Donizetti put L'Elisir d'Amore together in two weeks in 1832, using readily
available material. The story -- boy and girl get together in spite of things,
through luck, a bit of effort and a certain amount of wine -- is the basic
one of romance in its comic form. The play between contrasting types of
cleverness and stupidity, is carried out in music that follows the
individuals’ thoughts and emotions but fits into a grand scheme of things
so that the audience always knows what is going on. Adina reads Tristan --
a classic tale of great love, but not yet quite overloaded with its Wagnerian
associations -- with self-mocking grandeur and extols her own elixir, her
beauty, with musical confidence; Dulcamara’s salesmanship is familiar
buffo bluster, but full of brio; Belcore's military posturing is suitably
thuggish. And Nemorino is dimly amiable and sincere, unaware of the effect
of his straightforward expressions of misery and dawning joy. There is also
general collective jollity for the chorus.
Unfortunately, the San Francisco Opera‘s production has also been thrown
together from mainly existing materials, with much less success. The sets
are reworked from a design from the 1960s, and present a cute and inoffensive
Italian town where buildings move about at random. There is an unconvincing,
but unfunny, puppet horse, and Dulcamara’s wagon pops open to reveal
nothing very interesting. The costumes are similarly generic, in pleasant,
warm colours. The stage director Sarah Bernhard gave the singers business
that was sometimes harmless, sometimes distracting and never funny. Nemorino
eavesdrops on Adina’s reading by pushing a haystack around, Belcore
does an ankle swivelling goose step while someone else is singing, and Nemorino
has his inside leg measured while singing. It was all painfully close to
amateur Gilbert and Sullivan done on very expensive sets.
The singers on the whole didn‘t rise above the production, seeming to
churn out the music in the confidence that the audience knew the tunes already.
Rebecca Evans as Adina clunked along, while Tito Beltrán as Nemorino
and Rodney Gilfrey as Belcore both sounded granular when they weren’t
wooden. John Del Carlo as Dulcamara seemed to be sleepwalking. Donita Volkwijn
as the chorus soloist Giannetta sang gloriously, perhaps because her entirely
predictable gestures didn‘t overlap with her singing so much. Patrick
Summers and the orchestra did rather better, making the throwaway gestures
of the music sound intoxicating even when the singers merely sounded drunk
or bored.
H.E. Elsom
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