by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Metropolitan Opera’s October 17, 2015 performance of
Verdi’s Otello, first presented to movie
theatres as part of their “Live in HD” series and rebroadcast on KPBS yesterday
at noon, was an estimable production of what I would regard as the finest opera
Verdi ever wrote — indeed, arguably the finest opera ever written by an Italian composer. My favorite Italian
opera by a composer who wasn’t
Verdi or Puccini is Mefistofele
by Arrigo Boïto, who also wrote the libretti for Otello and Verdi’s last opera, Falstaff, both having agreed that if they were to
collaborate, they would seek their story sources from Shakespeare. (My
next-favorite Italian opera by someone other than Verdi or Puccini is Bellini’s
Norma.) Verdi came out of
retirement to compose Otello and Falstaff, and Otello premiered at La Scala in Milan in 1887 — not coincidentally, four
years after the death of Wagner. Eduard Hanslick, the Viennese music critic
Wagner viciously caricatured in Die Meistersinger, felt compelled to defend Verdi against the charge
of Wagnerian influence, saying that Verdi “owed nothing to the composer of Tristan
und Isolde” — which was true, but ignored
how the influence of Wagner’s earlier operas, particularly Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, can be felt in Verdi’s later work. (Tannhäuser and Lohengrin are the only Wagner operas Verdi owned scores of, and Lohengrin was the only one he ever saw performed — though he
must at least seen a copy of Tristan, since he’s on record as praising it.)
Because
Verdi’s career was so long — his first opera, Oberto, was written in 1837 and premiered in 1839, and his
last, Falstaff, was premiered
(also at La Scala) in 1893 — he grew and changed along with the operatic form
itself, from the conventionalities of bel canto with its strict divisions between recitative and
aria, its emphasis on vocal display, and its treatment of opera largely as a
showcase for star singers, to the newer, more flexible way of writing operas
that, if it didn’t altogether dissolve the difference between recitative and
aria (even Wagner didn’t eliminate that difference completely; as John Culshaw
pointed out, Wagner’s mature operas have “recitative” passages where Wagner
quiets the orchestra and allows what the singers are saying to be heard
distinctly, and “aria” passages in which he unleashes his orchestra at full
blast and the voices become part of the overall texture because what’s
important is the emotion being conveyed, not the actual words), certainly
smoothed it out. When Otello came
out it was hailed as Verdi’s masterwork, yet another milestone in operatic
history from the composer who had already significantly advanced the form with
the 1851 work Rigoletto and had
continued to push the envelope of what was both possible and practical on the
operatic stage. Since then a number of critics have tried to re-evaluate
Verdi’s oeuvre and rate the
middle-period hits — Rigoletto, Trovatore, Traviata — higher than the last works, but for me Otello remains Verdi’s masterpiece, a work informed by the
changes in music in general and opera in particular throughout the 19th
century but also pushing the envelope. Done properly, Otello is a rush of energy; though Boïto’s libretto smoothed
out the complexities and ambiguities of the play, what remained is a taut,
vividly told story of a man torn between love and war, between the guileless
heroine Desdemona and the cunning, manipulative Iago (Boïto, who’d called his
opera based on Goethe’s Faust Mefistofele, wanted Verdi to call his Otello opera Iago), and Iago’s
manipulation of Otello into suspecting, then believing, that his wife has been
unfaithful and finally killing her (and then himself when he realizes she was
guiltless). Verdi and Boïto tell this story in music and words that rush
through the catastrophe, always going for the ironic disjunct between Otello
the brilliant, savvy commander and Otello the uncertain lover. Otello is one of the greatest operas ever written, and
properly performed (or at least conducted as well as it was by Arturo
Toscanini, who as an orchestral cellist had participated in the 1887 premiere,
and who recorded the work in 1947 and tore through it with spirit and aplomb
despite a weak cast) it’s an energy rush as well as an intensely moving
tragedy.
The Met mostly did it honor with this production; the staging by
Bartlett Sher was somewhat ambiguous as to when it takes place (judging from the costumes by
Catherine Zuber, particularly the uniforms on the men, it seems to have been
relocated to the 19th century) but at least it didn’t intermix eras
and periods the way so many “Regietheater” (literally “director’s theatre,” in
which modern-day directors simply ignore the original story and text and use
the piece as an excuse to put on stage bizarre and contradictory images that
often don’t make sense) productions do these days. The way slabs of scenery are
shoved around (often by women costumed to match the opera’s period) to form the
outsides of buildings and thereby change the setting in mid-act is occasionally
risible but more or less works — there isn’t anything in the settings of Otello as silly as the house on the merry-go-round that
afflicted the Met’s production of Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta (in which the heroine is supposed to be blind, and I
couldn’t resist joking, “No, she’s not blind — just dizzy from the way you keep
turning her house around on that damned turntable!”) — and for once in a modern
opera production we’re seeing things that help project the work effectively
instead of fighting with it. The conductor is Yannick Nézet-Séguin, whom I’ve
previously criticized as slow and lacking energy, but though he isn’t Toscanini
he does move the opera
effectively and sounds the score well. The cast is a bit more problematical:
all three of the principals have Slavic names — tenor Aleksandrs (that’s how
it’s spelled on the Met’s Web site) Antonenko as Otello, soprano Sonya Yoncheva
as Desdemona and bass-baritone Zeljko Lucic as Iago — and though they sing
Italian opera idiomatically enough, they aren’t always the best voices you
could imagine in these parts. Antonenko has just the right trumpet-like tone —
the so-called squillo (“ring”)
for which opera singers are often praised — but on occasion he overdoes it and
becomes shrill, and when I heard the two other tenors in the piece, Dimitri
Pittas as Cassio and Chad Shelton as Roderigo (the guy Desdemona jilted to
marry Otello, and who has never forgiven her for it), I wondered if either of them might have made a better Otello than Antonenko.
(Carlo Cossutta did rise from
singing Cassio in a 1962 Covent Garden production under Georg Solti to
recording Otello, again with Solti conducting, in 1978.)
Antonenko did — or,
rather, didn’t — do one thing that put me off of his performance more than any
limitations in his singing per se:
he did not do anything to make
himself look Black. Yes, I know that in the original short story by Italian
author Geraldi Cinthio on which Shakespeare based the play, “Otello Moro” is
simply the character’s name — and it was the English translator of the version
Shakespeare read who read “Moro” as “Moor” and therefore created the plot point
that Ot[h]ello was Black — but Shakespeare did make that an integral part of his drama (Othello
even opens one of his speeches, “Hap’ly, for I am Black”), and for Verdi, who
revered Shakespeare, that would have been a sacred, unalterable part of the
story. I made fun of Plácido Domingo (one of the three greatest Otellos, along
with Lauritz Melchior — the absolute best, even though we only have about 15
minutes of excerpts to judge him by — and Jon Vickers) for putting on some
light-brown makeup that made it look like he’d just come out of a really good
tanning salon, but at least he tried
(though my dream of what an operatic Otello should look like is what Laurence
Olivier did when he acted the play in 1964, complete with dark black face makeup, a nappy black wig and even
holders in his nose to push out his nostrils and make them look more African;
as my mother said at the time, no one seeing him in that production without
knowing who he was could have guessed he was white in real life); Antonenko
didn’t even try, and if Ot[h]ello isn’t Black a good deal of the complexity of
the story, particularly the sense of alienation that makes him not quite
trusted by the Venetian officials even though they need his skills as a
general, disappears.
Zeljko Lucic’s Iago was rather curious; he doesn’t chew
the scenery (even in the big aria “Credo in un Dio crudel,” where Boïto’s text
and the jagged music Verdi set to it practically demand overacting — when Otello premiered there were rumors Boïto had actually
composed the “Credo” himself, and it is similar to Mefistofele’s big aria “Son lo spirito che nega,” but it’s
less likely for Boïto to have written the “Credo” than for Verdi to realize the
verses Boïto had written demanded that sort of setting); instead he plays the
part sort of like Conrad Veidt as the Nazi in Casablanca, a functionary who regards doing evil as his duty and
doesn’t get any big immoral thrill out of it. The best of the three principals
was Sonya Yoncheva; though she didn’t sound that much like Maria Callas, her voice had some of that
kind of weight and peculiar “bottled” quality, and whereas Desdemona, in both
the play and the opera, all too often comes off as literally too good to be true, Yoncheva brought enough vocal
weight and dramatic sense to the role that we didn’t get the impression with
her, as we sometimes do, that she’s marking time through the first three acts
just waiting to get to her big scena
— the “Willow Song” and “Ave Maria” — she does in Act IV just before Otello
comes into their bedroom and kills her. (Renata Tebaldi had just the right
voice for Desdemona, and it’s only a pity that to hear her you have to endure
the horrible Mario Del Monaco as Otello in both her recordings of the role.) I’d love to hear
Yoncheva as Lady Macbeth in Verdi’s first Shakespearean opera — the timbre of her voice seems more appropriate
for a Shakespearean villainess than a Shakespearean heroine — but she’s still
quite good here.
Overall, despite some deficiencies, this Otello does full justice to both Shakespeare and Verdi, and
watching it was a wrenching experience; I found myself crying at the
“Mandolinata” (the heart-rendingly beautiful tribute to Desdemona sung by the
Cypriot townspeople, which evokes Otello’s line, “If she be false, then heaven
mocks itself!”) and shaken by the ending. This is the sort of production a
repertory opera company like the Met should be doing: one that legitimately projects a classic
text and looks for its inspiration in what the original composer and librettist
(as well as the writer for their story source!) intended rather than some
conceit of the director’s (though I’ll admit I’ve liked some modern-dress opera
productions, including the marvelous Met Rigoletto in which Michael Mayer moved the action to 1960’s
Las Vegas and made the Duke Frank Sinatra and his courtiers the Rat Pack — that one worked because there was a legitimate parallel
between the moral corruption of the Mantuan court of the original and the moral
corruption of Las Vegas, soaked in alcohol, drugs and Mafia money); it’s the
sort of show that’s a good introduction to Otello as well as one that will give pleasure to someone
like me who knows the opera well (including having seen it, with Domingo in the
title role, in San Francisco in 1978).
