The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (42 page)

Based on Scribe’s play about the assassination of Gustavus III of Sweden in 1792, the plot was considered inflammatory by
the Bourbon censors in Naples – an Italian terrorist had recently made an attempt on the life of the French Emperor Louis Napoleon – and for the first performance the location was re-sited in a purely fictitious seventeenth-century Boston under British rule.
Today, the Swedish setting is generally preferred.

Plot

Gustavus III (Riccardo in the ‘Boston’ version) is planning a masked ball when he is warned by his friend and minister Anckarstroem (Renato) of a plot on his life.
A petition urges the banishment of the fortune-teller Mademoiselle Arvidson (Ulrica) whose utterances command widespread respect.
Along with his page Oscar, Gustavus decides to assume a disguise and visit her for himself.

Gustavus and Anckarstroem’s wife Amelia are secretly in love.
Amelia comes to ask Mademoiselle Arvidson how to put a stop to such adulterous feelings.
Mademoiselle Arvidson tells her to gather a magic herb from beneath the gallows at midnight.
Gustavus overhears and makes plans to follow her there.

Still disguised, Gustavus consults Mademoiselle Arvidson who tells him to beware the next man who shakes his hand.
This turns out to be Anckarstroem, so Gustavus gaily laughs the prediction off.

At the gallows at midnight, Gustavus finds Amelia and they express their turbulent emotions.
When Anckarstroem appears to warn Gustavus of the danger of lurking conspirators, Amelia draws a veil over her face.
Gustavus escapes and Anckarstroem offers to escort the veiled lady to safety.
But they are waylaid by the conspirators Ribbing and Horn (Sam and Tom), and in the ensuing confusion Amelia’s identity is revealed to Anckarstroem, who is so appalled that he decides to side with the conspirators.

Anckarstroem plans to kill his wife, but decides that it is Gustavus who has led her astray and who must die.
He orders Amelia to draw lots for the task of killing Gustavus.
She picks Anckarstroem’s name.
When Oscar arrives with an invitation
to Gustavus’s masked ball, Anckarstroem realizes that such an event will provide an ideal time to strike.

Gustavus resolves to send Anckarstroem, with Amelia, to England as his envoy.
At the ball, as Gustavus bids Amelia farewell, Anckarstroem shoots him in the back.
Before he dies, Gustavus affirms that Amelia is innocent and nobly pardons Anckarstroem.

What to listen for

One of Verdi’s most polished and elegant scores, even if it only touches the heart in its final moments.
By this stage of his career, Verdi had abandoned the aria model which uses a slow cavatina connected by recitative to a fast cabaletta, in favour of shorter, more flexibly paced and shaped arias.
Ballo
is also notable for the interplay of melodramatic political conspiracy with the airy gaiety associated with the elegant, insouciant and generous-hearted Gustavus (a favourite tenor role, which demands graceful style as much strong high notes or flexibility) and his spritely page Oscar, sung by a boyish-looking coloratura soprano.
Led by them, the ensemble at the end of the first scene sounds like something out of an Offenbach operetta, and the quintet ‘E scherzo o dè follia’ is early evidence of a sophisticated jokey strain (albeit one underpinned here by a certain nervous unease) which Verdi would again indulge in
Falstaff.

But the mood of the opera darkens: the love duet between Gustavus and Amelia is in the grand romantic mould, as is the ensuing scene in which Anckarstroem confronts Amelia, a conventional soprano tragic heroine, torn between personal inclination and moral duty.
Her hesitant first aria, as she approaches the gallows at midnight, concludes with one of those magically soaring imprecations which are a special feature of Verdi’s genius, even though only the most luscious of voices (Leontyne Price or Montserrat Caballé in their prime) can realize their full sumptuous glory.
Anckarstroem’s big moment comes in Act III – ‘Eri tu’ is one of Verdi’s most virile baritone showpieces.

In performance

A production in Stockholm in the late 1950s by Goeran Gentele was the first to follow historical actuality and present Gustavus as an effete homosexual, clearly more sexually interested in Oscar than Amelia.
A more extreme line was taken by David Alden at ENO in 1989.
Gustavus was presented as a dithering Hamlet figure, and the sets were dominated by images of time, fate and black magic – in the final ballroom scene, a statue of the horseman of the apocalypse, one of its hoofs resting on a clock-face, loomed above the stage.
Other productions have explored ideas of the mask, of play-acting, of illusion and reality and the genuine and feigned emotions of Gustavus and Amelia.

Recording

CD: Placido Domingo (Gustavus); Riccardo Muti (cond.).
EMI 5 66510-2

La
Forza
del
Destino
(
The
Force
of
Destiny
)

Four acts. First performed St Petersburg, 1862.

Libretto by Francesco Piave

Like
Il
Trovatore,
this is based on a sprawling, action-packed Spanish romantic drama.
Interestingly, it is the only Verdi opera with an abstract title, although it has often been pointed out that the idea of ‘coincidence’ more aptly describes the plot than ‘destiny’.
First performed in St Petersburg (where it gready impressed Mussorgsky and influenced the composition of his
Boris
Godunov
), it was not particularly successful.
Verdi revised the opera for a production at La Scala, Milan in 1869, substituting the now familiar overture for a shorter prelude and changing the original ending (Alvaro committing suicide
by jumping off a cliff) into something less melodramatic.
It is this latter version which is normally performed today.

Plot

Seville, during the eighteenth century.
As the noblewoman Leonora is about to elope with Alvaro, a figure of Byronic mystery and Inca descent, her father bursts in to thwart them.
When Alvaro surrenders by throwing down his pistol, it accidentally fires and kills the old man.
Leonora and Alvaro flee separately, each believing the other to be dead.
Leonora’s brother Carlo pursues them both, seeking revenge for the disgrace they have brought upon the family.
After narrowly missing an encounter with Carlo, Leonora asks the Padre Guardiano, head of a monastery, to provide her with shelter and he agrees to house her in a lonely hermitage.

Both Alvaro and Carlo assume different names and join a Spanish contingent fighting in Italy in the War of Austrian Succession.
Alvaro saves Carlo from being murdered by ruffians. Unaware of the other’s true identity, the two men swear friendship.
Then Alvaro is badly wounded in battle.
He entrusts Carlo with a small casket of personal effects, asking that it should be opened after his death.
Carlo’s suspicions of Alvaro’s true identity are confirmed when he treacherously looks inside the casket and finds a portrait of his sister Leonora.
Once Alvaro has recovered, Carlo insults him and provokes an inconclusive duel.
Alvaro returns to Spain and coincidentally enters the same monastery that gave Leonora her hermitage.

Several years later, Carlo tracks Alvaro down and challenges him to another duel outside the hermitage.
Alvaro mortally wounds Carlo, and knocks at the hermitage in search of a holy person to give him the last rites.
Leonora emerges and is startled to be reunited with Alvaro, but the still vengeful Carlo summons his ebbing strength and manages to stab her to death.
The Padre Guardiano attempts to bring religious consolation to the despairing Alvaro.

What to listen for

A failure on the grand scale – an opera whose extreme contrasts never gel into one convincing narrative line; least successful is probably the Italian battlefield episode of Act III, despite Alvaro’s big aria ‘O tu che in seno’ and his stirring duet with Carlo.
Among the finest sequences are Leonora’s arrival at the monastery where she is granted shelter – her urgent aria ‘Madre, pietosa Vergine’ is followed by a long and varied duet with the Padre Guardiano and concludes with the serene hymn ‘La Vergine degli Angeli’ – and the brief but electrifying final scene in which Leonora’s famous aria ‘Pace, Pace, mio Dio’ is (in the later version of 1869) swiftly followed by an impassioned trio.