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Monday, May 12, 2014

I Puritani: Why we killed Arturo

By Magda Romanska, Ph.D., BLO Dramaturg

In BLO’s version of I Puritani, a vengeful Riccardo kills Arturo during the last scene as the two happy lovers, Elvira and Arturo, finally reconnect after many trials and tribulations. Arturo dies in Elvira’s arms, and we can only anticipate that the final blow of his death will ultimately unravel her fragile and already strained psyche. The plot of I Puritani meanders back and forth, with the lovers reconnecting four times, making the climactic moment somewhat subdued by our implicit expectation of yet another impediment to the course of their love. The happy ending brought by the unexpected and convenient amnesty of all prisoners, including Arturo, is announced by the sudden arrival of a missive.

The classical Aristotelian model of dramatic structure eschewed such deus ex machina plot devices, considering them to be the subterfuges of lesser dramatists who are unable to provide us with a structurally satisfying and cathartic denouement. During the Romantic era of I Puritani, however, the Aristotelian model gave way to melodramatic plots with multiple climaxes, cliffhangers, and reconciliations. In that way, Romantic plot models, whether in opera or in melodrama, very much paralleled our modern soap-opera plot devices (think of Friends’ Ross and Rachel’s gloriously absurd stop-and-go courtship developing over the span of ten years).
Whether with happy or tragic endings, Romanticism focused on heightened emotions, weaving-in tales of love and redemption through the intricate landscapes of the characters’ dramatically enhanced inner emotions. Throughout the centuries, opera directors responded in various ways to I Puritani’s elaborate melodramatic plot and deus ex machina happy ending. Many, like BLO, chose to kill Arturo at the end, which, in light of everything else that happens in the story, is as psychologically consistent as letting him live. Can we really imagine Elvira and Arturo’s happy marriage?

The two most recent productions in which Riccardo kills Arturo at the end were a 2003 production directed by John Dew that premiered at the Vienna Staatsoper, and Francisco Negrin’s 2009 version of I Puritani directed for the Netherlands Opera. Negrin viewed the libretto as "silly and not making much sense," and chose to frame the ending as a figment of Elvira’s distressed imagination. At the end, we are left to wonder whether the amnesty really happened or whether Elvira merely imagined it. In John Dew’s version, Riccardo falls to his knees after killing Arturo, tragically realizing what he has just done. Although his rival is dead now, Riccardo too is a broken man: revenge has led him nowhere (as suggested in previous scenes).
For opera to remain a living, breathing genre of dramatic art, the living, contemporary directors must experiment with it as much as their counterparts have done in the past. If they wouldn’t try different approaches and visions, they would deprive us of the most salient pleasure of opera going experience: deconstructing the various delicious ins and outs of their decisions.

Thursday, May 8, 2014

An Interview with One of BLO’s Favorite Opera Mommies, Sarah Coburn

Sarah Coburn with Katie Rose (left) and Ruby (right)
Sarah Coburn stars as Elvira in Boston Lyric Opera’s production of Bellini’s I Puritani, through May 11. Sarah is also a wife and a mother of two. In between rehearsing, performing, and traveling, Sarah makes time to watch and sing along with Disney’s Frozen alongside her two daughters, Katie Rose (4) and Ruby (almost 2), and sometimes interviews with the Boston Globe while they giggle and play nearby.

BLO: How do you balance your thriving career and continued artistic pursuit with being a young mom?
SC: Young mom? Thanks! I am still overwhelmed by the challenges that come with trying to be a wife, mom, homemaker, opera singer, expert traveler and employer. It is tricky to keep it all balanced. Actually, it is impossible. I think our generation of working moms is going crazy trying to be and have it all. We technically can have it all, but I think we risk sacrificing our joy in the process.

BLO: Your most memorable moment of the two worlds colliding (mommy and artist)?
SC: My big “having it all” moment- literally running back and forth between rehearsals and my apartment in Los Angeles, while I was rehearsing for TWO operas and nursing a 10-week-old. I remember thinking, “Am I crazy?” while jogging home on the overpass.

Los Angeles Opera's Tamerlano
BLO: What was it like to perform while pregnant?
SC: Singing while pregnant was great for me…in the later months. The pressure of the baby gave me a nice cushion of support for singing. There were some drawbacks as well- breathlessness and constant visits to the restroom. When I was six months pregnant with Katie Rose, I was singing Gilda and Portland Opera didn’t have a restroom stage left. So, they rented a port-a-potty for me and set it up stage left. How is that for the diva treatment?
Florida Grand Opera's The Barber of Seville
BLO: Have Ruby and Katie Rose seen you perform on stage?
SC: My oldest, Katie Rose, has seen a few performances, and loves to come backstage. She is still a bit young to understand that when Mom is feeling sad or upset on stage, that I am really going to be ok. She doesn’t like it when other characters are mean to her mom! Last week, my husband brought her into the wings for the very end of the performance. When I saw her little face during the bows, I melted. At that point, I am usually recounting to myself all of the things that went badly during the performance and how I don’t really deserve an ovation. When I saw her, all I felt was joy and gratitude.

BLO: Do you think they might follow in your footsteps with a career in opera?
SC: I don’t know. We shall see. I don’t care what they end up doing; I just want them to have joy and to know how much they are loved.

Boston Lyric Opera's The Barber of Seville


Friday, May 2, 2014

I Puritani Interview with Mary Ann Smart


BLO Dramaturg, Magda Romanska talks to Mary Ann Smart, Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley about I Puritani Professor Smart is the author of the book, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera, the editor of the critical edition of Donizetti’s last opera, Dom Sébastien, and of the articles on Bellini and Donizetti for the revised Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians She has published articles on the lives and public images of nineteenth-century female singers, and on the ways madness is depicted in opera.  In 2007, Smart was awarded the Dent Medal by the Royal Musical Association and the International Musicological Society.  Her book Waiting for Verdi: Opera and Political Opinion in Italy, 1815-1848 will be published next year.

MR: There is more than one version of the I Puritani libretto. Can you tell us a bit about the differences between various versions?

MAS: The "definitive" text of I Puritani, as musicologists would usually define it, is not that much in doubt.  We know what was performed in Paris in January of 1835 when Bellini was present and supervising the performance.  Where things become complicated is the fact that, even before the Paris première, Bellini had begun work on an adapted version of the score for Maria Malibran to sing at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples.  These performances did not take place and Malibran never actually sang the role, because delivery of the score to Naples was delayed by a cholera epidemic and Malibran died soon after.  But Bellini's autograph of the "Malibran version" survives, and it shows that he introduced several changes. 

MR: Can you tell us about some of these changes?

MAS: The less significant of these changes, which shouldn't affect our perception of Bellini's intentions for the opera, include the transposition down a third of Elvira's music, to suit Malibran's range, the re-organization of the opera into two acts instead of three, and the elimination of the duet for Giorgio and Riccardo at the end of Act 2 ("Suoni la Tromba") which was cut in anticipation of Neapolitan censorship.   More interesting are the variations of the final scene: in the Malibran version, Bellini re-assigns the main line in the final duet cantabile ("Credeasi Misera") to Elvira instead of Arturo, and concludes with a new cabaletta for Elvira conceived for Malibran ("Ah Sento, O Mio Bell'angelo").   Many listeners feel that the finale works better with the cabaletta, but we have no documentation clarifying whether Bellini made this change simply to showcase Malibran and to flatter her with a new piece conceived especially for her, or whether he also sensed some weakness in the finale.  In the absence of such indications, I would take the original Paris ending as "definitive"-- although this philological judgment (of course!) need not be binding on performers.

MR:  I Puritani is considered structurally challenging. What do you think are the most difficult aspects of the dramatic structure?

MAS: The libretto (and hence also the score) do have an unusual structure.  Here are some of the main idiosyncrasies:
·         The three mad scenes, one in each act, are difficult to pull off without loss of momentum, although each one has a distinct musical, dramatic, and formal profile.

·         The reasons that Elvira and Arturo cannot marry are less clearly articulated than in many contemporary operas, relying on slightly obscure political allegiances rather than a clear paternal blocking figure.

·         The third act is strangely dominated by the movements of soldiers on and off the stage, punctuating and interrupting the private drama.

·         There's more chorus than usual, and the choruses are often dreamy and atmospheric;

·         there's a huge amount of offstage music--beginning from the off-stage chorus in the very first scene, through the offstage beginning of Elvira's "Son Vergin Vezzosa" and of her Act 2 mad scene, and the romanza she sings as a signal to Arturo early in Act 3.  This has the effect of making the drama seem ghostly and ephemeral in an interesting and innovative way, but one that may strike spectators as pale or undefined.

·         Each of the three acts has an unusual shape, not quite following the usual build through solo numbers, ensembles, and dramatic climaxes.  


MR: Bellini’s letters indicate that he blamed his librettist, Carlo Pepoli for some of these challenges…


MAS: These features are usually laid at the door of the librettist Carlo Pepoli, who was a political exile and Bolognese nobleman who was making his first stab at libretto writing with I Puritani.  (He later wrote a couple more.)  Pepoli's lack of experience is undeniable, but it's very doubtful that the opera's unusual structure is actually the result of accident or librettist failure.  For one thing, Bellini was on the spot in Paris setting the terms as the libretto took shape, and we know that he exerted a strong hand about certain aspects of the planning.  For another, across his career Bellini himself had an unusual attitude to operatic drama and pacing, always being far more interested in the cadences and echoes of individual poetic lines than any other composers of the time and, consequently, less concerned with medium- or large-scale dramatic pacing and tension.  You can see many of the same features in his opera La Straniera (La Scala, 1829), based on a libretto by the excellent and experienced Felice Romani.  And where I Puritani is criticized for shadowy form, La Straniera was at the time recognized as breaking new ground in romantic opera.

MR: I Puritani exhibits many characteristics of the Romantic drama. Can you tell us in which way the opera was characteristic for its era?

MAS: The opera has several obvious features in common with the more frequently performed Lucia di Lammermoor, especially the mad scenes for soprano that feature musical reminiscences of past happiness and hallucinated weddings.  This and the focus on a few passionate individuals caught up in, and victimized by, an impersonal machinery of state and civil war, are the features that would usually be identified as "romantic" in this opera.  But I think there's much more to it: the ghostliness and predominance of off-stage singing that I described above places I Puritani in dialogue with a group of French plays, ballets, and fiction from the 1820s and 1830s, and establishes its romantic pedigree in a more interesting and more specific way.  

MR: What are some of the major themes that you think still speak to modern audiences?

MAS: This is the hardest question for me, as I don't really think of 19th-century opera as realist or as having much direct relevance to contemporary life or experience.  (For what it's worth I don't think these operas were heard this way when they were first performed, either; people enjoyed the play of structures, contrasts, virtuosity, and vocal vulnerability, rather than worrying about or identifying with the characters.)  When forced to think in these terms, I notice that Elvira is interestingly indeterminate--certainly not voiceless, but much more buffeted by the forces around her (including her uncle, the nominal authority figure) than is Lucia di Lammermoor in similar circumstances.  There's less clear conflict and opposition between Elvira and the authorities that surround her, and at the end of Act I she comes only gradually to a realization of her situation.  In some ways this seems more real and more interesting than Lucia's sudden move from outright defiance (at the beginning of Act 2) to madness and death in Act III.  Elvira is always feeling her way, musically, and perhaps it gets her further than Lucia's relative clarity of thought.  

Finally, although the military and political background of the Civil War is not very clearly articulated in the libretto, the music somewhat makes up for this with all the off-stage marches in the last act.  I'd be interested in seeing modern productions that made more of this dimension of the plot, perhaps capitalizing on or drawing out the first-hand experience of armed conflict that librettist Carlo Pepoli had in 1831 and also (less directly) the over revolutionary sympathies of several members of the original cast and original audience.  Both Giulia Grisi and Luigi Lablache contributed money to the revolutionary cause of Giuseppe Mazzini, and became good friends of his in London soon after 1835.