The New York Metropolitan Opera has raised the curtain on a doubtful new season. With fading audiences and declining receipts, its administration had placed its bets on mammoth runs of a handful of standard repertoire favorites, and on an expanded number of new and contemporary operas that it hopes will attract younger and more diverse audiences. It has also slashed the overall number of productions to the lowest level in living memory, if not ever, and has cut the total number of performances by about 10%. Time will tell whether this approach will work amid New York’s general decay, a still sluggish U.S. economy, and the migration of much of the Met’s subscriber base to more appealing climes, but in the meantime there is still some space for traditional works.
Giuseppe Verdi’s dramatic genius is hard for any serious opera company to ignore. Less than a month into the season, the Met has already presented two of his operas: his early hit Nabucco (1842) and his troubled, but transformational, Un Ballo in Maschera (1859). The Met also gave one performance of the composer’s Requiem (1874), composed to commemorate the death of Verdi’s friend, the great Italian nationalist and novelist Alessandro Manzoni. Later this season, a third Verdi opera, La Forza del Destino (1862) will enter the company’s repertoire in a much anticipated new production.
Un Ballo in Maschera succeeded at its premiere and remained a standard repertoire opera until relatively recent times, when critical opinion seized on some of its irregularities to dismiss it as a frivolous work. Chief among its flaws is the question of its setting: the Papal censors wanted Verdi to relocate the action from Europe to either North America or, however oddly, the Caucasus. The problem was that the opera’s titular masked ball was the historic setting of the assassination in 1792 of King Gustav III of Sweden (Gustavo in the opera). An “enlightened despot,” Gustav was almost certainly killed for political reasons after stepping on the toes of his country’s nobility. His assassin, one Anckarström, survives in the opera with the Italianate first name Renato, although in real life he was executed without revealing his motive. A generation later, the French dramatist Eugène Scribe assumed that a woman must have been involved, and so he invented a love plot in which the King is infatuated with his murderer’s wife (Amelia in the opera) but, out of propriety, has not acted on his feelings. Scribe’s libretto was set by three other composers before it came to Verdi’s attention as a stopgap which could cover his failure to compose an opera based on Shakespeare’s King Lear, due for performance in Naples just before Italian unification became a political fact in 1859-1860. Antonio Somma, his librettist on that project, instead suggested a fresh look at Scribe’s libretto for a new opera.
The plan might have worked, but just after it was submitted to the Neapolitan censors, the Italian radical Felice Orsini attempted to assassinate the French Emperor Napoleon III. Operas about killing monarchs suddenly became impolitic, and heightened demands by the censors in Naples induced Verdi to seek his premiere in Rome, where restrictions were less severe. Moving the opera out of Europe led him to place it in colonial Boston, an improbable locale since the Puritans of seventeenth-century America were hardly known for exuberant dancing. Verdi probably had in mind the looser atmosphere of Restoration England under Charles II, but the Boston setting stuck and the composer never sought to return it to Sweden. Neither did anyone else until the 1950s, when the opera world’s current and more curatorial ethos revived the Swedish setting for greater authenticity. Today, the opera is almost always set in Sweden, with the result that critics take it more seriously. The irony, of course, is that the plot—of impossible love provoking wrath in a scenario of power—works in any surroundings.
The only remaining question for directors is which version of Sweden to use. For more than 20 years, the Met relied on a florid, rococo production set at the actual time of the opera. David Alden’s effort, revived this season for the first time in eight years, replaced the older staging in 2012 with an austere late Victorian or early Edwardian Sweden that evokes the dramas of August Strindberg or the voguish stylings of Downton Abbey, with elements of film noir mixed in. The passions are the same, but there is a smallness to Alden’s sets that cools the fire in the characters’ souls. It also serves up some inexplicably bizarre elements, such as a cakewalk dance of courtiers at the end of the first scene. Ulrica, the sorceress who prophesies the King’s murder by his friend, is not the bone-chilling fright whom the chief justice wants to expel from the country, but rather a kind of washed up Madame Arcati. And all three acts are watched over by a displaced rococo ceiling painting of Icarus, the iconic tester of human limits. The point is obvious and seems rather overdone.
The production’s revival would have been unremarkable were it not for a couple of noteworthy role debuts. Charles Castronovo began his career as a pleasant Mozartean tenor, but over time his voice has matured into an instrument capable of capturing the sympathetic part of the doomed Gustavo in this, his first attempt. He paced himself in the early scenes but nevertheless sang with a honeyed warmth that endured him to the audience. The part of his lethal non-rival Renato capably went to the accomplished baritone Quinn Kelsey, who has methodically collected the great Verdi baritone parts with a strong but sensitive approach. His Act III aria “Eri tu” (“It was you”) martially condemns the King to death, but reserves a hidden delicateness for memories of his early love for his wife. Capturing that range of emotions is the challenge to which any Verdi baritone must rise, and Kelsey’s performance succeeded in reminding us that the production’s original Renato was another master of that craft, the late great Dimitri Hvorostovsky. This was not Angela Meade’s first appearance in the opera, and her Amelia was burnished with experience that emerged from the singer’s resonant middle and lower registers—a reminder that her unconsummated love for the King helps seal his doom. Her versatile delivery emerged in great relief in Amelia’s Act II aria “Dell’arido stelo divulsa,” but her aria of maternal despair in the next act, “Morrò, ma prima in grazia” showcased her singing at its best.
The supporting cast deserved many plaudits. Ulrica appears in only one scene, but the Russian mezzo-soprano Olesya Petrova delivered the part with purring Golden Age depth that descended deep into the contralto range. The soubrette soprano Liv Redpath made her Met debut in this production in the trouser part of Oscar, the King’s page (Verdi’s only trouser part). She drew on radiant high notes to project his energy and enthusiasm, which are tonally best seen as a projection of Gustavo at his carefree best. Basses Kevin Short and Christopher Job were suitably menacing as the conspiratorial Counts Ribbing and Horn. Thomas Capobianco sang the small but impressive role of the Chief Justice.
Carlo Rizzi’s workmanlike conducting underserved a cast of this quality. He sped through the score with a rapidity that glossed over too many crucial moments and delivered a generally pallid effort.
