The genius of Verdi is all too appropriate for the modern world
A bit technical this week. Sorry. Necessary. Giuseppe Verdi’s genius shines through the jewel-like structure of his La forza del destino score. In the opening three chords, repeated after an extended one bar rest, Verdi sets the scene for a tragedy that unfolds over the next four hours.
What’s more, he creates an earworm that lives in the listener’s mind forever. Hear those three chords any pace, any time and you are immediately transported to the world of Forza. If ever proof was needed that music is a language that can move us more powerfully than the spoken word, this is it.
Or proof that Giuseppe Verdi was a master. Those chords, read on the score, seem so simple. Two notes only, not even a triad to fill out the sound – all blasted out as a brassy warning call to the audience. There is trouble ahead.
And brass only, the notes spanning two octaves. One instrument, the melancholy Cimbasso, sometimes replaced by a tuba or contrabass trombone, stretches down to the octave below the bass stave, injecting a deep sense of menace.
So what? Surely anyone could write that. No, they couldn’t. Why? Avoiding a triad, which would give clear affirmation that we were setting out in a major key, immediately sets the audience on edge. What’s happening? That’s why most police sirens use only two notes, except American waily ones. Listen up, we are being told. Trouble ahead.
And we dive into trouble in the very next bar as the symphonic start rushes off – Allegro agitato e presto – in hectic 3/8 time on its way to hell and, sadly, not back. For in Verdi’s epic, the heroine, Donna Leonora, her father, Marquess of Calatrava and brother, Don Carlo de Vargas, are all dead at curtain fall.
Composers filch from each other. Verdi borrowed from Beethoven, who opens his famous 5th symphony in much the same way. Three notes of equal length, but in his case rapid quavers – not mournful drawn-out minims – followed by a down note. Repeated, but a semitone lower. Then, off we go at speed with variations on that theme.
We launch with eight bars of seemingly simple music only. A Verdi ten seconds of genius. And now, for the tragedy that follows.
Forza was commissioned by Tsar Alexander II late in Verdi’s career. Given a blank sheet by the Tsar, Verdi started out doing what many of us do with blank sheets. Nothing. It is 1861, an era of epic literature. Charles Dickens was in full flow. In 1861 he wrote Great Expectations. Leo Tolstoy was getting into his stride in Russia, pouring out novellas and completing his autobiographical trilogy. War and Peace was to follow in 1867, five years after Forza premiered at the Bolshoi Theatre in St Petersburg. Wagner’s Ring was circling.
After rejecting Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas as the subject for his new opera – the Russian censors wouldn’t have it – Verdi settled on a play he had read and liked but could not source. We all keep Don Alvaro o la Fuerza del Sino, by Ángel de Saavedra, Duke of Rivas, handy on our bedside table, I’m sure.
Eventually a copy was sourced in Milan. Librettist Francesco Maria Piave, a Verdi familiar, was tasked with compressing it to a reasonable length – four hours reasonable – plus an extract from a Schiller play, Wallenstein’s Lager, a comic scene in Act III set in a military camp. Boy, by then do we need comic relief!
Originally set in mid-18th century Spain, this new Met production by Mariusz Treliński is transported to what is identified only as a “contemporary city”. For those unfamiliar with plot, it’s, er, complicated. Essentials only from here. So, here is what happens.
Leonora loves Alvaro, who is from a lower-class family. Her father, Marquess of Calatrava disproves. The opera starts with a confrontation, in this production in the Calatrava hotel. There is a Romeo and Juliette feel to the whole opera. Warring families.
Immediately destiny shows its force. To prove to reluctant daddy-in-law-to-be that he is not a threat, Alvaro throws down his gun. It accidentally fires. Calatrava dies cursing his daughter. The lovers are separated as Alvaro escapes. Carlo, Leonora’s brother pledges to kill both his sister, who he blames for having dishonoured the Calatrava name, and Alvaro.
Time passes between the acts. There is war. Carlo is on the hunt for his – he thinks – dishonoured sister and Alvaro. The action is based on hidden or mistaken identity. Alvaro, disguised, befriends Carlo. Leonora decides to become a hermit and self describes as a man.
We have a fortune teller who foretells bleak destiny, pilgrims en route to Holy Week and a rainstorm when Leonora, heading to a nunnery in a dodgy car in a smudgy, filmed backdrop with wipers flashing, skids off the road.
This year a lot of Met vehicle props head for the ditch. The props team has scoured the scrapyards of Queens looking for cheap write-offs. Economy drive. The endowment has already been plundered for $40m.
First, there was the wrecked lorry in Carmen. Now Leonora’s cheap sedan has been totaled. What next? Queen’s scrappers must be drooling over next season’s schedule with glee. It opens in September with Grounded, from Janine Tasori, about drone warfare. Scope for more vehicular carnage to come.
Now, badly disguised as a man, Leonora makes her way to a monastery, where Fra Melitone tries to send her away until the next morning. But she begs Guardiano, the Father Superior to give her shelter, not as a nun, but a hermit
In Act III Alvaro has been conscripted into the army and sent to the front. Hearing a brawl near barracks, Alvaro drives away a pack of thieves attacking a newly arrived soldier. It is Carlo, but neither is aware of the other’s identity. Both are using assumed identities. Carlo thanks Alvaro for saving his life, and the two swear friendship in life and death.
In the ensuing battle Alvaro takes on for the team and is carried back to camp, seriously wounded. He asks Carlo to promise to safeguard his private papers and, if he dies, to burn them. Carlo agrees but discovers a photo of Leonora. His rescuer is the hated Alvaro. Destiny will now have its day.
More time passes. In this opera destiny does not so much race as unfold, biding its time. In the final act five years has passed. War is over. The world is on the verge of apocalypse. Hunger and poverty are widespread. In this production the bombed out buildings are the stuff of CNN reports from any conflict zone – Ukraine, Gaza, failed African states, Jimmy ‘Barbecue’ Chérizier’s Haiti. Sadly, take your pick.
The main characters are brought together for destiny’s denouement. Alvaro and Carlo fight. Carlo is fatally wounded. Alvaro calls the “hermit” to give the dying Carlo absolution. “Lordy, it’s my sister”, says Carlo as he stabs Leonora.
Alvaro and Leonora – in her death throes but still in perfect voice as good sopranos always are when they snuff it – say farewell. As Leonora dies, she forgives Alvaro and, with her last gasp, proclaims that she will await Alvaro in heaven. A teensy-weensy bit of hope.
Heading the cast as Leonora was Norwegian soprano, Lise Davidsen. There are forty-five synonyms for ‘superlative’ in Thesaurus.com and Davidsen has earned all of them. She commands every stage she steps onto with a calm, imperial presence. Her voice coped seamlessly and effortlessly with the almost impossible range Verdi’s score demands.
Next, she takes on the similarly challenging role of Salome in Richard Strauss’ same-name piece at Opéra national de Paris. I already have my ticket.
Brian Jagde, an American tenor with a burgeoning international career, who brought acting vim and vigour to his role as Alvaro, has a terrific voice and off stage plays an active role in ‘Opera for Peace’. Ironic being cast in Forza.
Carlo was Ivor Golovatenko, a Russian baritone and Met regular – title role in Eugene Onegin and Prince Yeletesky in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades. He has the spacious voice needed for the Met. Still performing at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre, he is one of the few Russian artists to have sidestepped the consequences of war in Ukraine.
Other members of the excellent cast can be found here.
The Met’s musical director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin was in the pit and what a job he made of Verdi’s luscious and demanding score. From those first unsettling chords through to the unusual Rataplan military chorus in Act III he led his orchestra faultlessly. We were immersed in a sound world of permanent tension, pierced only by the occasional comic moment.
Donald Palumbo’s chorus is an essential component in this opera. I was fortunate enough to sit in on early rehearsals of Rataplan. While most of the seasoned chorus members sailed through, the complexity and subtle changes in vocalisation were challenging for singers confronting the work for the first time. On the night the staccato, martial chorus was pulled off perfectly.
This is the Met’s first new production of La forza del destino in thirty years. In the seats around me opinions differed. Regulars, familiar with more traditional versions, were unsettled by the modern imagery – crashed cars, mortar-shelled buildings, the tasteless Calatrava Hotel.
But newbies who did not carry that baggage got the point that they were watching an opera reflecting a world they read and worry about each day.
At the very end there is that glimmer of redemption, but not on this earth. Bleak enough for the 19th century. Troublingly apposite when set in the 21st. La forza del destino. I give you Verdi’s brilliant opera for today.
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