A High-level Production In Music & Vision del 31 dicembre 2010

A High-level Production
'The Merry Widow', heard by GIUSEPPE PENNISI

The Merry Widow is much too often treated as a 'holiday season' family show. Thus, it is staged by make-shift companies, with an overly simplified, if not altogether rudimentary, orchestra and only a few dancers, possibly on loan from a graduation class of some nearby Dancing Academy. This is neither Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow as originally conceived nor the production I saw in Verona on 18 December 2010 -- the basis for this review. The Merry Widow has sublime music; for this reason it has been one of the favorite scores of conductors such as Bernstein, Karajan, Kleiber, Matacic and many others amongst the best batons of the twentieth century. The 'operetta' has been also much appreciated by singers such as Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Nicolai Gedda. Its waltzes and mazurkas demand the best étoiles and a very well trained corps de ballet. Its orchestral playing deserves top-notch musicians and even some well rounded soloists.
The production I enjoyed is a joint effort of four major Italian opera houses -- the San Carlo Theatre in Naples, the Carlo Felice Theatre in Genoa, the Verdi Theatre in Trieste and the Filarmonico Theatre in Verona. The staging has been entrusted to a well-known Italian director, Federico Tiezzi and the sets, the costumes, the lighting and the choreography to Edoardo Stanchi, Giovanna Buzzi, Gianni Pollini and Giovanna Di Cicco -- all very professional specialists. The principals and the conductor are basically the same in all the four towns and theatres. The orchestras and the corps de ballet change from town to town and from theatre to theatre -- also due to 'closed shop' trade unions' practices -- but are always up to the standard of a major opera house. Furthermore, Verona has a rich ballet season in both Winter and Summer and, thus, an experienced ballet company. Thus, it is a high level production.
The Merry Widow is a special operetta. It erupted when this type of musical theatre was considered on its way out. The seventies and the eighties of the nineteenth century had been the heyday of Viennese classical operetta with Johann Strauss being the best known and most popular author. The exceptional success of this stylistic fashion produced a horde of librettists and composers who adapted the genre in a thousand of different ways; only a few of them propagated new ideas, melodies and rhythms. Thus the genre was dying out when its leading exponents were still alive. At the turn of the century, little or no operetta seriously existed, and nobody believed in the possibility of its renaissance. A similar phenomenon had occurred in France where operetta was mostly linked to the name of Jacques Hoffenbach and of its sharp and witty satire of the upper class in the Second Empire and in the Third Republic.
Within this setting, The Merry Widow started a new era. It was premièred in the An der Wien Theatre of Vienna on 30 December 1905, only three weeks after Richard Strauss' Salome had shocked Dresden's audience and worldwide music critics. Albeit very different in many aspects, the two works have the same basic theme: sex, money and power as perceived by a woman. It is the same core element of Strindberg's plays as well as a signal of the beginning of Freudian psychoanalysis. Musically, Franz Lehár's waltzes and mazurkas were as revolutionary as Richard Strauss' dissonance. It is significant that The Merry Widow became world famous not right after its première in Vienna but a few months later as a result of its tremendous success in Berlin, where its fiery and unconventional spirit was at once recognized and acclaimed.
The text is amusing but not exceptionally brilliant. It is based on a rather dull French play, L'Atttaché d'Ambassade by Henri Meilhac; the play had had some limited success in the period around 1861-65. The real marvel is the music: in a way, Lehár brought the Wagnerian revolution as close as possible to the dance hall and to the general entertainment theatre. There is a clear basic leitmotif, the love waltz around which other themes enfolds: the brisk Maxim's march, Hanna's brilliant entrance aria, the melodious Vilja song, the tender pavilion duet, the chorus of the grisettes, the Septet in the second Act played and sung again at the end of the third Act. The tunes are never banal. Lehár's waltzes are more caressing and sweeter than those of the classical Johann Strauss; they carry in them the foretaste of the slow waltz. Also the orchestration is rich -- much richer than that of Johann Strauss. Thus, it is not easy to perform The Merry Widow well. You need a good central idea for the staging, a good group of singers, a first rate ballet, an experienced orchestra and a director and conductor able to pull all of this together.
Tiezzi's key idea is to move the action from 1905 to 29-30 October 1929, ie to the beginning of the major financial crisis which opened the way to the Great Depression. In the background of a single set, where projections and props provide for the changes in scene (the Embassy of the bankrupt Balkan Kingdom, Hanna Glawari's fabulous mansion in Paris and finally Chez Maxim's), the audience sees stock exchange data and indexes like in a ticker of a financial TV program. Of course, the indexes fall until the final happy end when a marriage and a lot money save everybody and the stock exchange becomes bullish. The costumes are strictly in the 'roaring Twenties' style. Great attention is given to acting and dancing. The spoken parts are reduced to the essential -- as in the original 1905 edition -- by deleting the jokes gradually added in the last century and now considered part of the tradition.
Thus, there is the right emphasis on the music. The conductor, Julian Kovatchev, underlines the most modern aspects of the score -- eg the central role of the love waltz and its connections with the other themes; the orchestra is fine, especially the strings.
In the cast there is only one veteran, the 'basso buffo' Bruno Praticò, well-known in Italy and abroad as a regular presence at the Rossini Opera Festival. He sets the tone in the Septet Wie die Weiber ... Ja, das Studium der Weiber ist schwer and drives the other six singers of this spicy concertato. The other principals are mostly young, but already in careers. Hanna Glawari, the widow everyone wants to marry for her money, is Silvia Della Benetta, a good melodious voice but with limited volume in the large Verona Filarmonico Theatre; nonetheless, she received a well deserved applause at the end of her entrance aria Bitte, meine Herr'n and in the hard second Act song Es lebt' ein Vilja. Of course, she does much better in the duets with Gezyn Myshketa, a young and very promising Albanian baritone who is her Danilo Danilowitsch. Myshketa's well-rounded voice is apparent from his entry aria Oh Vaterland, du machst bei Tag to the final Lippen schweigen. I foresee that he will go far.
The second couple (Valencienne and De Rossignol) is not as well balanced: from the first duet (So comme Sie!), Davinia Rodriguez with her powerful voice overtakes Ricardo Bernal, a very light lyric tenor who, however, has the right touch for Wie eine Rosenknose. All the others were good. In short, a delightful Widow.
Copyright © 31 December 2010 Giuseppe Pennisi,
Rome, Italy