“That’s my subway stop!” gasped a millennial friend who lives in the gentrifying Harlem section of Manhattan when the curtain went up on the final act of Giuseppe Verdi’s sprawling 1862 epic La Forza del Destino. In an ambitious new production for New York’s ailing Metropolitan Opera, Polish director Mariusz Treliński, who previously staged a lugubriously modern production of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde for the Met, as well as a marginally better double bill of Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta and Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, has updated Forza from its original 18th-century setting to a vaguely modern milieu. His effort evokes a 20th-century authoritarian dystopia situated in what looks to be the ‘60s or ‘70s. Growing up in communist Poland might do that to a native son, whose production is shared with and premiered at Warsaw’s Teatr Wielki, but with so many variants of this time and place on stages today, it might be an idiom better escaped.
Unlike most Verdi operas, which are named for their principal characters, fate itself—a major Verdian theme—is the protagonist of Forza. Its literary inspiration is the Duke of Rivas’s Spanish play Don Álvaro, o la fuerza del sino (with a military scene taken from Schiller’s drama Wallensteins Lager), but the secondary title far outweighs the journey of the play’s named protagonist. Leonora, the daughter of the Marchese di Calatrava, is pursued by Don Alvaro, a Spanish nobleman who is nominally half-Incan and therefore thought to be an unacceptable love match. Here the father is a military strongman whose peaked cap and epaulettes could place him anywhere from post-Perónist Argentina to a louche South Vietnam. Calatrava is not a seigneurial toponym but rather a sleek modern hotel where the leader receives fealty expressed in extended arm salutes familiar to another 20th-century dictatorship. Whether the hotel connotation has anything to do with a former and likely future U.S. president is anyone’s guess.
When the swaggering ruler catches the beautifully dressed but unhappy Leonora on the verge of eloping with a hippy-styled Alvaro, the suitor pledges his good intentions and throws his gun to the floor, inadvertently shooting the Marchese, who dies cursing his daughter. In an exploration of another powerful Verdian theme—the futility of revenge—the Marchese’s son, Don Carlo, devotes his life to avenging his father and punishing his sister, who becomes a hermit to assuage her guilt. She arrives at the monastery after a car crash during a rainy night and takes her vows after a backhanded slap from the gruff Padre Guardiano and a gauntlet of caning from the other monks. In a Freudian moment that is not fully explored, the Met casts the same bass to sing both Leonora’s father and her new father superior. Are guilt and punishment associated with fathers, with patriarchy, and with the cruel contours of an inescapably violent society? We are never told, and it may not matter anyway.
War rages through the rest of the opera. The historical conflict was the War of the Austrian Succession, when Europe battled over territorial rights following the extinction of the Habsburg dynasty’s direct male line. Common soldiers and ordinary people who got in the way probably understood little about the larger political issue but knew the conflict’s brutality all too well. Here the conflict looks more like the Vietnam War, with a barbed-wire encampment and soldiers in the olive-green fatigues of the U.S. military in the ‘60s. In this environment, Carlo and Alvaro encounter each other under assumed names on the eve of the historic Battle of Velletri (1744), a contest between Spanish-led Neapolitan forces who defeated Austrian armies deployed to retain Habsburg hegemony over the Italian north. Over a century later, the Austrians were still there, the hated enemy of Italy’s national cause and an obvious object of Verdi’s ire.
Carlo surmises Alvaro’s true identity when he is wounded, and, learning that Alvaro will survive, he rejoices that he will be there to kill him when he recovers. After an inconclusive confrontation, Alvaro takes holy orders, but the vengeful Carlo discovers him and goads him into a renewed duel, which leads the brawling pair to Leonora’s sanctuary, here the devastated New York City subway station. In the revised version of the opera that is normally performed at the Met, Alvaro inflicts a fatal wound on Carlo, whom Leonora comforts as he expires, with Padre Guardiano appearing (dressed as Leonora’s father in this production) to offer a final benediction. In the original version, which might have been more appropriate for Treliński’s production but turned off Verdi’s opening-night audience, the dying Carlo spitefully stabs Leonora to death, leaving Alvaro to curse the world and jump off a cliff.
Forza has marvelous moments and is a storied opera around the world, including in New York, where the challenge of casting and the Met’s mounting financial difficulties have kept it off the stage for eighteen years. Legendary performances still reside in living memory, however, and there are still elderly operagoers who claim to have been at the 1960 performance where the legendary baritone Leonard Warren sang Don Carlo’s fateful aria “Morir tremenda cosa!” (“To die is a tremendous thing”) before suffering a fatal heart attack on stage at age 48. Other singers believed the opera to be cursed. Luciano Pavarotti avoided singing Alvaro throughout his career. Franco Corelli performed good luck rituals before going on in the same role.
Nevertheless, the opera has a surreal quality that is not quite believable. Its title notwithstanding, too much depends on coincidence. Its sprawling wartime backdrop and profound religious scenes offer scintillating contrasts, but the straining dramatic convention can lead one back to the leading Russian music critic and composer Alexander Serov’s conclusion upon Forza’s world premiere in St. Petersburg that Verdi’s opera is “a kingdom of nonsense upon the stage.”
It takes an exceptionally strong cast to pull all the threads together. A mediocre performance, which is what I recall from the Met’s last presentation of the opera in 2006, can inflict a long and unengaging evening. Here, however, the Met fielded what remains of its all-stars. With the originally cast Anna Netrebko under a de facto ban from performance in New York, Lise Davidsen is nearly omnipresent these days, having marched well before her 40th birthday through the major Richard Strauss and lighter Wagner roles here and around the world. I was less enthusiastic about her Italian repertoire singing in a pre-season concert she gave last September, but she has the versatility for a superb Leonora, a role that grand Wagnerian sopranos often take on early in their careers and that she had sung only once before, in a concert performance in her native Norway. A delightfully natural lucidity of tone radiated throughout the evening, though no one was prepared for the ecstatic heights of her final aria, “Pace, pace mio Dio.” Even though she sang it in the garb of a homeless person fresh from pushing around her shopping cart, the soulful aria modulated in harmonies so irresistible that the audience erupted into several minutes of sustained applause and cheers. Raucous show-stopping is a rare commodity at the Met these days, and the premiere audience was blessed to experience it.
Brian Jagde got off to a slow start as Alvaro, but later in the premiere performance and in subsequent performances, he was solid and stentorian, with all the clarion hallmarks of a superb tenore di forza, a rare vocal type that Verdi’s tenor leads demand. The Russian baritone Igor Golovatenko was gruffer as Carlo but nevertheless produced the right combination of determination and spite for his character. Solomon Howard’s dual casting as the Marchese di Calatrava and Padre Guardiano gave him two solid bass roles to explore, though the concept underlying this unusual casting decision made him less effective. Patrick Carfizzi added a degree of sour contempt to the role of Fra Melitone, one of Guardiano’s monks, who is normally there for comic relief but here contributed to the cruel landscape. The Romanian-born mezzo-soprano Judit Kutasi scored an impressive Met debut in the unremarkable and rather intrusive role of Preziosilla, a languid camp follower.
Despite his postmodern personal flair, Met music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin is most at home in the high drama of expansive 19th-century repertoire and delivered an excellent performance. The choruses boomed under the direction of Donald Palumbo, who is unfortunately retiring this year. With such a fine musical performance, it is perhaps regrettable that the subway station remains the production’s most memorable image. In its decayed state, however, it carries little shock value. With a seemingly unsolvable migrant crisis, rising transit system crime, an increasingly distressed infrastructure, and rampant homelessness, it was not much different from what subway riders will see in the normal course of their journeys these days.
