by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark
Last night my husband Charles and I screened a Blu-Ray disc of a 2019 production of Gaspare Spontini’s opera Fernand Cortez, composed in 1809 while Spontini was living and working in France and Napoleon personally commissioned the work as a justification for France’s attempt to conquer and occupy Spain. It was the ninth of Spontini’s 12 operas and came right after his biggest success, La Vestale, a story about a Vestal Virgin in ancient Rome who breaks her vows and has a love affair with a Roman general. To the extent Spontini has a presence in the modern-day standard operatic repertory it’s because of La Vestale, whose toehold in the opera world comes mostly from Maria Callas having sung it at La Scala in 1954. Her performance survives in a broadcast recording of the whole opera and studio cuts of three of its arias, and is still the easiest recording of Vestale to obtain even though there’ve been a few attempts since to record it under studio conditions in q quality sound and note-complete instead of riddled with cuts the way so many of Callas’s live performances were. (Arkivmusic.com lists five complete recordings of La Vestale but four of them are of the Callas broadcast; the one that isn't features Denyce Graves in the female lead and is listed at http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=10061.)
I remember being unimpressed by the three arias Callas recorded when I encountered them in the early 1980’s and tacitly agreeing with critic Michael Barclay’s snide comment that “if [Callas] found Mozart’s operas boring it’s a wonder she could stay awake during Vestale.” Then I read Felice Picano’s novel Like People in History and in particular was piqued by his scenes describing a group of Gay men in the repertory department of the San Francisco Opera looking for an obscure opera from the bel canto era to revive, with the choice ultimately coming down to Rossini’s Emilia di Liverpool or Spontini’s Agnese di Hohenstaufen. They ultimately went with the Spontini work, and so did I: when I researched what was available of these two operas online the only record of the Rossini was a pricey Opera Rara set combining it with Rossini’s own revision, L’Eremitaggio di Liverpool (“The Hermit of Liverpool” – both versions are a hoot for modern audiences, especially ones aware of British geography, because Rossini’s librettists depicted Liverpool as a city surrounded by hills instead of the seaport it actually is; one could imagine the reaction of an Italian audience to a British opera that made the same mistake about Venice!) but I was able to get a download of Agnese from Opera Depot for a reasonable price – and it turned out to be a quite good opera. It was also far more popular in Germany than in France, partly because the story was set there and partly because Spontini’s main role models as a composer were German – Gluck, Beethoven and Weber.
So I came to Fernand Cortez – or, to give it its full title, Fernand Cortez ou la Conquéte du Mexique – ready to like it a lot. In one respect I wasn’t disappointed: Spontini’s music is glorious, showing off his clear love of German symphonic music and a willingness to use the orchestra far more extensively and creatively than his Italian contemporaries or immediate heirs (George Bernard Shaw once dismissed the orchestral parts in Rossini, Donizetti and early Verdi as “the big guitar”). But the work as a whole turned out to be a lumbering bore. Spontini’s librettists, Étienne de Jouy and Joseph Alphonse d’Erménard, begin their story with Cortez and his men already having fought their way into Mexico and established a beachhead, only the Mexican tribes that originally fled these strange white men with horses and firearms, neither of which the Mexicans had seen, have pulled together to mount a resistance and Cortez’s men are urging him to head back to their ships and retreat. A delegation from the Aztec emperor Montezuma (yes, I know the P.C. way to spell his name these days is “Moctezuma,” which probably comes closer to the original Aztec) shows up bringing not only gold trinkets but a batch of slave women whom they offer to the Spanish as animate sex toys – depicted in this production with surprising explicitness by choreographer Alessio Maria Romano – only Cortez (tenor Dario Schmunck) has fallen genuinely in love with a Native woman, Amazily (soprano Alexia Voulgaridou), and wants to marry her. (In real life Cortez’s native mistress was named Malinche, and he couldn’t have married her even if he’d wanted to because he already has a wife back in Spain. Cortez and Malinche had two sons together, including a bit of a scapegrace named Martín whom historian Lesley Byrd Simpson once referred to as “the first mestizo.” Indeed, the Spaniards and the Natives interbred so thoroughly almost all modern-day Mexicans are mixed-race mestizos.)
The third leading character is Amazily’s brother Télesco (baritone Luca Lombardo), who gets what turns out to be the piece’s most beautiful and profound aria at the beginning of the second (of three) act, lamenting the invasion of his country and vowing resistance. The opera is three hours long but has surprisingly little plot: Cortez is attempting to negotiate the release of his brother Alvaro (David Ferri Dura), who’s been taken prisoner by the Aztecs, but the Aztecs want him as a human sacrifice (the nastiest part of their religion – all those cool-looking gutters on the sides of the great pyramids in Mexico were there to drain the blood of the sacrifice victims efficiently) and will only return him to Cortez if he gives them Amazily instead. Amazily is so much in love with Cortez that she willingly offers herself as a sacrifice to save her boyfriend’s brother – at the end of act two she’s shown swimming through the lake that surrounds the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán (where Mexico City is today) so she can show up at the Aztec temple and take the place of Alvaro Cortez – only at the very end both she and Alvaro are saved by the Spanish artillery gunners, who successfully besiege the capital and force the Aztecs into submission.
As propaganda, the piece is rather muddled to begin with – Napoleon and whoever he had in charge of the arts seemed to think that their depiction of an imperialist war with Spain as the aggressor would be seen as justification for their imperialist war against Spain, and their approving depiction of the replacement of the bloodthirsty Aztec religion with Roman Catholicism would be seen as an example to be emulated by the fiercely anti-clerical and anti-Catholic Napoleon. (When Napoleon’s forces occupied Italy he ordered his men to seize the archives of the Inquisition in the Vatican and ship them to France in four large wagons; two of the wagons were lost in transit but the other two made it to Paris and the documents they contained are still our best source for the history of how the Inquisition actually operated.) The politics of the piece got even more muddled in 1817, after Napoleon’s fall, when Spontini made the first of no fewer than four revised versions, one of which was performed in Turin in the 1970’s in a production that generated a private-label recording. The revisions apparently turned it into less of a propaganda piece, and the producers at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino (the name means “Florence May Festival” and that’s what it originally was, but the company now operates and maintains an orchestra and chorus year-round) reverted to the 1809 version but added written interludes projected above the scene, attributed to a diary being kept by Moralez (Gianluco Margheri), one of Cortez’s men, meditating on the inevitable whitewashing of Cortez’s conquest through history and the presentation in the main opera of Cortez as considerably more noble and heroic than he really was. (The main primary Spanish source for the story of Cortez is the priest he had along on the mission, Father Bernal Diaz del Castillo, who was genuinely appalled at the way the conquistadores treated the Natives and got away with saying so in his book.) The excerpts from Moralez’ diary were added in this production (though it’s not clear who wrote them) and, for the benefit of the audience in Florence, were in Italian even though the opera was actually sung in French.
The problems with Fernand Cortez are mainly in its structure: Act I in particular contains so many dance interludes it almost seems like Spontini was trying to revive the style of Jean Phillippe Rameau, a French composer from a century earlier who included so much dancing in his stage works he even called them “opera-ballets.” There’s also a long dance sequence at the very end of the piece that functions something like the big musical numbers in India’s “Bollywood” films, which almost end with a song-and-dance scene even if the rest of the film was not a musical. (These were actually quite common in operas of the time; Mozart’s Idomeneo ends with a big dance sequence, though it’s almost never performed or recorded as part of the opera today; I remember once looking for Idomeneo in a record store and having to content myself with a record of the opera and a totally separate record of the ballet music from another orchestra, conductor and record label.) And even when the characters in Fernand Cortez are singing instead of dancing, they’re doing so mostly in big choruses that make the piece sound as much like an oratorio than an opera. Fanfare reviewer James A. Altena called the first act “interminable” and faulted the conductor of this version, Jean-Luc Tingaud, for not taking it faster – though I’m not sure even Toscanini could have propelled this opera through its longueurs. It’s also the sort of piece in which the big action scenes happen off-stage and are merely described – even though the stagecraft of the 19th century could have done a quite good job of depicting them. The one spectacular visual effect we get is of Cortez burning his own ships to make sure his soldiers can’t keep demanding that he use them to retreat – historically accurate and represented here by real, albeit controlled, flames burning in front of a painted backdrop showing ships.
On the plus side is that director Cecelia Ligerio and designers Massimo Checchetto and Alessia Colosso kept it in the right historical period, and the Florence May Festival got three excellent principals for the roles of Cortez, Amazily and Télesco. Dario Schmunck is a typically short, stocky tenor but he has a great voice and he manages to convince us that he’s the unambiguous hero Jory and d’Esménard depicted in their libretto; Luca Lombardo does justice to the best aria in the piece; and, especially in the last two acts, Alexia Voulgaridou is absolutely electrifying in a demanding role and would be well on her way to a major career as a dramatic soprano in Callas-like repertoire if SARS-CoV-2 hadn’t come along to screw up everything. As a whole, Fernand Cortez doesn’t strike me as at the level of Vestale or Agnese, but the more personal scenes are gripping and the opera generally is worth having even though I couldn’t help but compare it to Jacques Fromental Halévy’s La Juive, which I got in the same Amazon.com order as Fernand Cortez.
The difference between them is essentially the story of what happened to opera as a form in the quarter-century between them; not only are the politics of La Juive considerably more palatable to modern-day sensibilities (and indeed Halévy’s and librettist Eugène Scribe’s attack on anti-Semitic prejudice is all too timely now, given the number of people involved in the January 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol who wore pro-Nazi and pro-Holocaust T-shirts and had previously posted on social media with swastika flags and other Nazi regalia giving the Hitler salute), but La Juive is a tightly-knit, well-structured piece of drama with little choral singing and – rare for a 19th century French opera – no ballet interludes at all. I’m not sure what to make of Fernand Cortez as a whole – and, as I told Charles at the outset, I’m annoyed by depictions of Cortez’s conquest of Mexico which intimate that he didn’t have Natives fighting on his side, without whom he couldn’t have won (his main Native allies were the Maya, who had themselves been subjugated, occupied and led away to be human sacrifice victims by the Aztecs a century earlier, and hoped Cortez and the Spaniards would liberate them from the tyranny of the Aztecs) – and though I’m glad I got the video I’m not sure it wouldn’t have entertained me more as an audio CD, in which I could have admired Spontini’s music (and the excellence of the soloists in singing it) without having to deal with the plot and its production – but it’s an interesting opera and Spontini is definitely a major (and heavily underrated) composer.
