The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (38 page)

CD: Piero Cappuccilli (Nabucco); Giuseppe Sinopoli (cond.).
DG 410 512 2

Ernani

Four parts. First performed Venice, 1844.

Libretto by Francesco Piave

Based on Victor Hugo’s play
Hernani,
this is one of the most cogent and vigorous of Verdi’s early operas.
Hugo himself disliked the adaptation.

Plot

The dashing oudaw-nobleman Ernani loves the courtly lady Elvira, who is being forced to marry her aged guardian, Silva.
Carlo, the power-hungry new King of Spain, also loves Elvira.

On the day of Silva’s wedding to Elvira, Carlo takes Elvira hostage.
Ernani is captured by Silva.
Ernani, who wants revenge on Carlo for the killing of his father, strikes a deal with Silva: he will join in Silva’s plot against Carlo – and as guarantee of his honour in the matter, Ernani promises on his father’s memory that he will kill himself if he should ever hear Silva blow a certain horn-call.

Carlo is elected Holy Roman Emperor and Ernani and Silva’s conspiracy is uncovered.
Moved by Elvira’s pleas,
Carlo forgives them both, and magnanimously allows Elvira to marry Ernani.

But Silva still wants revenge, and blows his fatal horn.
Ernani feels obliged to honour his bargain and to Elvira’s horror, he kills himself.

What to listen for

Like
Nabucco,
Ernani
is an opera notable for providing particularly strong roles for baritone (Carlo) and bass (Silva).
It is written very much in the style of Donizetti, with an uninhibited energy and swagger that is a trademark of Verdi’s early work; bad performances tend to use these qualities as an excuse for a lot of shouting – and some heavy cuts.
But neither Ernani (tenor) nor Elvira (soprano) are easy roles – Elvira’s opening aria ‘Ernani, involami’, for example, requires a range of over two octaves and has a fiendish cabaletta that is beyond the range of all but a few.

In performance

Because of its lack of ambiguity, there isn’t much that a director can do with this gloves-off tale of love, honour and revenge: productions usually evoke the paintings of Velázquez.

Recording

CD: Leontyne Price (Elvira), Carlo Bergonzi (Ernani); Thomas Schippers (cond.).
RCA GD86503

Macbeth

Four acts. First performed Florence, 1847.

Libretto by Francesco Piave and Andrea Maffei

Verdi’s tenth opera, and his first drawn from a Shakespearean source.
Interestingly, the original play had not been performed in Italy at the time of the opera’s composition and,
like
Nabucco,
was best known as a ballet.
Verdi substantially revised the score in 1865 for a French production; both the first and second versions, or a mixture of the two, are regularly performed today.

Plot

Broadly the same as Shakespeare’s play.

What to listen for

An opera which represents a great leap forward in Verdi’s development, notably in the hushed extended duet – more like a dramatic dialogue – between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth before Duncan’s murder.

Macbeth is a magnificent role for the mature Verdi baritone who can also sing Iago and Rigoletto, although his only major aria comes at the very end of the opera: ‘Pietà, rispetto, amore’ is a lament for his decline into evil, comparable to Shakespeare’s ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’.

Lady Macbeth is notoriously difficult to cast.
Verdi specified a soprano voice that was deliberately dark and even ugly, and the notes also specify a voice capable of enormous range and flexibility – the end of the sleepwalking scene demands a high pianissimo D flat that many singers simply can’t muster, and there are tricky coloratura passages in the nervous Brindisi in the banqueting scene.
Both sopranos and mezzo-sopranos may be heard in the opera house; Maria Callas proved one of the rare singers who has filled the bill consummately.

Note also the arias for Banquo and Macduff, both fine examples of Verdi’s style at this period of his compositional life.
The apparent jollity of the witches’ choruses has been much mocked, but a great Verdi conductor like Riccardo Muti can bring out their latent daemonic quality, and the scene in which the apparitions are raised is splendidly spooky.

Verdi revised the score for a Paris production in 1865, and it is this version which is generally favoured today, although the
original version (lacking among other things the haunting chorus ‘Patria oppressa’ which opens Act IV and Lady Macbeth’s aria ‘La luce langue’) has occasionally been revived.

In performance

At La Scala, Milan, Graham Vick’s production revolved around a giant rotating cube, which symbolized both the fortress of Macbeth’s power and the prison in which his evil deeds imprison his conscience.

Whether the Macbeths are presented in homespun medieval robes or in the guise of twentieth-century dictators, the problem for a director is the presentation of the witches.
In Hamburg, Steven Pimlott went the whole hog and showed them disappearing on broomsticks.
For Luc Bondy’s fine production for Scottish Opera, they were not so much toothless old hags as a coven of bored suburban housewives, who treat some of their jauntier music as an excuse for a knees-up.
This worked surprisingly well.

Recording

CD: Shirley Verrett (Lady); Piero Cappuccilli (Macbeth); Claudio Abbado (cond.).
DG 449 9732 2

Luisa
Miller

Three acts. First performed Naples, 1849.

Libretto by Salvatore Cammarano

Based on Schiller’s play
Kabale
und
Liebe
(
Conspiracy
and
Love
), although censorship forced Verdi to tone down some of its more scandalous aspects.

Plot