Ballo, though, in addition to a lightness of body and transparency of texture infrequently encountered in the other three, comes close to being a throwback to the drama of classical unities—certainly to a unity of time (from the morning of one day into the notte d’orror of the next—about 36 hours) and only slightly more broadly to that of place (a single city and its environs). As to a central, single action, that’s rather more complicated, for of the two that are proposed at the outset (the drive toward consummation of a secret love affair vs. a political plot to assassinate a king), the first is intended to end in noble renunciation, and the second is transformed into a mistaken revenge killing over the apparent outcome of the same affair. In all these respects, Ballo finds much in common dramaturgically with Rigoletto. Both works share as well the same variation on the E-19 metanarrative—to wit, that the male protagonist is not, as in the “pure” form of the story, a man unjustly deprived of his birthright seeking alliance with a highborn female. On the contrary, he is a ruler (in Gustavo’s case, a king) and his beloved of lower station, though Amelia is at least  the wife of the king’s private secretary and confidant, not the poor barely nubile daughter of his jester. With the class standings thus reversed, it is nevertheless still necessary for the couple to behave according to the the E-19 script. The male remains a supplicant pleading for the favor of his Lady, who is elevated by virtue of her power of consent within the courtly protocol understood by both. Again as in Rigoletto, Ballo gives us the standard Romantic voice distribution of soprano/tenor/baritone (the baritone, in these rather unusual cases, not in place as antagonist from the outset, but instead being transformed in the course of the action from subservient ally of the regnant tenor to homicidal antagonist over the Lady’s honor), along with such plot furnishments as masks and veils, court intrigues, and a ruler venturing among the people anonymously or under an assumed identity.

It needs to be conceded that the marvelous score has its banalities, most of them in the first act, though unfortunately returning with the opera’s final bars. But they pass quickly—even the thudding “O figlio d’Inghilterra/della patria” chorus is quickly supplanted by the jubilant Oscar/Gustavo entrance and its fine subsequent development, just as the “Gloria all’Egitto” reprise will soon morph into the Aïda/Radames flight in the Act 2 finale of Aïda, the soprano/tenor melody winging over the celebrative chorus in both instances. And they do not, in my opinion, include the music of the conspirators, remindful though it is of often amusing instances of the treatment of similar elements in earlier Verdi operas. If handled with appropriately ironic inflection combined with vocal weight (I suspect that the French-cultured basses of early Met Ballos—Plançon, E. De Reszke, Journet, Rothier—supplied both) there is no reason their music cannot possess an edge, retain its opéra-comique derivations, and avoid both the twin traps of the ridiculous and the lugubrious. There is also, finally, the matter of the standards of moral conduct, of codes of honor and punishment, and of the supremacy of a given state of “in-loveness” which in the experience of the opera are settled by the music, but whose differences from common contemporary presumptions (think for a moment of the power relations here) are among the reasons for keeping these canonical works before us, and letting them speak to us on their own terms. Having recently given the moral equivocations of a couple of veristically inclined operas some interrogation (see the posts on Turandot and Fedora), I suppose that in conscience I should not evade those of Ballo. But they are so widespread in the E-19 culture as to demand an examination of their own, which can’t very well be embraced by a performance-oriented article.