Soloman Howard’s robust efficiency provides added depth to the double position. The doomed triangle of Scene 1—lady’s father killed by her seducer– inevitably recollects the opening scene of Don Giovanni. Leonora’s lover Don Alvaro is hardly a talented seducer (although he’s a seduttore as far as the Marquis is anxious) and can stay extra a bumbler than a snake all through the opera’s lengthy night. He simply has a behavior of killing folks with out actually eager to. However the Marquis, like Mozart’s Commendatore, is each a father and a stand-in for paternal authority extra typically, and it’s the continuity of fierce patriarchal authority that this manufacturing sustains so effectively by bringing him again as Padre Guardiano. Let’s name this the Commendatore impact. In a approach it’s the central precept of Mariusz Trelinski’s grim, fascinating manufacturing.
Trelinski ties collectively this most unwieldy of Verdi’s operas by taking it by means of the unforgiving circles of hell of latest international politics. This Marquis of Calatrava is a vaguely Hispanic navy dictator (Franco? Somosa? Chavez? Maduro?) with greater than a contact of Tony Soprano. (Footnote: he owns a lodge, maybe even a lodge chain, which can have capitalized his path to political energy.) His dying propels the never-ending struggle and the Ukraine-like winter scenes that eat the center of the opera. There isn’t any aid, no redemption, no magnificence to correlate with the hovering lyricism of the rating and so lots of the vocal strains. In search of the seclusion of the convent and the consolation and style of the Virgin Mary, Leonora finds in Guardiano not a lot a benevolent man of the church as a sadistic boss who has her flagellated by a gauntlet of monks after which abandons her to not the solitude of a protected hermit however to the destiny of a homeless wanderer on desolate war-scorched streets. (I’m reminded of Jürgen Flimm’s prescient remark whereas getting ready the 2010 Walküre for Milan and Berlin: Wotan, he urged, doesn’t shield Brünnhilde in her coerced sleep, however moderately abandons her on a avenue nook to be raped by a passer-by.) In an analogous approach, Trelinski’s Padre Guardiano evinces the cruelty, violence, and sadism of patriarchal authority. And his assistant Fra Melitone gives not one of the comedian aid we now have come to anticipate from him and his scenes. (Although I endure myself from as a lot Fernando Corena nostalgia as anybody else, I discover this portrayal of Melitone as a thug moderately than a clown completely convincing.)
The worldwide attain of this manufacturing’s political creativeness additionally traces the historical past and geography of the Catholic world. The motion is in fact based mostly in and round 18th-century Seville, the nucleus of the fading Spanish business and navy empire (in addition to essentially the most default metropolis in operatic historical past—suppose Carmen, the 2 Figaros, Fidelio, and many others.). Forza additionally locations on panoramic show the Catholic world in its geographic vicissitudes. On the heart is the opera itself and its Italianità. Don Alvaro claims no less than partial descent from Peruvian the Aristocracy but additionally some Inca ancestry, which causes the extra absolutely old-world, Iberian aristocrat Carlo Calatrava to demean him in racist phrases. The Order of Calatrava was in actual fact a Castilian navy order confirmed by the Vatican within the 12th century and lionized for its protection of Spain towards the “Moors.” As far as the other, northeasternmost nook of Europe and our personal time are involved, we will marvel how Mariusz Trelinski thinks by means of this opera’s play of faith and energy are available dialogue with the Catholicism of his native Poland, repressed underneath communism after which celebrated by means of the papacy of John Paul II.
Trelinski has proven sustained curiosity within the staging of Catholic politics. His current manufacturing of Boris Godunov (Warsaw and Tokyo), for instance, used Mussorgsky’s unique orchestration however restored a portion of the so-called Polish act, utilizing it to spotlight the strife between spiritual regimes in addition to political ones. Tsar Boris’s incapacitating guilt produced by his homicide of the respectable tsarevich performs out, for Trelinski, in his relationship along with his son Feodor. Trelinski levels Feodor as a cripple (his phrase) with a tortured physique. Equally, Trelinski’s Peter Grimes climaxes with a dream scene wherein Peter steps out of the body and watches himself, that’s his physique, as he/is dismembered by the hostile villagers. Beginning and staying at all times with the physique of Christ, this aesthetic operates within the polarity between the eroticization and mortification of the (male) physique.
For Trelinski, the disturbing flip in Forza’s nice Act II scene of Leonora’s induction and its aftermath gives us the total spectrum of the Catholic world, heaven and hell, grace and damnation, consolation and sadism, the cult of the mom and the subjection of girls. Set designer Boris Kudlicka’s stage by no means loses the Catholic icons; the hollowed subway station of the ultimate scene is marked “Trinity Avenue.” Trelinski is a fan of railway stations as symbols of transience, of the way in which that shifting from place to put doubles as stations of exploration of internal life. His 2014 manufacturing of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut was set in a practice station, with every act of this very peripatetic opera highlighting a unique emotional state. However “Trinity Avenue” labels this most profane and transient area as a sport marked by the sacred, or no less than by its relics. And the sacred, not like the holy– as students of faith will remind us—comprises each good and evil, comfort and torture, salvation and damnation.
La forza del destino proceeds in an uncommon separation of the tales of its women and men. Males and their our bodies endure in struggle; ladies endure at struggle’s edges on the mercy of highly effective males. The Catholic world and its iconography concentrate on the struggling of the physique, at the start the physique of Christ himself. The successive scenes of this opera emphasize the struggling our bodies by separating the tales and traumas of women and men to an uncommon diploma. Forza’s central act is a struggle scene and a scene of males, represented fairly graphically on this manufacturing with its hospital scenes supplemented by movies of cliché-filled however efficient pictures and sounds of struggle (suppose Apocalypse Now). There are not any ladies on this state of affairs; even the orderlies are sung by males. Its central dramatic mechanism entails the wounding, ache, and restoration of Alvaro. Now, in fact, even this manufacturing can’t absolutely suppress the ludicrous character of Preziosilla (wanting chopping her scenes, which may be a good suggestion); it does one of the best it could actually by ironizing her, first as a Marlene Dietrich-like chanteuse who means the other when she insists that “è bella la guerra” and, in a while, when she makes her second entrance entertaining the wounded troopers with the musically and dramatically unbearable Rataplan.
The struggling of girls on the whole and Leonora specifically is restored to solely in Act IV, with the good aria “Tempo, tempo, mio Dio” adopted shortly by the entry of the 2 males—her lover Alvaro and her brother Calatrava Jr.– and her personal dying on the hand of the latter. Once more, Kudlicka’s set makes its level. Hooked up to the “Trinity Avenue” subway station is a big crucifix. Granted, the surroundings does must double as Guardiano’s monastery, into which Alvaro has secluded himself previous to Calatrava Jr,’s hostile interruption of his solitude. However extra necessary is the crucifix’s symbolic and emotional presence. Its struggling male physique is the companion of the bodily and emotionally anguishing Leonora, from her close to hunger to the opera’s finale in the mean time of her homicide.
The sequential violence of this remaining scene however, the opera ends in musical and emotional serenity with Padre Guardiano’s assertion that Leonora has gone to God: Salita a Dio. And right here the Commendatore impact, the ingenious double casting, makes its level in an understated however no much less devastating approach: not more than Mozart’s Commendatore does this one, in his normal’s uniform, declare or provide peace, comfort, or salvation. He stays the voice of a sure military-religious advanced. His incantation of Leonora’s salvation is a lie, a remaining act of violence to her spirit and physique. Although Trelinski’s Forza dutifully performs the work’s closing gesture towards heavenly salvation, its overwhelming focus is the wretched of the earth.
And a final phrase: Soloman Howard, Calatrava Sr. and Guardiano on this Forza, will probably be onstage in Don Giovanni in Santa Fe this summer time… because the (first) Commendatore.
Images: Karen Almond/MetOpera
