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OPERA REVIEW
Simon Boccanegra Climaxes Verdi Celebration
June 16, 2001
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By Thomas Grey
With the opening performance Saturday of Verdi's middle- to late-period masterpiece Simon Boccanegra, the San Francisco Opera offered the final entry in its month-long tribute to the composer on the 100-year anniversary of his death. Among the three productions mounted in this series, Boccanegra was the only new one. Moreover, with its cast ranging from adequate to strong and a sensitive and dramatically taught rendition of Verdi's most sophisticated scores, this chance to see one of the less common works in the mature Verdi canon was a fitting climax to the Verdi Celebration.
Samuel Ramey's debut in the role of the angry and troubled Genoese patrician Jacopo Fiesco and the Opera orchestra's rendition of the darkly brooding but often luminous score were among the principal highlights of the evening. But by the end of the performance, baritone Paolo Gavanelli was finally able to turn his portrayal of the betrayed leader of the Genoese republic, Simon Boccanegra, into the emotional focal point of the drama.
The most heavily revised of any of the operas Verdi retouched for later productions, Simon Boccanegra is unusual, if not unique, in the composer's oeuvre for straddling two significantly different stylistic periods. Macbeth, composed in 1847 and revised for Paris in 1865, is the only comparable case. But the revisions were less extensive and the distance traveled, in creative terms, less momentous than with Boccanegra.
Here the original version, to a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave (librettist also of Macbeth and victim of much ill temper on Verdi's part), was composed in between Traviata and Ballo in Maschera and then overhauled by the collaborator of Verdi's last years, Arrigo Boito, in 1880–81. In the revised score, conventionally patterned (if always skillfully executed) aria and duet passages coexist with solo scenes, dialogue confrontations, and large ensembles anticipating the world of Otello, whose Renaissance Venetian ambience has much in common with the late-medieval Genoa of Simon Boccanegra. One aspect of the opera not improved by Verdi's revisions was the comprehensibility of the drama. The source play is by the same Spanish dramatist, Antonio Garcia Gutiérrez, who provided the story for Il Trovatore. While foregoing the melodramatic excesses of that libretto, Simon Boccanegra bears all the hallmarks of a complex dramatic plot reduced beyond the limits of coherence for the sake of an opera libretto. We know that the title character has had a daughter out of wedlock from Maria, the daughter of Fiesco, who (for this reason?) is sworn to eternal enmity against him. We learn that this daughter, also called Maria, has gone astray in childhood, when her aged female guardian died, and that she (somehow?) came to be adopted by the patrician Grimaldi family, under the name of Amelia. We learn to distrust the commoner, Paolo, as an unscrupulous rabble-rouser and generally spiteful person who engineers Boccanegra's election as Doge of Genoa from purely selfish reasons. (But the variety of motives behind Paolo's eventually fatal hatred of Simon never add up to any coherent profile).
Likewise, the reasons for Amelia's lover, Gabriele Adorno, to oppose or support her father, Simon, shift so rapidly and radically that we can scarcely keep track. At least two popular rebellions occur whose politics remain obscure. Several important characters never appear on stage. I could go on to cite any number of small, confusing details (or missing details) concerning the interaction of the principal characters. We are left, in any case, with a few strong operatic "situations" and atmospheric moments that do not quite add up to a drama along the lines of Verdi's more enduring works. Originating in a 1991 Covent Garden production by Elijah Moshinsky, the San Francisco production has been reconceived by David Edwards, with set designs by Michael Yeargan, costumes by Peter J. Hall, and lighting by Michael Whitfield. It's visually spare and straightforward, with a unit set made up of a few basic Italian architectural signifiers: some rows of columns on the left, a stark wall with one small window grate (indicating one or another palazzo), and a geometrically patterned floor surface. A vast blue sheet serves various purposes, mostly denoting the surface of the sea (often at strange and disturbing angles, with respect to the rest of the set) and occasionally enveloping Boccanegra, as Doge. The wall-set could be raised or lowered to reveal interiors, such as at the end of the Prologue when Simon enters the palace of the Fieschi and discovers the shrouded corpse of his beloved Maria on a catafalque. In a striking visual coup at the conclusion of the Act 1 finale (the Council Chamber scene, the largest and most impressive addition to the 1881 version), the same wall descends upon the villain Paolo, who has been manipulated by Simon into cursing the man responsible for abducting Amelia (i.e., Paolo himself).
Diagonally bisected, with the lower triangle darkened by a stylized shadow, the effect is like a huge guillotine, a symbolic (if anachronistic) anticipation of Paolo's death sentence in the final act. In the Prologue, Samuel Ramey's commanding, resonant bass made Fiesco the clear center of attention, from the moment of his first entrance in the fierce yet subdued lament "Il lacerato spirito." (The voice sounded fresher and more engaged than in it has recently in some of Ramey's signature roles.) It's appropriate that Fiesco should have the upper hand, dramatically, over Boccanegra in their first encounter here. But it was a long time before baritone Paolo Gavanelli's Boccanegra managed to take center stage. Even standing on the top of the table to deliver the great, arching line of his Petrarchan quotation "E vo gridando pace, a vo gridando amor!" did not allow him to take control of the Council Chamber scene. This admittedly sprawling and unruly scene was instead held together by strong conducting and by the fine ensemble work of the other soloists and the chorus. When Amelia picks up and spins out Simon's cry for peace in this same scene (Verdi knew what he was talking about when he assured Boito he could make much of the word pace), Carol Vaness' sturdy soprano served well. The delicate orchestral-vocal tone poem that introduces her character in Act 1 ("Come in quest'ora bruna"), describing the approach of dawn over the Ligurian Sea, was rather less well served. (Michael Whitfield's generally supple, atmospheric lighting was strangely off-cue here: Where the text equivocates between nocturnal and dawn imagery, we were given broad daylight and bright blue skies.)
Sensitive phrasing and largely secure intonation were not enough to compensate for a certain lack of tonal bloom or luster in Vaness' voice. Where the part calls for drama, as in Amelia's tormented negotiations between her father, Simon, and her lover, Gabriele, Vaness was convincing, and at times compelling. Elsewhere, when the part calls simply for purity and delicacy of tone reflecting the "innocent candor" of the modest orphan girl Amelia has been up to now, Vaness seemed miscast. The square-jawed good looks and bright, secure tenor of Carlo Ventre suited him well for the part of Gabriele Adorno, who remains rather less developed as a character than the other male leads. (Ventre was substituting in this role for the indisposed Marcello Giordani. A reliable but not always interesting singer, Giordani seems to have become something like a "house tenor" for Italian roles, and a change was welcome.) Runnicles gave the vestigial cabaletta of the first Amelia/Gabriele duet ("Sì, sì, del'ara il giubilo") a nicely spirited lift that helped round out what is otherwise a somewhat tepid love scene. In the Prologue and Act 1, Nikolai Putilin's Paolo was much too mild mannered as the Iago-like villain, Paolo. Or perhaps he was consciously holding the venom in reserve for those subsequent scenes where the full measure of the character's spite is revealed. Only with the opening of Act 2, where Paolo writhes in a fit of self-loathing and self-pity (somewhere between Rigoletto and Iago), did Putilin start to take hold of the part, abjectly squirming with body and voice at once. His complete moral and physical abjection is even more vividly realized in at the opening of Act 3 (here presented as the second part of a larger, composite Act 2).
As Fiesco recedes from the later acts, Boccanegra grows in stature, as did Gavanelli, vocally. An emphasis on the higher, tenor range of the baritone role was characteristic here, and highlighted not only a fitting timbral contrast to Ramey's Fiesco, but altogether the vulnerable, tender side of the Doge's character as well as the physical and emotional stress sustained by Boccanegra in these last two acts. (After all, he has to get through almost and act and a half while suffering the effects of Paolo's poison.) Paradoxically, Gavanelli's strongest moments were also his "weakest," when Boccanegra is on the point of collapse. Particularly effecting was the brief cantabile episode "Il mare, Il mare!" (reminiscent of the Elisabeth/Carlos love duet from Act 1 of Don Carlos), where he contemplates the scene of his once-glorious seafaring career. If Gavanelli did not manage to capture the bold, enterprising like side of the character, the scourge of "African pirates" and queller of rebellions, he elicited the full pathos of the Doge's fall, exquisitely floating the final E-flat of his last word ("Maria!") before expiring. With the exception of Ramey's strong Fiesco, I could say that the rest of the production followed this same pattern, growing in strength and conviction as the fate of the characters declines towards darkness and tragedy. (Thomas Grey is chairman of the Music Department at Stanford University. He is author of Wagner's Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts and editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Opera Handbook on The Flying Dutchman as well as the Cambridge Companion to Wagner.) ©2001 Thomas Grey, all rights reserved |
