Mindful of Caruso’s famous admonition that all that was needed to perform Il Trovatore well were the four greatest singers in the world I nevertheless booked tickets for the June 7th performance of Verdi’s wild masterpiece at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm. Nothing would have made me miss a chance to hear opera in the theater that produced Jussi Björling.
 NEIL A. KURTZMAN, MD
"Trubaduren - Opera av Giuseppe Verdi"
he opera house sits on one side of a spacious rectangle bounded by the Royal Palace, the Grand Hotel, and water. It’s a beautiful building that looks like an opera house should both inside and out. It has a grand marble staircase with pillars and is the most intelligently designed musical theater I have yet seen. Each area of the hall (on all levels) has its own refreshment zone (alcohol, soft drinks, coffee, etc) and rest rooms. Thus there are no mob scenes during intermissions and no genitourinary emergencies - unless Calixto Bieito is invited to direct. Not only is the house beautiful, but its acoustics are marvelous – you could hear a stomach rumble at 100 feet. Björling must have sounded godlike in its intimate environment. Given the theater’s small size, that it’s still standing after many performances by the other Swedish superstar, Birgit Nilsson, is a tribute to Scandinavian engineering. I suspect that hearing her there would have induced permanent hearing loss. Interestingly, there were many more Nilsson CDs for sale in the lobby than those of Björling. Notably absent was the Turandot they recorded together.
Everyone associated with the production was new to me and since the program ($4.25 for a modest pamphlet) was almost all in Swedish and presented little biographical information in any language I have little to go on other than other than the performance itself. Despite the Swedish name on the program, Trubaduren was sung in Italian. As is typical these days the sets and costumes (by Reinhard von der Thannen) had little to do with the opera. The convent scene, however, was very effective. But the good feeling generated by that scene was dissipated by the next.
Il Trovatore is one of opera’s greatest masterpieces. It’s so familiar that it’s easy to forget how marvelous it is. For sheer inspiration from start to finish it’s unmatched. One glorious melody after another coupled with dramatic intensity that is jet propelled. But because of its florid libretto everyone feels the need to apologize for liking it or to stand at some superior remove which allows one to look down at the story while loving the music. After all this is the opera where the wrong baby gets thrown into the fire. Everyone from WS Gilbert to Oscar Wilde to the Marx brothers has had his jolly way with it.
Let’s chew on the baby bit for a minute. All we know about which baby was tossed into the pyre comes from Azucena. In an opera (Id Trovatore would be a good alternative title) where everyone is a lunatic, Azucena is the maddest of the mad. She’s so daft that she couldn’t possibly know which baby she threw away. Anyone crazy enough to throw away the wrong baby is so crazy she doesn’t know what she did. Thus while Verdi likely believed she tossed her own son, the audience can never be sure.
So we have this opera about uncontrolled lunacy and passion which musically and dramatically is the culmination of all Italian opera up until the middle of the 19th century. After Il Trovatore Verdi, and everyone else, had to go down a different road and find new ways of writing opera. He had had the last word with the old format. The point is that Verdi took the story seriously and wrote music for it of almost unbearable intensity. Thus the producers of the work should likewise take it seriously. Director Wilhelm Carlsson did so for seven of the opera’s eight scenes. But in Act III scene 1 he went as mad as the opera’s protagonists.
Ferrando’s soldiers were mincing about a mostly empty stage wearing tutus, garter belts, net stockings, and high healed shoes. According to a local review this depicted a typically Swedish crayfish party. I’d love to hear from anyone who can fill me in on crayfish parties. Carlsson’s silliness ruined the great encounter between Azucena and the Count. Basically he got in the way of Verdi and the audience – better he should have gone to a crayfish party.
The director’s lack of confidence in his material was even more striking given how effective he had been in the previous scene. Here white clad nuns on a brightly lit stage contrasted with the dark clad Leonora and Ines in the foreground. At the back of the stage was a white cross to which was fastened (if it had been a German house I might have said nailed) a young man who moved slowly in response to the action – it was better than it sounds. Overall, given the current state of European opera, the production was a bit on the conservative side. That Manrico and the Count dueled with knives in the first act and that the Count stabbed Manrico to death with a knife to the belly in the last act places the action within the European mainstream – Cavalleria Trovatore?
What about the four greatest singers in the world? Alas they were elsewhere, but three of the four principals were very good. Hillevi Martinpelto sang Leonora. She has a voice that is better suited for the Marchallin than Verdi’s luscious Leonora. Her tone is sometimes thin and she has to work very hard to produce the soft pianissimos in alt required for the role. Despite these limitations she is a first rate artist and got better as the opera progressed. By the last act she was able to manage Leonora’s great scene with aplomb. Though a lot of effort was required to get her through D’amor sull’ali rosee she did bring out much of the aria’s beauty. But don’t throw away your Milanov recordings.
Marianne Eklöf was appropriately deranged and hysterical as Azucena. She sang with force and passion; notwithstanding an occasional airy high note she gave a convincing portrayal of Verdi’s Mother-of-the Year wannabe.
The evening’s best singing came from Karl-Magnus Fredriksson as the Count di Luna. He has a rich bright baritone easily able to handle the high tessitura Verdi imposes on his baritones. I suspect he might not have faired as well in a big theater, but in the friendly ambience of the Royal Opera House he sounded like a first rate Verdi baritone. Il Balen which seems even more beautiful every time I hear it sung well was even more beautiful than when last I heard it sung well.
The Count is in many ways the most sympathetic character in this asylum of an opera. Everything goes wrong for him. He is a tornado of sexual frustration. Finally the woman who has driven him mad with lust kills herself rather than sleep with him and then he murders his long lost brother – well maybe it’s his brother. Why shouldn’t he be frustrated? He has everything a woman should want. He’s rich, powerful, handsome (at least in theory), young, and virile. But he’s weighted by an unsupportable burden – he’s a baritone. Mindful of the constant turmoil he’s in GB Shaw wrote, more than a century ago, that the Count should never sit down. He’s too agitated for repose. So the first thing Fredriksson did after his first act entrance was head for the only chair onstage - and plop down on it. Worse, he did it again in another scene.
Badri Maisuradze was Manrico. Manrico is to Verdi what Hamlet is to Shakespeare. The tenor who sings the role has to have everything - cantilena, high notes, stentorian utterance, beautiful tone. In short, he needs to be Jussi Björling. Unfortunately, the closest we got to Björling was the oil portrait of him as Manrico hanging near the back of the auditorium. Maisuradze has a large gruff voice that has little flexibility. He was utterly defeated by Ah si ben mio. There was no line, no tonal luster, no sense of cohesion. He barked his way through it. I hoped that he might do better with Di quella pira, but it was even worse. The first of the two interpolated high Cs was omitted and the second was a brief squawk that sounded like he had been prodded with a bayonet in a tender spot. His acting ability was similar to that of the large boulders that dotted the gypsy camp in Act II. Incidentally, the gypsy girls in that scene were wearing costumes that must have been recycled from Carmen.
Even though he is short, bass John Erik Eleby was effective as Ferrando. This leaves the Hämndens demon (demon of revenge), a mime character inserted into the opera by Carlsson. The demon was one of those directorial conceits that defy analysis. He was dressed and painted all in black and had wings. He looked like a cross between a giant cockroach and a chicken. He wandered around trying to be ominous and portentous throughout the entire performance. Send him back to the farm.
Christian Badea, the only name of the program I recognized, conducted very well. His orchestra played extremely well. But he failed the Verdi chord test. In virtually every Verdi opera at a moment of extreme emotional crisis a series of distinctive chords appears that resolves the crisis. Though the nature of these chords differs from opera to opera the manner of their use is so distinctive to Verdi that you might as well name them after him – they sound like no one else. An example of this harmonic device occurs at the end of the convent scene when a series of eight identical chords thunderously stops the action for a few seconds before the scene rushes to its close. If you know the opera you can sense what’s about to happen as the tension mounts to a peak of frenzy. The great Verdi conductor will knock you breathless with these chords. Badea emphasized them - it’s almost impossible not to - but nobody in the auditorium was short of breath.
In summary, a good performance of one the most difficult works in the standard repertory.
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The Royal Swedish Opera, Stockholm
Il Trovatore
13, 17, 20, 22, 24, 27, 29 May 2006, 5, 7, 15, 17 June 2006
Scenes and costumes: Reinhard von der Thannen
Lights: Ellen Ruge
Direction: Wilhelm Carlsson
CAST:
Leonora: Hillevi Martinpelto
Manrico: Badri Maisuradze
Count Luna: Karl-Magnus Fredriksson
Azucena: Marianne Eklöf
Ferrando: John Erik Eleby
Inez: Ingela Berglund
Ruiz: Carl Unander-Scharin
Old Gipsy: Björn Blomqvist
Choir of the Royal Opera. Direction: Christina Hörnell and Folke Alin
Orchestra: Kungliga Hovkapellet
Conductor: Christian Badea
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