Family Feud, Scottish Style

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Lucia di Lammermoor went crazy last Tuesday night at the San Francisco Opera House, and the audience went crazy for her. Natalie Dessay was magnificent in the title role of Donizetti’s opera. Not only does she possess the range and technical command needed for the famously demanding Mad Scene, but she also is an actress capable of expressing a wide range of emotions. Her beautiful sound is never forced and ranges easily from soft to loud, from sustained legato to bursts of coloratura.

Natalie Dessay as Lucia

All photos by Terrence McCarthy

Lucia is caught in a family feud of Shakespearian dimensions. Her brother, Enrico of Lammermoor, has killed the father and seized the estate of Edgardo of Ravenswood (Henry and Edgar to Sir Walter Scott, who wrote the novel The Bride of Lammermoor). Lucia and Edgardo, deeply in love, are secretly betrothed and consider themselves married.

Enrico, in addition to hating Edgardo, has fallen on hard times and needs to marry his sister to Lord Arturo in order to mend his fortunes. As Enrico convinces Lucia that Edgardo has abandoned her, wedding guests assemble and Arturo appears. Lucia, finally giving up hope and submitting to her brother’s entreaties, has just signed the marriage contract when Edgardo suddenly bursts in.

This is the occasion for a justly famous sextet. Lucia is in despair, seeing no way to undo what she has done. Edgardo is furious, but still loves Lucia. Enrico, remorseful, sees what is happening to his sister. Arturo probably wishes he were anywhere else, but hopes things will turn out all right, as do Raimondo, Lucia’s chaplain and tutor, and Alisa, her companion, who are greatly concerned about Lucia.

Gabriele Viviani (Enrico Ashton) and Natalie Dessay (Lucia)

Gabriele Viviani, in his U.S. debut, sang the part of Enrico. He was a commanding presence on the stage, in both voice and person. Enrico is angry most of the time, and Viviani’s dynamic range ran from forte to fortissimo. Yet he could also express remorse for his part in his sister’s undoing.

Giuseppe Filianoti was also mostly in loud mode as Edgardo, whose love is more ardent than tender. Even in declaring his love and honorably proposing to ask Enrico for Lucia’s hand, Edgardo finds that they need to keep it secret from his sworn enemy. He has much to be upset about, and the men often resort to their swords to deal with their problems. In the end, Edgardo uses his sword on himself, when he hears of Lucia’s death. Filianoti gave full utterance to the love and heartbreak of his final aria.

Oren Gradus (Raimondo)

Bass Oren Gradus sang Raimondo strongly, with evident compassion for Lucia, throughout the opera, and Cybele-Teresa Gouverneur as Alisa was her fitting companion. As Arturo, Andrew Bidlack’s pure, high tenor was an appropriate contrast to Edgardo’s larger sound. I found these three somewhat overpowered in the sextet, leaving an impression of a dominant trio of Enrico, Edgardo, and Lucia.

Blood Wedding

Despite all the forebodings expressed in the sextet, the wedding takes place. The guests are celebrating when Raimondo bursts in (poorly lit) and tells the audience (not the guests: poorly positioned) that Lucia has gone mad and has killed Arturo. Lucia enters, completely unhinged, her white wedding dress drenched in blood. Imagining that Edgardo is her bridegroom, she is happy to be reunited with him. Dessay’s singing, vocal fireworks included, conveyed brilliantly the sense of being at last happy and at peace.

A special feature of Dessay’s performance of the Mad Scene is the use of a glass harmonica to accompany her, along with a solo flute. Donizetti intended it to be used to accompany Lucia’s two love scenes, the first with Edgardo in Act 1 and the second with the imagined Edgardo at the end. A 1983 invention called the verrophone imitates the sound of the glass harmonica, with moistened fingers playing the rims of glass tubes of varying lengths. Dessay collaborated with verrophonist Alexander Marguerre in creating her cadenza.

The production used several sliding panels of differing sizes and shapes. They could create various indoor spaces or slide away to reveal outdoor scenes. When in place, the panels cut the stage in half lengthwise, leaving a space rather cramped for the chorus and rather large for the soloists. There were some resultant ensemble problems, but conductor Jean-Yves Ossonce kept things together. Effective use was made of a weathered tree and a large moon. Two large tartans, one blue for Lammermoor and the other red for Ravenswood, were used as identification, shawls, and carpets.

I wonder whether this opera would still be in the repertoire if it hadn’t provided a mad scene, which has made Lucia a signature role for many eminent sopranos. Donizetti’s musical language does not seem adequate for dealing with a plot so dependent on fatally timed intrigues and misunderstandings. Certain moments even call to mind Gilbert and Sullivan; and the Mad Scene might never have become so entrenched in the repertoire without the virtuoso cadenza added to it by diva Nelly Melba.

It was interesting to experience this opera near Handel’s Ariodante in the same week. Both were given strong performances. Handel’s characters, unbelievably gullible and mistrusting, sing music of such emotional penetration that we can laugh at how quickly the villain is dispatched but not mind such moments of absurdity.

Yet Natalie Dessay’s stunning performance does Donizetti a great favor. Her gorgeous declaration of love in Act 1, her steadfast defense of her lover shutting down into hopelessness in Act 2, and the ecstasy of her Mad Scene in Act 3 as she believes herself united to her lover — all made this Lucia di Lammermoor an unforgettable experience.

Anna Carol Dudley is a singer, teacher, member of the faculty of UC Berkeley, San Francisco State University lecturer emerita, and director emerita of the San Francisco Early Music Society’s Baroque Music Workshop.

Comments

Although Lucia di Lammermoor’s plot hinges upon fatally timed intrigues and misunderstandings, Donizetti’s score elaborates upon the emotions that spring from those intrigues and misunderstandings in a Romantically in-the-moment fashion. One can always quibble “how did we get here?” but the fact remains that the score and libretto HAVE placed the audience “here”, and Donizetti’s depiction of the moment is both intensely Romantic and Romantically intense. This score is the product of an Italian Romantic imagination and temperament during a pre-Freud era time when madness for love was considering the apex of romance.

One wonders what musical language Ms. Dudley had in her ears that would be more “adequate” for dealing with the plot, but for all her fault-finding she seems to have ignored the desolate opening orchestral passages in B-flat minor for timpani and horns, then winds, then crushing tutti… or the evocative harp solo that sets up the following scene at the fountain… or the D minor orchestral tempesta that begins act III… or the proud yet sobbing E-flat major prelude to the final scene of the opera. Even without the virtuosity of Lucia’s mad scene (and here we the audience have the rare privilege of hearing it with Donizetti’s original obbligato for glass armonica, once described as sounding “like a musical UFO”), these are more than enough to dignify the opera as being more than just a playground for the hystrionics of high sopranos.

The devil being in the details, Ms. Dudley would do better if she were a little more careful with her details. Never mind that she misspells the name of a distinguished late-19th century interpreter of the title role (Nellie instead of “Nelly” Melba) or that a cadenza for the character is indicated in the score at that point (not the virtuoso skirmish with flute that most divas have made of it, but certainly a cadenza), but also to be accurate about the instrumental details of the score she so readily finds fault with. One will not hear glass armonica in the first act love scene between Lucia and Edgardo because no such part was ever written. Certainly great interpreters make all the difference in the bel canto repertoire, but even they can only go so far in “making silk purses out of sows’ ears” - a performer can only work with what they have inherited from the composer. In the case of Lucia di Lammermoor, that inheritance is so rich: after all, great performers, such as Mlle. Dessay, are - like the rest of us - only human, and can only give a “stunning performance” if they have great material to work with.

While listeners will debate over the splendors and miseries of the opera, certainly coverage that is - if not more enthusiastic, then at least more accurate is deserved both by a score that is still performed on a regular basis to contented audiences some 162-plus years after its premiere (September 26, 1835 in Naples), but also by the dedicated readers of San Francisco Classical Voice.

Posted by William Melvin on June 26, 2008 at 10:17 pm
Reasonable people can disagree about the merits of an opera, and we welcome William Melvin’s passionate defense of Donizetti’s Lucia. His factual quibbles, however, would seem to be with SF Opera’s program annotator, Evan Baker.

Baker, a well-known researcher of opera production history, uses several unusual spellings in his notes, including Nelly Melba, a form of the diva’s name which is certainly less used, but is not incorrect. Mr. Baker may have used it because that form is used in “The Origins of Lucia’s cadenza” by Margherita Romana Pugliese (Cambridge Opera Journal, 16:1 (March 2004), 23-42). This article definitively established the provenance of the famous mad scene cadenza.

Given the excellent research that went into this article, it’s probably worth noting the following (from the article’s abstract): Once introduced, the cadenza with flute decisively altered the impact and reception of the mad scene. In the first two decades after the opera’s 1835 premiere, the mad scene had not been particularly popular, perhaps because it contravened contemporary Italian taste for mad scenes featuring docile, virginal heroines. By the fin de siècle, however, the mad scene was regarded as the highlight of the opera, the excesses of the cadenza resonating with the new vogue for violent and hysterical heroines on the operatic stage.

History, in other words, shows us that opinions change. The value of an artwork is not totally inherent in itself. The audience for the work has an important say in whether the work becomes”great” and a valued repertory work. Why do wonderful Donizetti scores like those for Lucrezia Borgia, Maria Stuarda, Roberto Devereaux, Caterina Cornaro, etc. not enjoy the musical favor of Lucia? We may owe more to Melba than we think.

On the quibble about the glass harmonica: Baker’s program note is the first I’d heard that Donizetti had wanted to use the glass harmonica in Act I. It strikes me as being less dramatically apropos than the use in Act III, but that does not mean that Baker is wrong. In any case, the score would be the wrong place to go for that information. In Donizetti’s time, scores were notoriously volatile things, setting down a picture of a performance, not necessarily the composer’s real preference. The glass harmonica player for Lucia’s premiere was having a dispute with management and was thus unavailable. Since orchestration was a last-minute (and I mean LAST minute) operation in Italian opera, we don’t have any idea what Donizetti would have done if the player had been available. But you can bet the farm that Donizetti would have approved flute substitutions for any theater that didn’t have a glass harmonica, even if he had written the instrument into the score.

We know, for example, that the original Lucia, Fanny Tachinardi-Persiani, substituted an aria from Donizetti’s previous opera, Rosamunda d’Inghilterra, for “Regnava nel silenzio” because she found the Lucia aria difficult. Donizetti obviously knew about it and approved, because when he revised the opera for Paris, he made the same substitution, and there it remains in the score that was printed for the Paris premiere.

What this means is, when you do a performance of Lucia today, if you’re a really serious conductor, you don’t begin and end with the Dover reprint score. There are lots of variables and options to consider, and no way to gauge what Donizetti’s “final” thoughts were, if he had any. The whole idea of the finalized score, set in stone, is a concept that Verdi fought for, and would have been unfamiliar to Donizetti.

Posted by Michael Zwiebach on June 28, 2008 at 9:45 am
I might just add that my review, reflecting Baker’s note that Donizetti’s intention was to use the glass harmonica in the first act, did not claim that he ever put his idea into action. But it made some sense to me that the color of the glass harmonica could be used in the two powerful scenes in which Lucia expresses her love for Edgardo: when we first see them together and when in the mad scene she is convinced that they are reunited at last. Anna Carol Dudley

Posted by Anna Carol Dudley on June 28, 2008 at 2:14 pm