The Marchese di Calatrava, Leonora’s father. A short role, but a key one. He has the first lines in the opera. (“Good night, my daughter. Goodbye, beloved.” But then he spots the balcony door Leonora has left open for Alvaro’s arrival, and closes it.) A part for basso, which Trelinski has doubled with the more extensive one of the Father Superior, in an attempt to persuade us of a rigid patriarchal presence that keeps Leonora, figuratively and literally, under lock and key. That is quite unnecessary, since Verdi has already seen to it that we will sympathize with the protagonist couple’s rebellion, and will understand that the Marchese conducts himself according to a rigid Spanish code of honor and family. It is the same code that another basso, Don Ruy Gomez de Silva, follows in Ernani, and in its peak centuries it undeniably served to (among other things) keep women in “their place.” But it is also true (his music tells us this) that the Marchese truly loves his daughter, and that his sense of patriarchal duty is not all that different from that of any responsible father seeking to protect his child from what he not unreasonably sees as a terrible match. We should note that as his short time before us expires, the Marchese etches in what might as well be stone a version of Destiny familiar from other Verdi operas and their theatrical sources: a father’s curse, which will home in on its victims, time and distance notwithstanding, in the end.

There is a racial element in the Marchese’s disapproval of Alvaro, but it is expunged in the present production by casting a black singer, Solomon Howard, as both the Marchese and the Father Superior. Expunged to the eye, that is. It’s still there to the ear, if anyone’s listening. Howard, with a good bass instrument, was unable to invest his singing with either the dignified authority or the warm solicitude written into the part. But how could he? Trelinski shows him as a drunken military who staggers in to collapse on the couch.

Don Alvaro. According to the creators, a man of poor circumstances but high descent. His father was Spanish, the royally appointed Viceroy of Peru, and his mother the last in the line of the Incas, ruling family of the indigenous empire that held together large territories of South and Central America before the Conquest a century and a half earlier, for we are in Spain in the 1740s. (According to Trelinski’s scenario, a “self-conscious, poor young man” in “a contemporary city.”). Alvaro’s entrance (the entrance that, as O’Brien observes, he can hardly make in the production, and which has already been kneecapped by furtive scuttlings about in the overture pantomime) shows, in words and music, a combination of swashbuckling energy and gallantry, soon followed, in a swelling tenor phrase and its immediate descent, by a declaration of pride in his People of the Sun ancestry and of tenderness toward his beloved. But we quickly hear a darker side. Leonora’s last-minute hesitancy over forsaking home and family for life on the road instantly unmasks Alvaro’s inner identity of brooding Romantic predestined for a life without love or social inclusion. “I understand all, milady!” And, to a gathering of Verdi’s darkest colorings: “I shall know how to suffer alone . . . if you, like me, don’t love me . . .”^(I) This governing inner self is fully revealed in Alvaro’s Act 3 solo scene, wherein he discloses that his parents had dreamed of ruling an independent Peruvian kingdom, but had been sent to the axe for their pains. His aspiration to Leonora re-enacts that history, and in that re-enactment we suspect (at least, I do) a vague fantasy of such a restoration, struggling against an ingrained sense of a predestined doom.