There is something quintessential about Verdi’s Il Trovatore. It
is not, to be sure, the most performed opera in the canon
(Carmen or La Bohème
is more likely),
nor is
it the most iconic (that dubious honor belongs perhaps to
Aida or Die Walküre). And yet all of opera’s most familiar
elements (wags would say clichés) 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
-
Opera note
David Mermelstein on Il Trovatore, by Giuseppe Verdi, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York.
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 19 Number 6, on page 56
Copyright © 2001 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com