An event announcement for those in the New York area: on the afternoon and evening of Saturday, Dec. 2, I will be participating in a program sponsored by Teatro Nuovo to celebrate the 100th birthday of Maria Callas. It will include recollections by a few of us who saw her perform, some hands-on work with young singers to demonstrate the teaching of bel canto techniques, and much else, concluding with a concert of selections from operas Callas might have sung, but didn’t get around to. Program details and ticket info here.

And a preliminary note about today’s post: because of unanticipated tech troubles that must be addressed immediately, I have broken it into two parts, of which this is the first. The second, assessing the Met’s current revival itself, will follow next week. Thanks for your patience. 

Giuseppe Verdi’s mature, taut and compact, full-blooded, and in some ways uncharacteristic Un Ballo in maschera has made a furtive re-entrance into the Met’s repertory after an eleven-year absence. “Furtive” on three counts: first, the company is not promoting standard-repertory revivals. Following the practice of the last three seasons  and the one to come, this one opened with a contemporary American opera, Jake Heggie’s well-traveled Dead Man Walking, and the banner over the entrance to the house proclaimed that work’s title although it was alternating with performances of Verdi’s Nabucco and Requiem, plus the now-customary twice-weekly dark nights. As of my visit to Ballo (Oct. 24th), the banner read “The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” amid performances of Ballo and Bohème. Advertising policy has followed suit. Second, our lonely mainstream sentinel and bell-ringer, The New York Times, has fallen right into line. Until quite recently, the first seasonal performances of repertory operas occasioned dedicated reviews, not always prominent but reasonably attentive to performance and production, perhaps with a dollop of house history, hinting at a dim awareness of the reasons for the work’s admittance to the canon. But this fall, Zachary Wolfe’s thoughts on the Bohème and Ballo revivals have been conflated into a “Critic’s Notebook” item on the bottom quarter of the Arts section’s fifth page (see the NYT, 10/24/23). That seems to be the new SOP. And third, nothing in this production of Ballo, brought back after an eleven-year absence, bespoke serious, or even respectful, engagement with the opera, and little in the performance rose above the level of an expectable professionalism. The response of the audience, which was larger than those of some post-pandemic standard-rep performances but still significantly subpar, was low-key.

I am sure that to most of my readers, the story of the adaptation by Somma and Verdi of Scribe’s libretto for Auber’s Gustave III, ou le bal masqué; of the vexing disputes with managements and censors attendant on the new opera’s birth; of the change of setting from the historically grounded Stockholm in the year 1792 to colonial Boston (hence, necessarily twenty years or more earlier); and of the recent trend back towards the Swedish setting, is familiar at least in outline.^(I) So I won’t tread that worn-in pathway here. Still, some of the detours and way stations along the way may bear exploration. Though I can agree with Budden when he calls the opera’s central performance issue “the chiaroscuro of the score,” I can’t acquiesce in his dismissal of the setting as “a subsidiary problem . . . to which there is no obvious solution.” Certainly it’s true that Verdi assimilated all elements into a thoroughly Italian opera; that a hot performance can reduce the setting to a matter of comparatively minor importance; and that when Piave wrote to Verdi “So they want other people to judge whether your music, written for one libretto, can be adapted to another?”, he was referring to many changes proposed by the Papal Censor, not only that of the setting. But I think of Verdi, who wanted everything in his operas to serve a common dramatic purpose and who was keenly sensitive to the atmospheric color (the famous tinta) of each of them, working on his score, which, let’s keep in mind, he had completed before the censoring difficulties arose. And as he worked, as he envisioned each scene and character, the characters’ actions, desires, and emotions and exactly how, in what manner, the actions would be carried out and the desires and emotions expressed, he has to have had in his mind’s ear and eye two worlds that strongly marked what he wrote. One was French—not only the world of Scribe, of opéra comique and of Parisian flavors and conventions in general, but of the “real-life” court of Louis XIV, with which, for all his Enlightened outlook, Gustavus had been much taken and whose brilliance and sophistication trailed behind him to his lavish Stockholm court. The other was, obviously, Swedish, and that has to have included the feel of the scenario’s interior and exterior settings (the palace’s reception room and ballroom, Ulrica’s conjuration room, the bleak field of execution, the light and climate of that city of the North and the looks and ways of its people as Verdi imagined them. The French ingredient is acknowledged and studied for its influences on the score, while the Swedish is more often simply noted as a superficial aspect of the opera’s theatricality. But can we suppose that the music (and I think especially of that of the second act) would have been the same had the composer visualized a Spanish or Italian setting? I can’t. I think the North is in there, in a texture not quite that of any other Verdi opera. As Budden himself puts it, “Mediterranean sunlight is harmful to the plot.”