One of Destiny’s lesser relatives, Lady Luck, is brought into the picture on our next meeting with Carlo after the Inn Scene. At the camp at Velletri—now under yet another nom de guerre, Don Felice de Bornos—he’s fallen in with the wrong crowd and has to be rescued from murderous assault by none other than Alvaro under his alias of Don Federico Herreros. And when “Federico” asks “Felice” how it is that a man of noble aspect has descended into such base company, the answer is a quarrel over cards.

The Don Carlo of the present production is Igor Golovatenko, whom I heard as a pleasant lyric baritone too light for the role of Yeletski in The Queen of Spades at the time of Lise Davidsen’s Met debut (see 1/3/20). Given that impression, I was surprised by the sturdiness and security of his singing in this dramatic baritone part, heard here with no important redactions. The timbre and pronuncia were plausibly Italianate, the intonation reliable, and the singing consistently firm and energetic. He and Jagde were well matched. The voice is narrow, though, and forced to operate at full capacity, with a rather clamped-down “cover” in the passaggio, simply to stay the course. Hopes that a leaner, more lyrical high baritone might render the Pereda narrative with some of its rhythmic jauntiness and a delicacy with the dolce graces (Hermann Prey does some of that, auf Deutsch, on an old highlights disc, and throws in a zippy high A to top it off) weren’t realized—we just got a competent, smaller-calibre example of the bygone standard-issue voicing. Directed to lie down on the floor with the “buona nottes” at the close of the scene, he betrayed no signs of helpless giggling.

Fra Melitone. Like the American director Sam Wanamaker, who was in charge of the 1953 ROH production of Forza I referred to in the 2018 posts, Trelinski has “issues” with the Roman Catholic church, and he comes down especially hard on poor Melitone, calling him an example of “the worst” that institution has to offer. Let’s concede Melitone’s faults, the very ones the Father Superior chides him for—his lack of charity and patience with the poor, his pomposity, his resentment over his low status (he’s only a lay brother, after all). Let us also allow that we ourselves can easily feel a lack of charity and patience toward him. He’s given a lot of stage time late in the proceedings, in the genre scenes whose length, content, and sequencing were never resolved to our total satisfaction by the creators, and his Predica (sermon) requires great expertise in performance to avoid becoming tiresome. There is an element of mockery in Piave and Verdi’s treatment of him.

But the mockery is affectionate, and the character is meant to be funny. The Predica is an aria buffa, written for a high character baritone (baritono brillante—the original, de Bassini, was a leading baritone in whom Verdi sensed a comic talent), and his writing in the scene with the beggars lies in the same tessitura. At the Metropolitan premiere (Ponselle’s debut, in the company of Caruso, Amato, and Mardones), the part was taken by Thomas Chalmers, a strong baritone who later had a substantial Broadway career as a character actor, and in 1927 Tibbett took a stab at it.^(I) But it later settled on the company’s succession of basso buffo stars, and however comically gifted a bass may be (Baccaloni and Corena assuredly were), the role is awkwardly high for even the best of them, and the score’s distribution of vocal weights is badly distorted by that casting. Saturno Meletti, on the old Cetra recording, and Renato Capecchi would be examples of the right combination of vocal category with stylistic understanding, and among recent performers, Alessandro Corbelli would have been the best bet to render Melitone listenable and entertaining. In the current production, he is represented by Patrick Carfizi, a light bass or baritone under instructions from Trelinski to delete the buffo elements and interpret Melitone in the harshest possible light. But the buffo elements cannot truly be extracted, because they are in the warp and woof of the music, vocal and instrumental, woven in there by Verdi to ensure that if they are not observed we’ll be left with a puzzling nullity. Carfizi did eliminate any hint of the humorous from vocal and bodily expression, but his efforts to create a mean Melitone, attempted mostly through a quantity of unpleasant straight-toned yelling of the many high-lying phrases, suggested less the worst of the  Catholic church than the worst of contemporary notions of “character voice.”