Arrigo Boito (1842-1918)
Nerone (unfinished, first performed 1924)
Nerone – Rafael Rojas (tenor)
Simon Magus – Lucio Gallo (baritone)
Fanučl – Brett Polegato (baritone)
Rubria – Alessandra Volpe (mezzo-soprano)
Asteria – Svetlana Aksenova (soprano)
Prague Philharmonic Choir
Vienna Symphony Orchestra/Dirk Kaftan
Olivier Tambosi – Stage Director
rec. live, July/August 2021, Bregenz Festival, Austria
Reviewed in Stereo
C MAJOR Blu-ray 761304 [149]
Even during his lifetime Boito’s Nerone was the subject of wry comments and indeed ridicule from his fellow Italian composers, despite the fact that none of them had ever heard a note of the music. He began work on the opera – as in the case of his earlier Mefistofele, to his own libretto – shortly after his first opera had begun to establish a place in the repertoire of Italian theatres following its wholesale revision and overhaul following its disastrous premičre. But his skill and talents as a librettist soon began to reap rewards, and he found himself distracted by work undertaken for other composers – Verdi, Ponchielli, Faccio – including adaptations of Shakespeare which quickly established him as a leading force in Italian literature. His compositional work on the long five-Act Nerone languished for extended periods, until the point where the much younger Mascagni composing his own opera on the subject in 1892 was able to ignore the possibility that a score from Boito might imminently appear to challenge his own version (in fact he did not complete that until 1935, when it sank almost without trace although it has subsequently been revived). It was only when Boito died in 1918 that anybody else was allowed to investigate his progress with the music for Nerone, and eventually Toscanini produced a four-Act version of the score at La Scala in 1924. It achieved a certain measure of success, but never succeeded in making much headway outside Italy, where even Mefistofele soon found itself relegated to the outer reaches of the standard repertory.
And there for a long time matters rested. Patrick J Smith, in his 1970 detailed and valuable study of opera libretti in The Tenth Muse, devoted of course considerable space to the work of Boito and spent some time analysing the libretto which he had devised for Nerone, concentrating in particular on the decidedly peculiar ideas he had for the final Act where in a “play within a play” the Emperor would re-enact the myth of Orestes and the killing of his mother. (It does not appear that Boito in fact ever wrote any of the music for this weird closing scene.) In 1983 Eve Queler, with a cast of Hungarian singers, recorded the opera ‘complete’ for Hungaroton in a studio performance which revealed a work of considerable musical beauty and grandeur, as well as an expected dramatic constrtuction of exceptional intricacy and psychological insight. Another recording subsequently appeared from Bongiovanni conducted by Giandrea Gavazzeni, apparently deriving from a Italian broadcast performance in 1975 (I have not heard this, although it remains available; reviews at the time complained of inadequacies in some of the singing, partly the result of last-minute cast changes). There was also a live Naples performance from 1957 on Opera d’Oro, where the sound would have been clearly inadequate to the sonic demands of the score (and which has vanished from currently available listings). And that was it, until unexpectedly this video emerged.
So what is one to expect of the work? In the first place the music itself is surprisingly modern, a considerable advance on the decidedly nineteenth century style of Mefistofele with overtones of orientalism and exoticism which parallel late Puccini in Turandot. Even the opening is unexpected, with no orchestral overture or prelude; instead we are plunged immediately into the sound of offstage voices introducing the haunted Nero stumbling in fear from the imagined ghost of his murdered mother (John Steane described this “opening stroke” as “disturbing”). In the second place, as one might expect with a librettist of such keen psychological insight, there is more emphasis on the emotional relationships between the characters than the grand historical spectacle that concludes Act One so effectively, or the somewhat perfunctory handling of the scene in the amphitheatre which opens Act Four. And finally, possibly as the result of the loss of the final Act from Boito’s original scheme, the focus unexpectedly shifts away from Nero himself around half-way through the action to the unconsummated love between the Christians Fanučl and Rubria – whose death at the end of Act Four brings the opera to a conclusion. The character of Asteria, the pagan priestess whose attempts to save the Christians from death in the arena leads to her own condemnation, is denied any closure to her story at all; which is all the more unsatisfactory, since much of the weight in Act Two has centred around her personal dilemma. It is indeed odd to reflect that in an opera where one would expect the librettist’s preoccupations to perhaps have overshadowed the music produced by the composer, precisely the opposite occurs; the music serves to redeem, and indeed paper over the cracks, in a decidedly unbalanced and ramshackle libretto.
Or would do, if it were given a proper opportunity to do so. But there is also one essential element in the scheme, and that is the historical setting. Boito clearly set out to emphasise the Roman context, where the new Empire was still seeking to establish its ascendancy over the republican roots of the state, and he expected his audience to appreciate the increasing influence of oriental religions on the culture of the period – not only Christianity, but also the worship of Egyptian and Syrian deities and other wandering self-proclaimed Messiahs exemplified in Nerone by the character of Simon Magus. The complex relationships between the characters, who themselves sometimes come close to archetypes rather than wholly-rounded individuals, is essential to the understanding and development of the plot. And the comprehension is hardly assisted here by the ill-chosen combination of traditional and modern costumes, and the almost total absence of any sense of place. The action moves from the open air into a pagan temple, the Christian catacombs, the arena of the circus, and the spoliarium of the arena itself; but apart from some vaguely shifting abstract and neon-illuminated sculptures, neither impressive in themselves or atmospheric in their nature, the viewer is provided with almost no reference points to indicate these changes in location. One is left wondering in some bewilderment precisely why one character should appear where and when they do. And in a scenario that is already quite heavily laden with various sub-plots, this is fatal. There may be some point in depicting the Romans as wearing costumes liberally splurged with blood, as opposed to the pure white of the Christians; but when those costumes are modern (Nero artistically clad in a Noel Coward style dressing gown) the results are unintentionally hilarious rather than horrifying. And the clearly deliberate resemblance conjured between Fanučl and Christ (complete with crown of thorns) reduces to a single dimension the character’s internal struggle between paternal, pastoral and sexual feelings towards Rubria, rendering his inner conflict nonsensical. When we are frequently told of Boito’s efforts to ensure historical accuracy and precision in his libretto (it was often cited as a reason for his failure to complete the score), it is fatal for any director to attempt to superimpose any further layers of supposed ‘meaning’ onto the action even when grosser misinterpretation is avoided.
The singers do the best they can to overcome these dramatic hurdles, and much of the success of this performance is due to those efforts. Even shorn of his final Act, Rafael Rojas gives a fully rounded portrayal of the psychotic, haunted, yet fundamentally artistic Emperor with his petulant changes of mood from sentimentality to sadistic violence and back again. The role really needs a full-scale heroic tenor (an Otello or a Tristan) but he manages to summon plenty of strength to ride the massive climaxes at the end of Act One, and his shading of the text is sensitive throughout. The pagan side of Rome is also represented by his hulking henchman Tigellinus in the shape of the bully-boy characterisation of Miklós Sebestyén, and the more sinister Simon Magus in the firmly declaimed tones of Lucio Gallo who even manages at times to make one overlook his absurdly modern hairstyle. The priestess Asteria, a sort of Kundry-figure in her oscillations between blasphemy and piety, is well encompassed by the vibrant Svetlana Aksenova and she forms an effective contrast with Alessandra Volpe as Rubria, whose darker tone colour helps to overcome her otherwise somewhat pallid character. Best of all is Brett Polegato as Fanučl, who has by far the best music in the opera in terms of pure singing and can also rise to the heights with a well-controlled lyrical baritone. The choral body, with Bregenz Festival performers reinforced by the Prague Philharmonic, needs to be massive if it is to make its proper impact; and in the Act One finale it is. In the circus scene of Act Four the choristers are kept behind the scenes, and the whole effect falls very flat in dramatic terms; it is difficult to appreciate precisely what is supposed to be going on, as Simon Magus makes his fatal attempt to achieve manned flight while the Christians set fire to Rome. It is only with the final scene, reducing the focus once more to the doomed love between Fanučl and Rubria, that calm is restored; and the final curtain, with Nero intruded into the stage action by the producer, largely ruins the effect.
It is good to see that Nerone is finally being taken up again by opera houses, and hopefully we can look forward to further new productions – possibly one that will successfully take up the technical challenges of the stage pictures that Boito took so much trouble to produce. For those who want the opera on video, however, we may wait some time for a challenger to appear. However in purely musical terms, and without the distractions of a sometimes perverse staging, all lovers of Italian opera should really get to know the score in the Queler studio recording, unfortunately now available only on download without booklet, text or translation (my Hungaraton CD set has both, so there is no excuse for these not to be available online).
Paul Corfield Godfrey
Previous review: Jim Westhead
Other Cast and Production Staff
Tigellinus – Miklós Sebestyén (bass-baritone)
Gobrias – Taylen Reinhard (tenor)
Dositčo – Ilya Kutyukhin (baritone)
Cerinto / Pčrside – Katrin Wundsam (mezzo-soprano)
Voce di donna – Shira Patchornik (soprano)
Frank Philipp Schlössmann – Set Designer
Gesine Völlm – Costume Designer
Davy Cunningham – Lighting Designer
Lukáš Vasilek - Chorus Master
Tiziano Mancini – Video Director
Video Details
Filmed in HD - Mastered from an HD source
Picture format: 1080i, 16:9
Sound formats: a) PCM Stereo, DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
Region Code A, B, C
Sung in Italian, with subtitles in English, German, Korean
