Don Carlos at the Met

It pays sometimes to have friends in high places, in this case Bob Sutherland, Principal Librarian at the Metropolitan Opera. Met tickets are notoriously expensive. But for some productions the Met issues tickets to their staff for a dress rehearsal. This was the case for Verdi's Don Carlos. Bob Sutherland, my old biking buddy and commissioner of several of my compositions, came up with 2 tickets for Don Carlos. So my wife, Dulce, and I saw Don Carlos at the Met - for free.

The previous evening the 3 of us - Bob, myself, and Dulce - had gone out to dinner at Pau, a Portuguese restaurant in Greewich Village, purporting to have Portuguese Fado music - but not that evening, unfortunately. Bob - a dear friend and an extremely knowledgeable opera fan - and I got into a heated discussion. Perhaps I was annoyed at the lack of Fado music, so I asked Bob, "Why does no-one perform the operas of Alberto Ginastera?" Bob's answer, "It's because they don't work." "What!!" I exclaimed. "And what about all those other operas that the Met never does?" Bob, "The Met does the operas that work - for instance, the operas of Verdi (I'm paraphrasing and simplifying)."

Well, Bob, and anyone else who's listening, Dulce and I left Don Carlos at the first intermission. Reason: Don Carlos no longer works. Let me explain. The libretto for Don Carlos was adapted from a play by Schiller.  I don't know the original play, but the Italian adaptation is a melodrama of the 19th Century variety. 19th Century melodrama was  a plague on theatre - finally stamped out by Henrik Ibsen. Melodrama is defined by mono dimensional characters who gesticulate in an overraught, stylized manner. Think early silent movies.

Verdi, for whose skill and professionalism I have nothing but awed admiration, thought of himself above all else as a dramatist. His operas are about enhancing the drama itself. In the case of the Italian Don Carlos drama, it no longer work because the drama itself no longer works. No one would go to see the thing merely to hear it spoken. They go because of the music, and because of the singing, and because it is by Verdi. I figure that would have really enraged Giuseppi Verdi, the dramatist.

It would have also enraged him that opera singers mangle vowels incessantly. They do this in order to produce what they think is a more beautiful sound. Think of a person trying to speak with no tongue. Even the most fluent Italian speaker (Dulce speaks Italian) can't understand more than one word in a hundred. But then of course, who cares about the drama, and who cares about what Verdi had in mind. And who cares if the opera no longer works as drama. We are there only to bathe in melifluous vocal crooning.

Myself, I'm trying something different. If you've a mind check out my pocket opera version of Puccini's Madama Butterfly. It works as drama.
http://www.youtube.com/user/voiceafire#p/a/u/2/9jbhpovMlB8

On the other hand, if Dulce hadn't been there, I would have stayed for the whole opera, just to get a lesson from Verdi in rhythmic pacing and in using the orchestra to support the voice.

Comments?