SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Salustia:  new production by Jean-Paul Scarpitta for Le Festival de Radio France et Montpellier Languedoc-Rousillon, soloists and orchestra La Capella della Pietà de'Turchini, Antonio Florio conductor. Opéra Comédie, Montpellier, France.  28.7.2008 (MM)

Wonders never cease.  Certainly the weirdest wonder of the current festival season in the South of France (and perhaps anywhere in the world so far this century) was the world premiere [!] of Pergolesi's first opera Salustia.  The young composer was but 21 years old in 1732 when he wrote it, and soon realized he must re-think the whole art form.  He is now far better known as Pergolesi, the new-age composer of La Serva Padrona.

The program booklet provides a detailed biography of Pergolesi, notes on opera seria and this opera, a three-page apology of some sort by the metteur en scène, plus a full-page color portrait of the young composer.  All this is a lot to read, never mind digest in the twenty minutes time one generally has between arriving at the opera house and the curtain going up.  In fact it was impossible even to try.  Thus this performance, as all performances should, had to stand on its own. 

Salustia comes from the days when an opera was 'by' its librettist, not the composer of its music.  Here the librettist is one Sig. S. [Sebastiano?] Morelli who re-wrote the much better-known Alessandro Severo tragedy by Apostolo Zeno.  In fact this sentimentalism-filled libretto was more striking than the music, containing an arsenal of situations taking the usual heroic Baroque love vs. duty conflict to bizarre domestic extremes. 

As is the wont of Baroque opera the 'action'  was more reaction, three and one half hours (one brief intermission) of aria after aria, usually unleashing fury of some sort, though there were some quite beautiful softer moments.  The talented young Pergolesi did treat us to one brief duet, and a complex, very effective quartet buried inside the second half, fortelling the coming of dramatic action through the music.

There were two full, single spaced, paragraph-less pages of synopsis.  Essentially however, the selfish Giulia wants to get rid of her son Alessandro's wife Salustia, whose not very bright father Marziano was a war hero who in turn wants to get rid of Giulia.  Salustia's friend Alina loves the father's not-so-bright friend Claudio who cannot bear her.  Salustia saves the cruel mother from being murdered by her father and everyone lives happily ever after.

All this made metteur-en-scène Jean-Paul Scarpitta think of water for some reason. The curtain rose on ten dancers frolicking on a water covered black stage floor with some Afghanistan-looking hills as a backdrop.  Down stage center there was a large platform-trolley covered with a dirt like substance (though neither dirty, dusty nor eventually muddy) on which the singers stood or in which they rolled while the platform was pushed back and forth across the proscenium with great (simulated) effort by two wannabe Hercules(es).

In the second half of the evening,  hems of  costumes were still being soaked by the perpetually water covered stage floor.  The Baroque's mandate for scenic marvels was honored when a huge curtain of rain replaced the dry hills as the stage backdrop, under which  various mute men and ladies-in-waiting bathed one another (male-male, female-female, then male-female, you name it).

These instruments of movement - one hesitates to call them dancers - offered their own voiceless additions to the story, adding lots of meaningful looks and meaningful touching which often had strange sexual connotations. Although the opera has a happy ending, one silent friend of the cruel, turned forgiving, mother was moved to murder Salustia at one point.  Then,  Salustia,  resurrected was left alone on the stage, her family celebrating what was to have been an uplifting ending in an off-stage, i.e. faraway, sextet.  Thus Pergolesi's big, singerly, reconciliation wrapping up this quite frankly startling opera, simply vanished.  

Pergolesi's surely fine vocal writing was overwhelmed both by Sig. Morelli's weird libretto and by Jean Paul Scarpitta's bizarre gloss.  One yearned for the opportunity to discover the voice of this important new composer.  Of the singers only soprano Maria Ercolano, the Salustia herself, brought true operatic excitement to the stage, and it was formidable.  Valentina Varriale cut a fine vocal figure as the deceitful if loving Albina, adding some welcome excitement from time to time.  The cruel mother Giulia is a huge role, and would have profited from a larger-scale, older singer, though soprano Raffaella Milanesi did it full justice. Counter-tenors were completely missing, neither the Alessandro of mezzo José Maria Lo Monaco nor the Marziano of alto Marina De Liso filled the pants of these two wimpy male roles.  The Claudio of tenor Cyril Auvity was painful to listen to. Now, let me see if I can find that program booklet.

Michael Milenski

Picture © Mark Ginot


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