Sarasota.(North America)(The Corsair)(Opera Review)

It's easy to understand why Verdi was drawn to Byron's melodramatic poem The Corsair as source material. For one thing, it was immensely popular; selling an unprecedented 10,000 copies on the day of publication in 1814. Verdi also identified with the English poet's involvement in the Greek struggle for independence, mirroring the composer's own Italian nationalism.

The Corsair is "an enthralling yarn, written in Byron's rattling heroic couplets, of the rescue from death of Gulnare, chief slave in the Pacha's harem, by Conrad the pirate chief," writes Fiona McCarthy in her recent biography, Byron: Life and Legend. "When he and Gulnare reach his pirate island, Conrad's first love, Medora, has died from grief, imagining that he is dead. The pirate then mysteriously disappears. Byron's poem provides another dashing, haunting, enigmatic hero, the Corsair whose name is 'Linked with one virtue, and a thousand crimes.'"

Piave's Corsaro libretto changes a few things (including some of the names). In Il Corsaro, lovesick Medora doesn't succumb until the pirate Corrado and Gulnara return from their adventures in Turkey. After Medora dies in his arms, Corrado flings himself off a boulder into the sea.

The place of Il Corsaro in the Verdi canon--it was his twelfth opera, given its premiere in 1848, not long after Macbeth--promises a more sophisticated work than it turns out to be. Verdi conceived the opera in an earlier stylistic period, in 1844, when he was in the throes of a Byronic enthusiasm, and he had little to do with the first performance in Trieste. The work never found its way into the standard repertoire and is rarely staged today, making the Sarasota Opera production this season a notable event, if mainly for diehard Verdians. Il Corsaro has some splendid tunes, and it's a pretty good showcase for a tenor and two sopranos, but the score never achieves the character development of top-level Verdi.

Il Corsaro got off to a good start in the March 21 performance, with conductor Victor DeRenzi bringing out the extremes of a prelude that went from urgent, rambunctious brass and percussion to solo clarinet over delicate strings and then back again. Unfortunately, tenor Gabriel ...