In my series of reviews of the C Major series called
Tutto Verdi,
issued during the bicentenary anniversary year of Verdi’s birth, I
repeatedly counselled that the claim of twenty-six operas in the Verdi
oeuvre was erroneous. I concentrated my remarks on the two operas that were
specifically renamed, making twenty-eight distinct titles. The difference
between the two numbers involve re-writes of two works,
I Lombardi
and
Stiffelio, each with significant alterations and additions
fully justifying a different title.
I sometimes also pointed out that this was not the whole story. In fact,
Verdi undertook a number of radical rewrites of various of his operas
without re-titling. Most notably these include
Macbeth,
La
Forza del Destino,
Don Carlos and
Simon Boccanegra.
There were also changes to works such as
Il Trovatore to include a
ballet when the opera was performed in Paris. These revisions would take the
number of operas in the Verdi canon towards the mid-thirties rather than
twenty-six or -eight. The number, and extensive nature, of the many
revisions that the composer made to
Don Carlos puts the figure up
towards thirty-eight and that is not counting the music that was cut from
the score after the dress rehearsal and before the first night. As an
appendix to this review I give more detail as to the background to the
fraught genesis of
Don Carlos and its subsequent revisions.
An aside: as well as being my personal Desert Island opera,
Don
Carlos is Verdi’s longest. Circumstances make the present version
particularly memorable for me. A few months after the performance in Paris,
my wife and I were camped in the Provence hills in our caravan. Passing
through the small village of St. Paul-en-Forêt we noticed an advert for
Don Carlos. We stopped and enquired of a man who turned out to be
the mayor, in France a civic dignity of power and influence. He proudly told
us that the village was taking a performance transmitted from Paris via
satellite link, the venue being the village Centre Culturel. We payed our
fifty Francs, around ten pounds sterling at the time, and on Friday 13
September 1996, five months after the Paris performance and before any video
was available commercially, we took our seats. We took along some Belgian
friends for their first operatic experience. There were no surtitles or the
like and at the first intermission my friends were keen to know what was
coming in the next act. In my limited French I started to give a summary.
Disconcerted to notice an increasing audience, I slipped up in describing
Elisabeth as La Regina rather than the French La Reine; otherwise my
summaries went well and the number of listeners increased on each occasion.
I was quietly proud of my contribution to the
entente cordiale.
At the time of its recording, and commercial issue, this performance from
the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris was not quite the the first sung in the
original French. DG had made a sound recording in the early 1980s conducted
by Abbado. Recorded over two years, the recording was distinctly woolly and
the cast largely Italian, some of whose French betrayed their origins. The
only other performance I had heard in French was a BBC broadcast in 1973
made under Verdi scholar, Julian Budden’s direction and significantly using
several Francophone singers. This is now available on CD from
Opera Rara. What was very evident to me in that Provençal
venue was the more lyrical performance, for want of a better word, that the
young Pappano drew from his singers and orchestra compared with Giulini or
the earlier Santini (both EMI) or the first stereo set from La Scala
featuring Christoff issued in the early 1960s (DG nla). All of these tended
towards a more dramatic, even
verismo interpretation. Going home to
volume three of Budden’s seminal
Operas of Verdi (Cassell, 1981) I
was reminded of the fact that, for all the changes Verdi made to this opera,
over nearly twenty years, he always did so to a French libretto, so keen was
he to marry his music to the prosody of the words.
This cast, like the BBC broadcast has native French speakers in principal
roles and another, the Posa of Thomas Hampson, who could well pass as such.
Add the chorus and the totality acounts for the difference I detect. It all
makes a difference to the patina of the sound. Of the solo singers the major
revelation is Alagna in the eponymous role. It was not that many years
before that he had made his mark at Covent Garden in the vocally lighter
role of Roméo in Gounod’s opera. His voice had grown in power and his
overall interpretation is good. Regrettably, his later forays into the
heavier Verdi roles such as Manrico are less successful with vocal strain
too obvious. Here his lyricism, attention to words and general phrasing is
good. It is a pity that the positives are somewhat negated by his appearance
as a rebel includes designer stubble. How the tall and elegant Karita
Mattila fell for this scruffy youth in the Versailles forest is not obvious.
Her singing is as pure as her somewhat virginal appearance and includes a
particularly well shaped opening to act five. Her more general coolness and
appearance could maybe explain why the widowed Phillip failed to find
fulfilment in his second marriage and sought extra-curricular activity with
the more temperamental Eboli. As Philip, the Belgian bass baritone José Van
Dam, dressed in black, is austere of demeanour throughout. Whilst he lacks
some of the lower sonority of his Italian counterparts in the role his
diction and vocal expression and acting more than compensate. His opening
aria to act four when, in his study, Philip laments his wife’s response to
him, is wonderfully conveyed (CH.16). The lyricism of his interpretation is
particularly evident in the act two, scene two interview with Posa (CHs.
7-11) where, as I have noted, this version is less dramatic than that of
Verdi’s early revision translated into Italian. However, the beauty of the
phrasing of Van Dam and Thomas Hampson is a delight. Hampson’s diction,
phrasing and French is outstanding throughout and particularly in Posa’s
death scene (CHs. 20-22). His overall acting is convincing, but what
persuaded Luc Bondy to give him such ridiculous hair defeats me.
Of those with the least impressive French, Waltraud Meier as Eboli is more
convincing in her act four scene after revealing her infidelity with Philip
(CHs.18-19) than in the earlier Garden Scene. Overall she does convey the
tempestuous nature of the role. Likewise, Eric Halfvarson is fearsome as the
Grand Inquisitor, a role that must have guaranteed him a good pension over
the years. As I have already indicated Pappano brings lyricism to Verdi’s
creation. It is interesting to compare his Covent Garden recording of the
five act Don Carlo where he seeks a more Italianate drama from the music.
The chorus and orchestra of the Théâtre du Châtelet are fine.
Since this recording, there has been a video and CD recording of all the
music Verdi wrote for the original production including that excised before
the premiere and during the early performances. It is conducted with
particular feeling and elan by
Bertrand De Billy. It is derived from the
soundtrack of a Peter Konwitschny production for the Vienna State Opera that
caused some furore at its premiere. Although lacking Francophone singers it
is worth hearing and is now available on DVD. I personally find the
production gimmicks somewhat beyond acceptability.
Appendix
The original and subsequent versions of Don
Carlos
In 1864 when spending time revising
Macbeth for the Théâtre
Lyrique in Paris, Emile Perrin, director of the Paris Opéra, the Académie
Impériale de Musique, approached Verdi to write once more for the theatre.
With the Great Exhibition of 1867 on the horizon, and Meyerbeer dead,
Perrin, realised that he would need a Grand Opera for the season that year
and turned to Verdi. Despite his earlier frustrations with working for the
Paris Opera, and with the interventions of a mutual friend, Verdi committed
himself to write a work of four or five acts complete with ballet.
At the rehearsal of the whole opera as prepared by Verdi in February 1867
it became obvious that
Don Carlos was too long to allow time for
suburban Parisians to get their last trains home. The composer reluctantly
removed well over twenty minutes of music excising more in the course of the
first run of performances. It was in this cut five-act form that
Don
Carlos was premiered at the Paris Opéra on 11 March 1867. Even in this
reduced form it was only modestly received. As was usual, it was quickly
translated into Italian as
Don Carlo. However, public response in
Italy was little better than in Paris. Both the Italian public and theatre
managements thought it over-long and were slow to take the work to their
hearts. It was not long before the act three ballet and then the
Fontainebleau act were dropped altogether. The arrival in Italy of the
shorter, and equally grand,
Aida in 1871, added to the difficulty
of the opera’s length. After a failure in Naples in the same year Verdi made
his first alterations to the score for a revival under his own supervision.
Still, the fortunes of the opera disappointed the composer and as early as
1875 he began seriously to consider shortening the work. With other demands
he did not begin determined work on this until 1882 concluding his revision
as a four act entity the following year. It had to wait until 1884 for its
premiere at La Scala. This new shorter four-act revision involved much
re-wording to explain the sequence of events and maintain narrative and
dramatic coherence. Verdi’s own revisions involved the removal of the
Fontainebleau act, the ballet and the Inquisitor’s chorus in act five as
well as other changes. For a revival in Naples in 1872 he had already made
alterations to the duet between Philip and Posa in act two, scene two,
making it considerably more dramatic, particularly the King’s concluding
warnings to Posa to beware the Grand Inquisitor. The premiere of the new
four act
Don Carlo, which has become known as the 1884 version, was
a great success at La Scala and featured the tenor Tamagno who created
Otello three years later. At Modena, two years later, a five act
version, in Italian and including a translation of the first act was given
with, it is claimed, Verdi’s approval.
There, the complications of the versions of
Don Carlos and
Don Carlo might have rested and did so for nearly a century. All
the excised music was thought lost until, at the Verdi Congress in Parma in
1969, when David Rosen, an American scholar, produced a previously unknown
section of the Philip-Posa duet. This had been folded down in the conducting
score prior to the premiere. The English musicologist Andrew Porter, acting
on a hunch, visited the Paris Opéra library and asked to see the original
score. He was amazed to discover that the pages of the music that Verdi
omitted from the premiere, and subsequently thought to be lost, were simply
stitched together. These excisions amount to about thirty minutes of music.
More importantly, they give greater cohesion and explanation of the details
of the complex story as the work unfolds. Porter copied out the missing
parts.
Some of the items discovered by Porter were included as an appendix to the
first studio recording of the French version conducted by Claudio Abbado
(DG). Prior to that, and unobtainable for a long period, was the
BBC broadcast of 1973 conceived and realised by Julian
Budden with a largely Francophone cast. With two hundred and thirty one
minutes of music it is only exceeded by the 2004 recording from Vienna of
Konwitschny’s controversial production. Wonderfully conducted by Bertrand De
Billy the latter is claimed as a world premiere of all the extant music
Verdi wrote for the Paris premiere. It is available on
CD and DVD.
Robert J Farr
