Franco ALFANO (1875-1954)
Risurrezione (1904)
Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Chorus and Orchestra/Francesco Lanzillotta
Directed by Rosetta Cucchi
rec. 17 and 21 January 2020, Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino
Region
code: 0
Dolby Digital 5.1 and PCM 2.0. NTSC, colour, 16:9
Booklet
notes and synopsis in Italian and English. Subtitles in Italian,
English, French, German, Korean, and Japanese
DYNAMIC 37866
DVD [119 mins]
Mary Garden (1874–1967), the legendary Scottish soprano, always spoke of Franco Alfano’s Risurrezione, premiered in 1904, as one of the greatest operas of the twentieth century. There is a beautiful recording of her singing what is arguably the work’s lyric highlight, Act II’s ‘Dio pietoso’. Though her judgement has never become a majority view, the opera has always had enthusiastic champions. Moreover, it has more than proved itself in the theatre: by 1951, there had been more than 1,000 performances around the world. Since then, though, it has become something of a rarity, and it has endured a good deal of negative press. Jürgen Maehder, in the Grove Dictionary of Opera, is particularly begrudging, describing it as ‘a traditional Italian opera in a somewhat crude verismo style devoid of Puccini’s subtleties of orchestration’.
It’s hard to know what to do with such criticism apart from saying it’s nonsense: Risurrezione is not traditional, nor crude, and its ‘subtleties of orchestration’ are its most immediately winning feature. At many points, especially in Act I, it does sound remarkably like Puccini, and after listening to it no one should be surprised to learn that, two decades later, it was Alfano who was chosen to complete Puccini’s unfinished Turandot. Risurrezione’s problems lie, rather, at the level of the plot. Alfano decided, in a burst of youthful idealism, to adapt Tolstoy’s final, recent, much-talked-about philosophical novel, Resurrection (1899), as an opera. As a short opera, at that, for the four-act Risurrezione is only two hours long. This involved cutting lots of Tolstoy’s plot and virtually all the extended social and religious commentary that the great Russian writer considered central to his work. Alfano’s opera thus comes across as ‘scenes from a novel’; one realises that a great deal has happened between the acts, a few details of which are retrospectively alluded to. Perhaps the most problematic artistic decision made by Alfano and his librettists, Cesare Hanau and Camillo Antona Traversi (only the former was credited) was to cut what, in most readings, is the central scene in Resurrection. In this, the nobleman Dimitri Ivanovich Nekhlyudov (referred to simply as Dimitri in the opera) finds himself on a jury that wrongly convicts a prostitute of murder and sentences her to prison in Siberia. He recognises the prostitute, Maslova, as Katyusha, a ward of his aunts’, whom he had seduced and left pregnant ten years earlier, when she was just sixteen. Realising his own responsibility for her fate, he determines to make amends and seek redemption. This incredibly important scene is understood to have occurred between the second and third acts of Alfano’s opera.
The part of the opera that poses the greatest challenge for the audience, though, is the conclusion. In the novel, Dimitri obtains a partial reprieve for Katyusha and offers to marry her. She gently refuses him, choosing to stay with Simonson, a political prisoner. Dimitri concludes that she does this in a spirit of self-sacrifice, not because she loves Simonson, but so that she can ‘free’ him, Dimitri, from further feelings of responsibility for her. He now looks forward to starting a new life and turns to the Gospel of St. Matthew for inspiration. It’s really hard to know what Maehder meant by calling Risurrezione ‘a traditional Italian opera’, and the end certainly defies generic expectations. The emotional arc running through Acts II and III seems to be heading, in context, to the sort of tragic conclusion in which Puccini specialised. In fact, it’s rather hard to explain or understand what happens at the end. Dimitri offers marriage, Katyusha refuses, but nevertheless spells out emphatically that she has always loved him. Though Dimitri clearly loves her romantically in the opera—something left uncertain in the novel—he ecstatically accepts her renunciation as something like the highest form of love and agrees that, by parting, they will somehow be more together. ‘Partendo, uniti per sempre sarem!’ Katyusha sings: ‘In parting we shall be united forever!’ It’s all rather hurried, as though to avoid giving the audience too long to think about why the lovers don’t just choose to be together, and to me it strikes a note of false triumphalism a little reminiscent, ironically, of the future conclusion to Turandot.
Risurrezione has been surprisingly neglected by the recording industry. The first full recording was not made until 1971, a live performance conducted by Elio Boncompagni, with Magda Olivero notably singing Katyusha. Olivero had studied the role with Alfano’s widow, and her superb performance set the standard by which all future Katyushas will be judged. For decades this was the only recording available, but in 2003 it was joined by a captivating live recording with Denia Mazzola as Katyusha and Friedemann Layer conducting the Orchestre National de Montpellier, released on the Accord label (472 818-2). For anyone primarily interested in experiencing the ripe sumptuousness of Alfano’s music, this 2003 recording is still the best place to start. On the other hand, anyone wanting to experience it as first and foremost a theatrical work is advised to go directly to this very welcome new video recording of Rosetta Cucchi’s production, originally designed for the Wexford Festival Opera in 2017 (also available on CD). Because of the compressed nature of the action, and the many incidental characters, it is often hard to imagine what is actually happening when following the audio recordings or a score. I had found Act II particularly hard to grasp: Katyusha, several months pregnant, waits to see Dimitri at a railway station; her meditations suffer various passing interruptions; finally, Dimitri briefly appears with another woman and somehow Katyusha is unable to speak to him. In this Wexford staging, it all makes perfect sense.
Katyusha is a difficult role to cast. Tolstoy’s story is spread over many years, and the innocent sixteen-year-old girl at the start would appear to be about thirty by the end, though doubtless looking much older after all her hardships and sufferings. The opera carefully avoids references to time or age, but still only makes sense if it is assumed that many years pass between Acts I and IV. Mary Garden notably sang the role until she was sixty; Olivero continued singing it in her sixties. Having an older singer in the role inevitably changes the impression the story makes: the seduction in Act I, so central to everything that follows, starts to appear the desperate act of a woman seemingly doomed to waste away an unwed life as a sort of companion to Dimitri’s aunt, a bit like Mademoiselle Bourienne in War and Peace perhaps. Anne Sophie Duprels, who sang the role in Wexford and returns to it for the Dynamic recording, is this sort of older Katyusha, and this allows the production a poignant novelty. Maria Caterina Frani is introduced as a non-singing child Katyusha, effectively a memory. She first appears gliding across the stage in Act I, suggesting that Katyusha, even before the seduction, is already feeling a sense of painful distance from youthful hopes and happiness. In the conclusion, the mature Katyusha steps outside time and place to be reunited with her child-self in an idyllic cornfield scene—the scene featured on the case and booklet cover. The implication seems to be that by choosing not to accept Dimitri’s offer of marriage, she can undo all that has gone wrong in her life and return to something like the innocent condition of childhood.
Katyusha’s is also a huge role, not just in terms of the vocal stamina required, but in its sheer variety—she is quite different in each act, from the playful, slightly melancholy, naïve person of Act I, to the desperate, heavily-pregnant woman of Act II, the hardened alcoholic of Act III, and finally the redeemed, selfless heroine of Act IV. Duprels may not have the sheer beauty of voice that Garden or Olivero brought to the role, but she acts and sings with incisive emotional intelligence, vividly and movingly bringing this complex character to life. She is well matched with Matthew Vickers’ Dimitri: there is something innately warm and tender in his singing and he conveys, at every stage, the essential niceness of the character, which is essential to Alfano’s conception, though not to Tolstoy’s. These two characters so dominate the opera that the rest of the cast are effectively all supporting roles, but they need to be done well, as Alfano wants his heroine’s story to unfold against a background of what might loosely be called ‘real life’. They are done very well here, and the sense of society’s cruelty, though only an echo of the far more brutal descriptions in Tolstoy, is powerfully expressed. Indeed, Rosetta Cucchi’s production does what any really good production of the opera should do: it makes you look more sympathetically at the spectacle of suffering in the world around you, asking whether there is a Katyusha who needs your help. Francesco Lanzillotta conducts with winning conviction, but in his hands, or at least on this recording, the score does not possess quite the lush, late Romantic glow that other conductors have found in it.
David Chandler
Previous review (Blu-ray): Paul Corfield Godfrey
Cast
Anne Sophie Duprels (soprano) – Katyusha
Matthew Vickers (tenor) – Dimitri
Leon Kim (bass) – Simonov
Francesca di Sauro (mezzo-soprano) – Sofia
Romina Tomasoni (contralto) – Matryona, Anna
Ana Victoria Pitts (contralto) – Vera, Karablyova
Barbara Marcacci (soprano) – Fentichka
Filomena Pericoli (contralto) – Hunchback
Nadia Sturlese (mezzo-soprano) – Redhead
Niccolo Ayroldi (baritone) – Train-station officer
Giulia Bruni
(mezzo-soprano) – Fedia
Silvia Capra (soprano) – Woman
Giovanna Costa
(contralto) – Third prisoner
Lisandro Guinis (bass) – Krizlov, Second
peasant
Nicola Lisanti (tenor) – Officer, First peasant
Monica Marzini
(soprano) – Second prisoner
Giovanni Mazzei (baritone) – Guard
Antonio
Montesi (baritone) – Cossack
Egidio Massimo Naccarato (baritone) – Muzhik
Delia Palmieri (soprano) – First prisoner
Nadia Pirazzini (contralto) – Old
maidservant
Gabriele Spina (bass) – Chief guard
