. All the time.') are also very effective for filling in details of the plot that could otherwise be missed.

Character definition goes a long way to making this tongue-in-cheek update workable. When we are introduced to her, the Baron’s rebellious daughter Giulietta, who has been separated from her Edoardo for a more advantageous marriage and is thereby "suffering in mortal anguish", wears long unkempt threaded hair, is dressed in grungy tracksuit and flipflops, and has a 'Not My King' poster on the wall. Her rebellious nature is underlined (very heavily here) as she deals awkwardly with a delivery guy who has just delivered an online order of a self-assembly bomb and detonator. Giulietta is perfectly defined by the production design even before she sings a note, since you can't totally trust Verdi to get it right at this stage in his second opera. Musically it's wonderful, but the tone and libretto all feel wrong for the situation - Giulietta's ladies-in-waiting cooing a chorus (not that anyone coos in a Verdi opera) of "Why does sorrow cloud her angelic features?" - unless it's delivered with heavy sarcasm. 

The Garsington production doesn't stoop to making fun of such expressions, but sets Verdi's music more in character with the visual comedy of the production design than the silly/earnest 19th century libretto. It helps that the characterisation and singing performances are strong enough to carry it. In this scene for example, beautifully sung by Madison Leonard, her delivery is spot-on, striking the balance between sorrow and angry defiance; "Inclined to melancholy" she can pout with the best of them. Likewise the defining of the Treasurer La Rocca as a financier whose greed is turned against him when he seeks a more advantageous 'promotion' over the promise of marriage to the Marchesa fits nicely, as does the characterisation of the Baron as a ruthless oligarch and arms dealer. All have a surprising relevance to mocking the totalitaritechnocapitalist (© First Dog on the Moon) powers we see continuing to rise even in the aftermath of this 2024 production. Not so funny in real life, that bit.

Charles Edwards' set design for this 21st century visualisation of the opera is marvellous. The large stage at Garsington is employed to show-off a modern mansion of fashionable minimalism and expensive good taste, albeit one that doesn't necessarily extend to the choice of attire of those within. The Baron, CEO of Kelbar Defence industries, gives the king a boardroom presentation of the latest models of weaponry and helicopters, all ready to sell. Somehow it also helps to sell this adventurous scene of Verdi's where the business meeting on war goes on simultaneously with Edoardo and Giulia romancing in the next room. As an arms dealer moreover, the idea of a 'shotgun wedding' takes on a new meaning when the Baron learns that La Rocca has declined the offer to marry the Baron's daughter after the better offer that has been made by the pretend king.

All of this suitably amplifies the plot to rise to the level of the music, but inevitably it all becomes a bit silly: the opera and the production both. Or fun if you like, with Henry Waddington's Barone di Kelbar and Grant Doyle's La Rocca not only delivering superb singing performances, but also while engaging in comic slapstick and a duel as a food fight with spaghetti bolognese at five paces. There is plenty of entertainment like this in the singing and performances of Christine Rice as the Marchesa del Poggio and Joshua Hopkins as Belfiore, some of it distracting, some of it a welcome distraction that helps lift the slow movement towards reconciliation and resolution in the second act. It's never less than entertaining and as good a production as you are ever likely to see of Un giorno di regno.

External links: Garsington opera, OperaVision

Turnage - Anna Nicole

Mark-Anthony Turnage - Anna Nicole

The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London 2011

Antonio Pappano, Richard Jones, Eva-Maria Westbroek, Alan Oke, Gerald Finley, Susan Bickley, Loré Lixenberg, Peter Hoare, Rebecca de Pont Davies, Allison Cook, Andrew Rees, Grant Doyle, Wynne Evans

Opus Arte

Dealing with a low-brow subject, treating it to an outlandish and tasteless staging, with crude language and bad-taste humour, there is a danger that Anna Nicole, an opera by Mark Anthony Turnage about the former Playboy model who died of a drug overdose in 2007, could be accused of making Eurotrash out of American Trash, but the language and the staging befits the tone of its subject. The barrage of rhyming couplets in the libretto from Richard Thomas (Jerry Springer the Opera) may clearly signal their intention to rhyme at the end with four-letter words and other mildly shocking profanities, but at the same time there is wit and pathos here in a libretto that actually manages to cut through the niceties directly to harsh crude reality of the circumstances of Anna Nicole Smith’s life, unpalatable though that might be to the average opera-going audience. Benjamin Britten and particularly Billy Buddcomes to mind in the use of language, in its subject – which is also about a kind of loss of innocence on a bigger level than just the personal – and in Turnage’s score, which also adopts his usual jazz and American influences, successfully finding the right tone for each occasion.

The colourful, tastefully tacky set-designs by Richard Jones also adopt the right tone with plenty of eye-catching sights not commonly seen in an opera house, including a sequence in a lap-dancing parlour replete with artificial breast-enhanced women twirling themselves gymnastically and provocatively from poles. The decision to present the opera as if it were a reality-TV show in which a chorus of TV hosts interview Anna Nicole Smith, already dead but looking back over her life and tracing the path from smalltown girl to media celebrity that will ultimately lead to her destruction, is a masterstroke and it imbues the piece with a slightly sinister edge that grows as the opera proceeds. The tone darkens considerably by the second half, when it does indeed become a tragedy, as the people in Smith’s life disappear to be replaced by masses of ominous black figures with TV cameras for heads.

Antonio Pappano, conducting the orchestra of the Royal Opera House, does well to allow the music score to assert its presence and not be overshadowed by the spectacle or the libretto. Eva-Maria Westbroek is marvellous in the title role, and well supported by Gerald Finlay and Alan Oke. As more of a Wagnerian soprano, Westbroek is not really tested by the limited singing demands of the role, but she sings exceptionally well and manages to bring out the inherent humanity of her character, never letting her be merely an icon, nor indeed, allowing the performance to descend into parody. Whether the opera ultimately has anything new to say or whether it touches on anything deeper in its subject – if indeed there is anything deeper to be drawn from its subject – is questionable, but Anna Nicole demonstrates nonetheless that opera can still be a vital artform to address contemporary subjects in a powerful manner that can connect with a modern audience.

On Blu-ray from Opus Arte, the opera – opening with a legal disclaimer that it is “not intended to be an actual factual depiction of any person” – looks every bit as bold as it should, the striking colours deeply saturated, with strong blacks and contrasts, and a good level of detail. This often looks just stunning, and it is well filmed, picking out the singers at the right moments, while also allowing the overall impact of the set to be appreciated. The audio tracks in PCM Stereo and DTS HD-Master Audio 5.1 are also effective in allowing the detail of the musical arrangements to come through. Subtitles are in English (so you can check that they actually sang what you thought they sang but couldn’t quite believe), French, German and Spanish. Aside from a Cast Gallery, the only other extra on the disc is a brief Production Report (8:25), introduced by Pappano, which nonetheless covers the development of the opera well with interviews with Turnage, Thomas and Westbroek.

Turnage - Anna Nicole

Mark-Anthony Turnage - Anna Nicole

The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London

Antonio Pappano, Richard Jones, Eva-Maria Westbroek, Alan Oke, Gerald Finley, Susan Bickley, Loré Lixenberg, Peter Hoare, Rebecca de Pont Davies, Allison Cook, Andrew Rees, Grant Doyle, Wynne Evans

World Premiere - February 17th, 2011

A few eyebrows will have been raised, and no little amount of scepticism expressed, when it was announced that Mark-Anthony Turnage would be writing an opera for the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden about Anna Nicole Smith, a former Playboy model who died of a drug overdose in 2007. In reality, however there’s nothing at all new about opera dealing with women who live scandalous lives and come to an untimely end. If Turnage’s Anna Nicole is unlikely however to be considered a masterpiece on the scale of Madama Butterfly, La Bohème, La Traviata or Lulu, it at least has the advantage of dealing with a contemporary subject with the kind of social lifestyle and aspirations that a modern audience can relate to more easily. And if the merits of Anna Nicole as an opera can certainly be questioned, there is at least no doubt, judging from the headlines and media attention that it has generated, that is indeed a worthy subject of great interest to the general public.

Commissioned by the Royal Opera House under the direction currently of Antonio Pappano – a great supporter of opening up opera to a wider audience – the general public would at least have been no doubt familiar with the subject of the opera, Anna Nicole Smith, and have some familiarity with the nature of her “career” and the circumstances of her death at the age of only 39. What was rather less certain was the tone that would be adopted by Mark-Anthony Turnage (Greek, The Silver Tassie) – a composer who can be rather experimental in his work, and is known for incorporating jazz and other forms of modern music into his compositions. It didn’t take too long for it to be established that the tone of the opera would be heavily influenced by the choice of Richard Thomas as librettist, the resulting barrage of rhyming couplets, with a high swearword quotient, bring Anna Nicole closer to Thomas’ work on Jerry Springer the Opera than to Turnage’s Greek.

Initial and surface impressions however prove to be deceptive, for while Anna Nicole Smith’s early life, her escape from the “shithole” backwater of Mexia (pronounced Mu-HAY-ah, we are told, as if it gives the town some kind of distinction) and her first marriage to Billy Smith is very much the kind of material that US daytime TV shows thrive on, it does nonetheless have a relevance to how a large proportion of society live and it reflects their aspirations, unpalatable thought they may appear to an opera-going audience. Just as significantly, the manner in which the opera is initially presented and the tone it strikes is vitally important, and indeed it ought to match and be appropriate to the content. The decision then to present it through the medium of a chorus of TV hosts to whom Anna Nicole, already dead but looking back over her life in the manner of a reality TV show and tracing the path that will ultimately lead to her destruction, is a masterstroke, imbuing the piece with a slightly sinister edge that grows as the opera proceeds. The opera darkens considerably by the second half, when it does indeed become a tragedy, as the people in her life disappear to be replaced by masses of ominous black figures with TV cameras for heads.

While there are certainly plenty of eye-catching sights in the imaginative, colourful, tastefully tacky set-designs (by Richard Jones) to provide entertainment, with strong language and even a sequence in a lap-dancing parlour replete with breast-enhanced women twirling themselves gymnastically and provocatively from poles – all things that are, I think it’s safe to say, not all that common on the stage of the Royal Opera House and likely therefore to generate interest and headlines – it’s easy to be distracted from what is going on musically and in the opera as a whole. Richard Thomas’ rhyming couplets, which deliberately clearly signal their intentions to rhyme at the end with four-letter words and other mildly shocking profanities, actually manage to cut through the niceties directly to harsh realities of the circumstances of Anna Nicole’s life in a tone that is appropriate and understandable to a modern-day audience. It’s reality-TV language, but there’s something in the phenomenon and popularity of reality-TV as a representation of the American Dream that is worth examining, and Thomas’ libretto gets to the hard truths and the tragedy of it all, wrapping it up cleverly in pithy, satirical and witty phrases.

It’s easy also to be distracted from what Turnage is doing musically, but he, likewise, succeeds allowing the nature of the opera’s subject to establish the correct tone rather than imposing his own upon it. In doing so moreover, Turnage nonetheless finds a perfect expression for his own musical language and the often American influences that he draws from and incorporates into his music. Anna Nicole Smith’s leaving of Mexia (pronounced Mu-HAY-ah), for Huston, where she works in a Wal-Mart store, is set to a blues rhythm that matches the zombie-like movements of its employees, a swinging jazz percussion accompaniment is used for the strip-club scene, while other scenes evoke George Gershwin. Antonio Pappano, conducting the orchestra of the Royal Opera House, succeeded in allowing the music score to assert its presence at such times, darkening the tone considerably in the tragedy of the Second Act, by which stage the audience were thoroughly in the grip of the piece and solemnly mindful of where it was leading. Much credit for the embodiment of the tragedy that Anna Nicole’s life would represent has to go to the Eva-Maria Westbroek. As a Wagnerian soprano, her voice wasn’t at all tested by the limited singing demands of the role, but she sang exceptionally well and managed to bring out the inherent humanity of her character, never letting her be merely an icon, nor indeed, allowing it to descend into parody.

Whether Anna Nicole is ultimately considered a success as an opera – it received a very warm reception at its World Premiere from the audience at Covent Garden and a guardedly positive response from the national press – it is at least a success as far as the Royal Opera House is concerned, selling out its initial short run of six shows, but more importantly generating more interest and front page headlines than any other important opera event, premiere or any drawing of the biggest names in the opera to the house have achieved. Beyond its artistic merits, whether the opera ultimately has anything new to say or whether it touches on anything deeper in its subject – all of which are debatable and subjective – what Anna Nicole demonstrates is that opera can still be a vital artform that can address contemporary subjects in a powerful manner that connects with a modern audience.