The Devil and the Bourgeoisie Music and Vision March 18

The Devil and the Bourgeoisie
GIUSEPPE PENNISI reviews
Arrigo Boito's 'Mefistofele'

Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele is an opéra maudite, or an opera over which a bad spell seems to hang. It was a fiasco when the seven-hour-plus first version was premièered on 5 March 1868 at La Scala in Milan. It was a major hit when drastically revised, the present version (about two and a half hours of music) was staged on 4 October 1875 in Bologna. This second version, further slightly revised for La Fenice in Venice, was successful nearly until World War II. Then, it disappeared nearly everywhere. In the USA, I remember a good production constructed by the New York City Opera around the bass Norman Triegle in the 1970s. In Italy, only a few conductors (Riccardo Muti, Stefano Ranzani, Nicola Colabianchi, Renato Palumbo) appear to like it. In 1995, Mefistofele was produced at La Scala but only for a few performances. In 2005 it was on the stage of the small Maruccino theatre of a little provincial town, Chieti; there Colabianchi took up the challenge. A few months later, Muti conducted two open air concert performances of excerpts of the opera in Ravenna and Tunisia. In January 2008, a glittering Giancarlo Del Monaco production inaugurated the season of Palermo's Teatro Massimo with Ranzani in the pit. In 2009, Antonio Pappano performed The Prologue in Heaven as a concert piece in the Accademia di Santa Cecilia season; it is a superb twenty-five minute summary of what will happen next in the opera. Pappano, with the orchestra and chorus of the Santa Cecilia, as well as the Rome Children's Chorus, provided a real heavenly panoply.

A scene from Arrigo Boito's 'Mefistofele' in Rome
I consider Mefistofele an uneven masterpiece, the only real attempt -- with the second part of Mahler's Eighth Symphony -- to capture the spirit of Goethe's poetry. Of course, only an attempt due to the immensity of Goethe's Faust. There are naïve sections and uncertainties -- something rough, not fully polished. But this adds to its charm.
Fifty years after the last performance in the main house of the Rome Opera complex (the Teatro dell'Opera) -- the last performance in the open air Baths of Caracalla took place in 1970 -- Mefistofele is back in the main Winter stage of the Italian capital. It is quite a challenge, indeed a welcome challenge in a season where financial stringency has compelled management to organize a season based almost entirely on revivals of old repertory productions. Mefistofele is a new production in that the stage sets are based on a fixed structure by Andrea Miglio (similar to that used by Riccardo Muti at La Scala in the 1990s for a Rossini Guillaume Tell staging) and projections mostly taken from sketches by Cammillo Parravicini (a well known Italian stage designer and director from the 1940s to the late 60s) for a production planned but never actually implemented. The stage direction by eighty-year-old Filippo Crivelli is quite conventional.

A scene from Arrigo Boito's 'Mefistofele' in Rome
It seems more apt to a girls' college or 'polishing school' than to a modern opera house. Boito was an atheist and anti-clerical. His Mefistofele smells of lust and sin, but on the stage there is a parable of venial misdemeanors and redemptions. The opera starts with an excellent idea: the change of time and place from Germany in the period when Renaissance was replacing the Middle Ages. However, it is not followed through except in the costumes by Anna Biagiotti (the head of the Teatro dell'Opera's laboratory), mostly extracted from the stock of sixty thousand costumes in the theatre's warehouse. The acting is quite conventional, with the aggravation that the well-known Metropolitan tenor Stuart Neill does not have the physique du rôle to be a credible Faust. The third Act's orgy is a bourgeois kermesse where the participants indulge not in wild sex but in smoking -- maybe grass. In addition, the plethora of projections makes it difficult to follow the action, also because the opera is presented without surtitles. This is difficult to understand because it would been easy and economical to lease those developed, and used, in Palermo in 2008.
The musical part has three very strong elements. First, the orchestra conducted by Renato Palumbo; it delves into the very difficult scores, where a Wagnerian symphonic approach and leitmotiv blend with Italian melody: a real jewel from The Prologue in Heaven panoply to the highly intense finale. Second, the choruses (the Teatro dell'Opera Chorus directed by Andrea Giorgi and the Voci Bianche Chorus directed by José Maria Sciutto); the choral element is one of the real protagonists of the opera and did extremely well. Third, Orlin Anastassov as Mefistofele; on the opening night, 16 March 2010 (on which performance this review is based), he sang and acted extremely well (although there were some difficulties in fully understanding his diction in the central register). He showed a very clear timbre and agility when going from grave to acute tonalities, and vice versa. At thirty four, Orlin Anastassov could have an excellent career if he takes good care of his instrument.

A scene from Arrigo Boito's 'Mefistofele' in Rome
Probably this is not what Amarilli Nizza has done. A very promising young soprano (I remember her in an excellent Puccini Trittico) in 2007, she has sung very impervious roles (such as that of Abigaille in Nabucco). On 16 March she started out quite badly in the second Act quartetto (and Stuart Neill was not much help); she improved in the prison scene and performed Helena's part reasonably well in the fourth Act (avoiding the difficult B natural). In short, she may need to pace her contracts and focus on roles really suited to her voice.

A scene from Arrigo Boito's 'Mefistofele' in Rome
Stuart Neill had perhaps an unlucky evening. He is very often at The Met, La Scala and Covent Garden -- thus on major stages. Yet, in addition to his poor acting, his singing on this occasion left a lot to be desired from Dai Campi, dai Prati to Giunto alfine. He was clearly in difficulties as he went into falsetto in all the score's hard passages.
In short, the challenge was only partly successful.
Copyright © 18 March 2010 Giuseppe Pennisi,
Rome, Italy

ARRIGO BOITO
ROME
ITALY
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