Semiramide falls into the serious part of Gioachino Rossini’s oeuvre, which we rather seldom hear in an endless stream of Barbers of Seville and Cenerentolas. Premiering at the Royal Opera this season, Rossini’s work has not been presented by any of Covent Garden’s earlier operatic enterprises since 1887. (Coincidentally, the Met will revive its 1990 production this season with a different cast.) Based on Voltaire’s play Sémiramis, Rossini’s opera could easily have turned out to be an Enlightenment work exploring virtue as its own reward and the inevitability of punishment for existential misdeeds. Instead its lurid plot—which inspired at least sixty-five other composers—propels it to the frontier between lyrically expository baroque opera, of which it is held to be the last example, and the more psychologically demanding Romantic works that dominated the rest of the nineteenth century. The opera’s title character, the Queen of Babylon (she of the wondrous Hanging Gardens), is mired in her own murderous corruption. Tortured by bad omens and guilt for having murdered her husband Nino with the help of the army commander Assur years earlier, she must now square off against her ambitious collaborator to secure the throne for her newest love object, Arsace, who inconveniently turns out to be her son and has now returned after growing to manhood in exile. By way of convoluted intersecting love plots, fate forces Arsace to deal Semiramide, whose identity as his mother eludes him until nearly the end, an “accidental” death blow that clears his path to a virtuous new reign over a realm cleansed of her sin.
Dating from 1823, Rossini’s opera still has enough of the composer’s signature up-tempo music to recall his earlier comic works and enough coloratura to recall the great eighteenth-century scores. Yet in other ways it follows the path from Cherubini’s Medea to the more insightful scores of Bellini and Verdi, with melodic devices suggesting theme and character and a captivating dramatic focus on a tormented hero and anti-heroine. Plunging into vicissitudes and anticipating her femme fatale descendants, Semiramide is much more Lady Macbeth than Donna Elvira, Arsace more Arturo than any displaced Handelian heir of mistaken identity. Sometimes the results verge on comic. The assembled Babylonians sound quite cheerful as they prepare sacrifices to Baal, their Rossinian choral music looking forward to the sing-song devils who would less than convincingly torment Joan of Arc in Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco two decades later. Murderous passion arrives in cadenzas that sounds irrepressibly joyful. And at four hours in length with only one intermission, one wonders whether the old practice of cutting longueurs might be a wiser approach than upholding the curatorial ethos that now dominates an opera world thirsting for authenticity.
The Royal Opera’s Music Director Antonio Pappano showed some sympathy for his audience, and perhaps solicitude of union concerns, by maintaining a brisk pace. But this did not diminish the shining star of Joyce DiDonato, arguably opera’s leading lyric mezzo-soprano, who embodied the title role with magnetic presence. Though announced as recovering from a throat infection at the performance of December 4, she admirably radiated tones that were by turns charming and chilling. Some faintness could be detected in the cadenzas, which could have stood more embellishment, but this was hardly a flaw in the overall impression. As Arsace, the superb Italian mezzo-soprano Daniela Barcellona faced no challenges in the role’s higher register and delivered a stunning reading of this conflicted trouser part. Michele Pertusi, more familiar from his comic roles, dispatched the gruff role of Assur with the oaken resonance of a born conspirator. Lawrence Brownlee blossomed in the supporting part of Idreno, an Indian prince who courts Semiramide.
David Alden’s colorful production gives us a modern setting in an anonymous country in the Middle East, where numerous leaders have recently met unpleasant ends. But in a world where opera gasps for relevance, and in which virtually all operas set in the Middle East therefore demand a modern staging, one wonders whether this might be a new Orientalism in which no other idiom is possible. Those concerned can travel to New York for the Met’s much more Biblical-looking sets. Here the Temple of Baal is a vast chamber dominated by a Stalinesque statue of an undoubtedly beloved dear leader—the deceased Nino. It could easily stand in the courtyard of an antiseptic presidential palace anywhere between Istanbul and Pyongyang. The walls are dominated by imperious family portraits foregrounding him before vast natural vistas, immaculately tailored and sporting chic sunglasses, ironically alongside his murderous wife and lost son. Assur and the other military characters wear over-decorated uniforms that strike an authoritative imitation of the gaudiest Soviet command-rank outfits, still rather in fashion around the region. Semiramide’s seductive powers are captured in the couture that draws third world princesses and their corrupt fathers’ credit cards from their grimy national capitals to the welcoming shops of Regent Street. If the message is that people and politics never change, it is well received, if not completely original.