Like any of our other piggybacking-scenarios productions, ^(I)Trelinski’s Forza cannot really be received as a palimpsest. That just isn’t how the human sensorium works. The upper, contemporary layer of this Janus-faced recumbent creature is received mostly by the eye, whose attention, should it ever slip, is restored to dominant position by the scenario’s revisionist elements. The deeper, ancient layer is received by ear, through the music. It is the musical narrative (whose sung portions sound out the libretto) that carries nearly all the emotional impact of the work, which is why, in the sensory simultaneity of opera, the ear must usually lead and the eye confirm. Trelinski, one of our Not-Stupid Men, presumably knows this, and so, with that overture pantomime, he sets about ensuring that the eye will not confirm, but contradict, and that the creature’s upper layer will be a mirror that reflects back at us, not a transparency that lets us see through to some older understanding. Verdi’s music will be, if not exactly Missing In Action,  buried alive beneath it. He sees to it that the most exciting, sweeping, and dramatically pregnant introduction Verdi ever wrote (which is saying something) truly is “mere soundtrack,” its pacing and tone consistently violated and our first hearing of those recurring motifs thrust under by the comings and goings of persons and the grindings of the turntable. Once past the Sinfonia, the sung libretto and the actions it prescribes rise from their open coffin to proclaim the true creators’ drama, and the music to try to impose its beauties and truths. They register modest gains here and there, but are for the most part shoveled back down by the Full Collaborator’s counterdrama.

La Forza del destino is a close-to-the-bone, epically elaborated specimen of the E-19 operatic metanarrative. In it, an outcast man whose highborn birthright has been taken from him forms an alliance with a woman of station. Together, they assert their right to marriage over the bounds of class and lineage. Exactly what the present couple’s plans are is unclear, except that they will involve a life on the move “to the ends of the Earth.” In these stories, the alliance is opposed by the woman’s father or brother—in this case both, though the father is removed from the picture early on, thus intensifying the quest of the brother/antagonist, who after the opening scene drives the action to its tragic end. O’Brien calls the plot’s progression a “furiously eddying stasis,” condensed to “Furious Stasis” in the title of his article. That describes not the opera’s world, but the world Trelinski wants to show us. If his production succeeded in that, it would convey the feel of an interpretation of the contemporary world with which I have a measure of agreement, that in which the acceleration of our society’s driving forces are reaching a point beyond which our capacity to absorb and control them breaks down and humanity is left at their mercy, caught in the “whirligig.” “Furious Stasis,” in fact, is a rewording (conscious or not) of “frenetic standstill” (“rasender Stillstand“), the summation of our “posthistorical” predicament proposed in Hartmut Rosa’s Social Acceleration/A New Theory of Modernity, of which I took brief notice near the end of Where Are We? (6/10/22). Were someone to write an opera that actually made us feel that condition, it would certainly get my sympathetic attention. But no production of Forza can do so, because the opera takes place in a world of very different beliefs and values, presented not as a whirligig but in directly sequential, linear form. It is that world (and, often, that form) that our adversarial auteurs, fearing the possibility of its continuing appeal—an emotional appeal that flies directly into us on the wings of song before intellectual analysis can struggle to its feet—and therefore of a continuity with it, are determined to blur to the point of unrecognizability. I think that those values and beliefs, and the themes the true creators of the opera attached to them, will emerge if we consider the principal characters and their actions, as seen and heard. Leonora is the female lead and the focus of contention, but it’s the men who cause all the trouble, and thereby create a plot. So I’ll start with them, in our order of introduction.