Verdi’s riches
Michael Tanner
Don Carlo
Royal Opera House Verdi’s Don Carlo is as much of an obsession for me as one of my favourite operas. Though it isn’t perfect, and can’t be made perfect, whatever you include or eliminate from the extraordinary number of options available (including two languages), it has so many prolonged scenes of incontrovertible greatness, and their density increases as the opera proceeds, so that the last 80 minutes or so are all magnificent (ignoring the perfunctory endings of both the last two acts), that it seems to me obvious that it ranks with the Requiem as Verdi’s finest work. Yet this richness brings the inevitable problem of casting a large number of roles from strength. And, since the narrative is not a straightforward one, such as Verdi almost always favours, whatever the ludicrous complications of his plots, the director and conductor must collaborate to maintain momentum and give the work all the shape they can.
One would expect, after his exemplary Così fan tutte for Glyndebourne, that Nicholas Hytner would be ideal for getting the characters in the drama to interact, especially Carlos and Elizabeth in their three great scenes together, which stand at the start, the centre and the end of the work. But though Rolando Villazón and Marina Poplavskaya are both competent actors, indeed he can be considerably more than that, their tormented relationship, moving rapidly from uncertainty to abandoned and appallingly brief happiness, to despair, resignation, and a final transcendence of their earthly wretchedness, is simply not brought to life. Like nearly everyone else on the stage, they make stock operatic gestures, stand yards apart at their most intimate moments and, above (or below) all, completely fail to disappear as performers and become characters. And in the case of Ferruccio Furlanetto, who sings Philip more securely, on the whole, than I anticipated, an element of verismo ham is permitted into his account of this stoical monarch, so that he even ended his great aria sobbing.
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The production opens in the forest of Fontainebleau — the Modena version is used, which is to say the five-act version with the cuts which Verdi had sanctioned by that stage, and with the Rodrigo–Philip encounter in its final form: Verdi was right to see that episode as central, and right, too, to feel that he needed to improve it from its earlier versions, but in my minority view it remains stronger as a dramatic confrontation than it is musically realised; the orchestral punctuations seem routine. We don’t get the woodcutters at the opening, or Elizabeth’s touching promise to do what she can to improve the lot of these hungry people. That robs the opening scene of its social dimension, and means that after the hunting horns we immediately get Carlo alone, then the long passage in which he and Elizabeth conceal and then reveal who they are. It makes a tentative start, and though the singers were at their best here it was not possible to feel that the composer is. PM The setting, by Bob Crowley, is a stylised forest, with heavy frost. To ensure, admirably, that there is no pause between the many scenes, a large wall is lowered, strongly suggestive of a prison, and that turns out to be the dominant motif of the whole work — but it’s suggestive of the outside, not of the inside, of a prison. It is therefore unatmospheric, and whether we are at the autoda-fé, in the King’s study, or in the gardens, everything seems much the same. Something about the production seemed to cast a lowering spell over the singers, all of whom were performing at less than their best, except for the irrepressible Pumeza Matshikiza, who sparkled in the role of Tebaldo, and made a stronger mark in the role than anyone else I have seen.
Even Simon Keenlyside, typecast as Rodrigo, was constrained both vocally and in movement, and only his death was moving — but it was so moving as to compensate for a lot that was inert. The least impressive performance was Sonia Ganassi’s Eboli, a role that has been the Waterloo of finer singers than she is. She was severely overparted, able to encompass neither the tiresome high jinks of the Song of the Veil, nor the agonies and determination of ‘O don fatale!’ It was in that latter aria that the real source of the trouble with the whole evening, apart from what I’ve already indicated, was so evident. Antonio Pappano massaged so much of the score that it was unravelling as it went along, and the whole passage of repentance in her aria was both slowed down and pulled about to a point where no one could have coped. It is the old failing, often manifested in Pappano’s Wagner, Verdi, Puccini. Often his need to go in for heavy petting with every note gives way later in the run, or next time round, to a grander mode of expressing his affection and eliciting a performance where the wood is apparent as well as the twigs and leaves. Later audiences may well have a much more rewarding evening than we did on the first, no doubt nerve-ridden night.
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