Il Trovatore.(Review)

Il Trovatore, by Giuseppe Verdi, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York.

There is something quintessential about Verdi's Il Trovatore. It is not, to be sure, the most performed opera in the canon (Carman or La Boheme is more likely), nor is it the most iconic (that dubious honor belongs perhaps to Aida or Die Walkure). And yet all of opera's most familiar elements (wags would say cliches) are here in spades: the vigorous, richly upholstered orchestral score; the seemingly fragile but finally tensile soprano; the villainous baritone whose foul mood is at least partly justified; the noble but, of course, ultimately doomed tenor; the overwrought mezzo-soprano who possesses a terrible secret; and, naturally, plenty of sword fights and a soldiers' chorus. The mix is irresistible. The Metropolitan Opera has been among the many companies susceptible to Trovatore's charms, staging it repeatedly since 1883. (The opera had its premiere in Rome thirty years before.) Partly in acknowledgment of the centenary of Verdi's death this year, the Met has mounted a new production, directed by Graham Vick. Previously, Vick has directed Met productions of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, works of a decidedly more modernist bent. In those twentieth-century operas, Vick's outlandish designs raised plenty of hackles but also earned him much praise in certain quarters. Not so this staging of Trovatore, which had its debut (rather fatefully) on December 7, 2000. I saw it on December 21, when many of its most egregious effects (precarious sets, risible symbolism, harsh white makeup) had been drastically altered. Yet even toned down, this production proved remarkably inept and misguided.

Verdi's opera is based on the 1836 melodrama El Trovador, by Antonia Garcia Gutierrez. Set in fifteenth-century Spain, the plot has at its center a fair maiden, Leonora; two rivals for her love, Manrico and the Count de Luna (brothers unaware of their fraternal link); and a gypsy, Azucena, ostensibly Manrico's mother but in fact a surrogate. Though there is a fair amount of political content in this opera, it is very much of the one-dimensional kind: good vs. evil. There are no truly bold political statements in Trovatore, only impassioned romantic ones. Thus updating the setting and the scene is something of a fool's errand, though apparently not enough of one to stop Vick and the set and costume designer Paul Brown from doing just that. In their conception, Spain became Italy; the fifteenth century, the nineteenth. Had that been the extent of their tinkering, audiences might have indulged them. But their extreme choices--Grand Guignol by some accounts--were an affront, so much so that the bulk of them were excised after opening night. The result is a pallid staging, almost a concert version in some respects, that leaves audiences with little to consider but the singing and the orchestral ...