Time for the latest mash-up of SNLC with the occasional opera series begun by Demi Moaned some time back, inspired by the Metropolitan Opera’s HD-cast series at the movies. So we start with the standard question, phrased for today:
Anyone see the double bill of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci today?
A much easier way to refer to this most famous double bill in opera (not that there are many such candidates) is as “Cav” and “Pag”, for obvious reasons, and also just to show that you’re a “real opera insider” (of a sort). In fact, per this NYT preview article, it's quite possible that the Met was the very first opera company ever to stage the two as a double-bill. Fast forward 120+ years below the flip.....
First, more or less following 3CM’s usual protocol, you can read a synopsis of the double bill from the Met’s here. If you note the two plots, there is a certain superficial similarity, in that both involve love triangles (or even would be quadrangles) that spill over into violence when the infidelity of one spouse in the couple in each story is revealed. As well, they do share some other meta-aspects that actually make it rather appropriate to team them, as has so often been done.
The first meta-aspect is that both works are exemplars of the verismo movement in Italian opera in the late 19th century. Roughly translated, ‘verismo’ means realism (think the word verisimilitude, or the French word ‘verité’ [truth]; same Latin root for each), so that in terms of opera, these works refer not to distant historical, mythological, aristocratic, or uber-literary figures, but to “real” people, ordinary folks that one could potentially meet on an Italian street. In fact, in the Prologue to Pagliacci, Tonio (George Gagnidze in this production) states that what you, the audience, are about to see on the stage are real people, portraying real passions, in what one can see as a manifesto for operatic verismo. (Keep this in mind for later.)
Another aspect is that both works are pretty compact, as operas go, with each lasting around 70-75 minutes or so, a semi-reasonable length for a single act of an opera. Cav is structured in one act and Pag in two acts. However, Pag is generally played continuously without a full intermission, but usually with a pause for time to change the scenery for Act II (although the 2013 Opera Theatre of Saint Louis production just kept going), as the Met did today. In effect, Pag is a de facto “one act” opera in two parts/scenes.
The other meta-aspect that both operas have in common is that each was its respective composer’s biggest success. In other words, Pietro Mascagni and Ruggiero Leoncavallo, respectively with Cav and Pag, were “one-hit wonders” in the realm of opera. Just as an example, Leoncavallo wrote his own version of La boheme, which I’m told isn’t too bad an opera. Unfortunately, it happens that the opera by Puccini with the same title is rather more famous (and by all accounts much, much better).
Focusing back on this new Met production, the main MSM reviews are as follows:
(a) Anthony Tommasini, NYT
(b) Martin Bernheimer, Financial Times
As you can tell (you did click through on them, didn’t you?), neither was exactly a rave. Bernheimer is pretty much on full snark mode, as he often is when he rips into a production. He even gets in a jab at the ultra-traditionalist old Franco Zeffirelli production that held sway for years prior to this new production by Sir David McVicar:
”In the beginning, say 1970, there was Franco Zeffirelli. He turned Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, the eternal verismo twins, into a pair of kitsch spectaculars. Audiences applauded the scenery.
On Tuesday the Met introduced an antidote of sorts: the double bill staged, quasi-modern style, by David McVicar and designed by Rae Smith. It would be nice to report a revisionist triumph. Unfortunately, that would mean exaggeration at best, distortion at worst.”
Tommasini, as he so often is, tends to tread softly when he writes anything critical of the Met, which historically hasn’t been that often (bilious snark on acid generally isn’t his style). But by his standards, he has some fairly harsh critical remarks for this production:
”Someone at the Metropolitan Opera should persuade the director David McVicar to turn off the rotating platform that mars his new production of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana....
In Cavalleria....Mr. McVicar uses that rotating platform too often. It comes off as a director’s shortcut to lending mystery, even a touch of surrealism, to an ingeniously compact melodrama. Watching the townspeople mill around on that spinning dais just makes you dizzy.
The juxtaposition of starkness, abstraction and realism might have worked well had Mr. McVicar left it at that. But when that platform starts rotating, you sense a director trying too hard. And why is the lighting (by Paule Constable) so dark? The opera takes place on Easter morning. In this Cavalleria, the villagers could be attending midnight Mass.”
Actually, that last line from AT might be the most Bernheimer-like that I’ve ever seen from him. AT actually does have a point about the dark lighting, when it’s normally morning as in after 9 AM, not the middle of the night. The HD-cast mitigates that, and the rotating platform, to some extent, given the tendency for close-ups that characterizes the movie-casts, so that you don’t necessarily see the whole platform rotating all the time. You see the rotation implicitly, when you see the background moving, often enough.
In general, the singers do well, even if the sound balances sound a bit strident, and I was wondering if Marcelo Alvarez as Turiddu wasn’t forcing things a bit much, as seems to be the case with leading tenors. Of course, he gets a long break after his opening off-stage serenade to Lola (Ginger Costa-Jackson, who is well worth the serenading). Eva-Maria Westbroek as Santuzza is, indeed, a healthy Dutch blonde rather than a Mediterranean peasant in her general physiognomy, who gets pushed to the stage more than once by the men in the production (Alvarez’s Turiddu, and George Gagnidze’s Alfio). But she throws herself into the emotions, as she admitted to Susan Graham in the intermission banter. Worth mentioning also is the fine work from Jane Bunnell as Mamma Lucia, Turiddu’s mom. The production is indeed extremely minimalist, with lots of chairs and a table that emerges from the platform for scenery, even if the staging does try to mimic the market square at one point, complete with stage vegetables and fruits.
Once we shifted to Pagliacci, though, I kind of saw why Cav was so spare and dark, if perhaps misguidedly so, namely to set up the biggest visual and emotional contrast between the two. To give an idea, at the start of Pag Gagnidze as Tonio delivers the Prologue in a really tacky, glittery jacket. According to this NYT article, McVicar had an old UK vaudeville act in mind, apparently. The setting is post-WWII Italy, in the same village (the Italian-language poster unnoticeable in the house, but visible in HD, for the 1951 film An American in Paris, as if to show what a difference two world wars and a few decades can make for the town. From the moment the curtain goes up for Pag the lights are up (even if the dark back house walls prevent full sunlight from showing, rather than having a sunny backdrop), and there’s plenty of action on stage, as the commedia dell’arte troupe arrives in town, with a kids’ chorus present as well to liven things up. (One wonders how they reacted to the end of the show, when Nedda gets hers in front of them.)
Speaking of which, one nice bit of detail in this production, however, occurs at that very end of Pagliacci. Even if you don’t know this opera, or opera at all, you’ve probably heard its very famous final line:
”La commedia e finita” (The comedy is finished)
If you read the Met’s on-line synopsis, you see this:
“Turning to the horrified crowd, Canio announces that the comedy is over.”
Here’s the historical catch, though; that’s not how Leoncavallo originally planned it. Originally, Leoncavallo gave the last line to Tonio, which mirrors the Prologue (remember that Tonio delivered the Prologue). However, not long after
Pag hit the stage, no less than Enrico Caruso began the practice of ‘stealing’ that last line from Tonio, a tradition that has continued more or less to this day. In a way, it makes sense, because it’s such a great last line, very meta.
The problem is that, besides destroying the symmetry of Tonio covering both the Prologue and the very end, for that very meta-reason, Canio saying the line makes no sense whatsoever. Here’s why, IMHUO (U = useless; remember that 3CM is a loser, after all). It helps to think of the relationship between Tonio, Nedda, and her husband Canio by this set of rough analogies:
Canio -> Othello
Nedda -> Desdemona
Tonio -> Iago
Here, though, unlike in Shakespeare, Tonio, an ugly gnomish dwarf-like dude (even if Gagnidze is a big lug, in real life, no dwarf he), hits on Nedda in the course of Pag, whereas in Othello, if you really know the play, Iago drops a line that he heard that Othello had been having it on with his wife Bianca. In the opera, Nedda repels Tonio, sensibly, especially after Tonio borderline-assaults her, to which Tonio basically replies “I’m gonna git you, sucka”. Basically, Tonio sets Canio up on the road to vengeance by revealing Nedda’s infidelity to Canio (albeit while Canio is drunk, and isn’t able to glimpse the face of the other guy), and tells Canio that the lover will definitely show up to the troupe’s performance that evening. This revelation actually mirrors the scene where Santuzza reveals Turiddu’s affair with Lola to Alfio, which in turns sets Alfion on his road to revenge (but note which role Gagnidze plays in each opera).
In short, even though Canio laments how he has to act happy on stage while his real life is falling apart (which is what “Vesti la giubba” means in a nutshell), he isn’t so detached when he does the double-whacking at the end that he would be intellectually capable of saying “La commedia e finita”. Canio is admittedly a loose cannon in waiting, as he has one passage earlier in Act I when he says that it’s one thing for Colombina in the play to flirt with Arlecchino, but in real life, if his wife did that, he’d get his revenge, in no uncertain terms. Because Tonio is the one pulling the strings, in that sense, the line properly belongs to Tonio, and kudos to McVicar for respecting that, at the very least.
Ironically enough, for the HD-cast, the pdf of the synopsis reads, in line with McVicar’s restoration of the original ending:
“Turning to the horrified crowd, Tonio announces that the comedy is over.”
In addition, how McVicar stages things just after the final line also mirrors Santuzza’s revelation, and reaction. In
Cav, right after Westbroek as Santuzza tells Gagnidze’s Alfio the news, and sees his vengeful reaction, Santuzza immediately regrets it. In
Pag, after Gagnidze’s Tonio says “La commedia e finita”, he actually crumples to the ground in a remorseful pose, realizing that “oh s)(*#&$, I went too far”, just like Santuzza’s earlier reaction. Other stagings can easily show Tonio as satisfied at having his revenge on Nedda for turning him down. Not the case here.
Holding it all together in both operas is, of course, the Met Opera Orchestra, with Fabio Luisi, the Met’s current principal conductor (not music director; long story with no time to tell here), on the podium. Luisi is a very unprepossing-looking fellow, who could almost be a bank manager if you met him on the street. He’s not necessarily the deepest conductor out there, but he’s generally straight-up, no nonsense, and gets the job done. In fact, in the orchestral preludes to each act of Pag, the camera gets in plenty of footage of Luisi and the orchestra. Luisi stepped into the breach as the Met’s principal conductor when music director James Levine suffered major health issues in 2011, leading a lot more performances than just as a regular occasional guest conductor. However, now that Levine is back in action to some degree, and it’s looking down the line that Luisi probably will not become the Met’s next music director, the nominal scuttlebutt is that Luisi might give up his Met title in a few years. So perhaps the subtext of the HD-footage of him is almost to say “we love you, man, we want you to stay around”. He becomes principal conductor of an orchestra in Denmark in a few years, and still has a major post with the Zurich opera. So we shall see.
So this was perhaps a mixed bag of HD-opera, but overall worthwhile, with plenty to talk about. I dwelt more on Pag here because there was more to talk about, at least IMHO. If you went to the HD this afternoon, your opinion might differ, of course. With that, you can either:
(a) Discuss the HD-cast today, or
(b) Observe the standard SNLC protocol
And for the indecisive, or all-inclusive, there’s always option (c), i.e. do both :) .