San Francisco Classical Voice

They are spared and released, however, by the fall of Robespierre. Six years later Marie, who has dedicated herself to the child born of that desperate night, is running a millinery in Paris. Clorivière, absent since the night in prison, arrives to see his son for the first time: he is about to leave France permanently. Maurice, also absent for the last six years, also appears, at first overjoyed at having a son, then bitter at learning the boy is not his.

In the denouement Clorivière, ever the partisan, has set a bomb under Napoleon's coach, but succeeded only in killing a few bystanders. Maurice, whose life is no longer worth living, feigns responsibility for the bomb and is about to be executed. At the last minute, Clorivière admits his guilt and kills himself.

Rome Opera cast both the major roles and the smaller ones beautifully. Of the alternate principals for the second night's performance, which I saw, Anna Rita Taliento (she alternated with Nelly Miricioiu), was a remarkable Marie, her dramatic spinto effortlessly pacing Respighi's long melodic curves, her acting fully up to the complexities of this role. Dario Solari, who alternates with Alberto Gazale, was a fine, sympathetic Maurice. This is an important role, though onstage only to frame the story: Maurice is the unspoken constant Marie ultimately realizes she needs and longs for through the turbulence of the action.

Alberto Cupido was the Clorivière, a very complex role poised between idealistic loyalty to Maurice and abandonment to his sexual fascination with Marie. Cupido's is a strong tenor; the role is placed in the dramatic range (like so much of the opera) and he sang with polish and precision. Of the smaller but still significant roles, Francesco Facini (who alternates with Giorgio Surian) was a compelling and sympathetic Cloteau; Mauro Utzeri flashed through the enigmatic role of Kermarec; Massimiliano Gagliardo was solid and warm as Simon; Paolo Francesca Natale, bright and assertive as Lison (alternating with Taliento).

Fine and convincing as the singing was, though, it was Gianluigi Gelmetti's conducting that inspired the considerable applause at the end of the long night. His direction was inspired and inspiring, probing every detail of the meticulous orchestration, maintaining the long, almost Wagnerian phrases, propelling the waves of climax and relaxation with extraordinarily intelligent dramatic rhythm.

It must be said that the orchestra, very good indeed, and the singers all benefit from a house like Rome's Teatro dell'Opera, whose five or six tiers of boxes rise from a fairly small orchestra floor for a total of perhaps 1500 seats at the most. Every sound is clear, including the disapproving comments from the people down the row.

And what were they disapproving? What we all hated: the mise-en-scene. This was the responsibility of Hugo De Ana, who chose to force the opera into a Pirandellian play-within-a-play concept. The third and fourth act were combined into one, not itself a bad idea. The three resulting acts, separated by half-hour intermissions, each opened with a projected quote: the first from Louis XVI, the second from Robespierre, the last from Napoleon; all stating observations on the intersection of human rights and social responsibilities.

Fine: that's what Respighi's and Guiraud's opera is about, and that's one of the things that makes it an important opera today. But De Ana's staging, both fussy and curiously static, sacrificed the clarity of the text to what seems an unnecessarily ironic interpretation. He set the action in the year of the opera's composition, on the eve of World War I, with crowds of fugitives in a railroad station (the chorus) surrounding a Brechtian troupe of street-theater players (the principals).

One sees De Ana's point: as if apologizing for this tardy premiere, he puts as much distance between his staging and Respighi's composition as there was between Respighi and the French Revolution that inspired him. But look: this is a premiere. Before subjecting the opera to historicist interpretation, let's stage it as it was first conceived.

At the end of the performance yet another text was projected onto the scrim: “This opera was composed ninety years ago and has waited until now for its premiere.” In fact it continues to wait: Gelmetti's loving musical direction, and the care that's gone into the singing, deserve a direction that is as respectful of the text.

Because, in seeing this opera we begin to understand that the assignment of Respighi's real place in musical history has been misdirected by the very popular success of those symphonic poems. He was closer to Mahler, curiously enough, than to either the Ferde Grofé of the \“Grand Canyon Suite or the Puccini of Tosca. He was Modernist, fascinated by the collage and interpenetration of things, not an early Postmodernist content with unintegrated parallel pluralism.

The score of Marie Victoire is seamlessly integrated, but shot through with quotes and references to historical music. It opens with Marie singing the sadly Royalist “Il pleut, bergère,” and one high point — for once well captured by De Ana's staging — is the staging, by prisoners, of a scene from Rousseau's opera Le Devin du village. There are onstage musics and sounds of various kinds, offstage choruses, alarms and sonic excursions.

The opera is about the collisions of things — morals, ideals, loves, duties — and these collisions are marvelously represented by musical procedures. One of the most perplexing successes of Marie Victoire, in fact, is its counterpointing of complexity and accessibility: Respighi was an intuitive master of this, and we know now that his mastery extended to the opera stage.

So where does this work belong in the repertory? With the middle operas of Richard Strauss, for one thing, particularly Die Frau ohne Schatten; with Janácek; with the glorious what-if of Turandot. Musically Respighi is not quite within that group; he eyes admiringly the Berg of the Three Pieces for Orchestra.

But Marie Victoire is, for all its composer's identification with Rome, a French opera. It was sung, as it was composed, in French: a successful singing translation into Italian has yet to be achieved. The supertitles, in Italian, often showed how difficult that would be: the rhythms of Respighi's text-setting are entirely French.

So where this opera really stands is perhaps with the unknowable lost operas of Debussy — and, perhaps, with whatever Ravel would have done had he been able to propel the romantic histories of Berlioz and Meyerbeer into his own time. Respighi, for his part, shows himself almost uniquely capable of doing just that, and Marie Victoire deserves to take its place in the repertoire for historical reasons as well as for its intrinsic pleasures and glories.