by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I just got through watching a PBS telecast of a Metropolitan
Opera performance from last April 16 of Donizetti’s opera Roberto Devereux, which I was somewhat surprised to read had never
been performed at the Met before the run of this production started on March
24. It was premiered in 1837, two years after Donizetti’s Lucia di
Lammermoor (which is set in Scotland) —
apparently Italian audiences were really big on British subjects at the time,
and Donizetti not only came up with the risible Emilia di Liverpool (Donizetti’s librettist, Giuseppe Checcherini, for
some reason thought Liverpool was an inland city surrounded by mountains
instead of a seaport), which got revised later and retitled L’Eremitaggio
di Liverpool (“The Hermit of Liverpool”),
he wrote three operas about British royal women during the Tudor era: Anna
Bolena, Maria Stuarda and Roberto
Devereux, dealing with the May-December
romance (or whatever it was — historians are still trying to sort it out) between Queen Elizabeth I and
the Earl of Essex, a.k.a. Robert Devereaux, in 1599. The bare historical facts
are that Essex saw a lot of the Queen that year and offered to lead an army
into Ireland to put down one of the regular rebellions the Irish fought against
their British overlords until they finally won effective independence (well, 26
of Ireland’s 32 counties did, anyway) in 1922. The Essex campaign was widely
supported by the British people — William Shakespeare wrote his play Henry
V largely as propaganda for it and
deliberately intended his original audiences to make the Henry V = Essex
parallel — but, unlike Henry V, Essex got his ass handed to him by Irish
fighters, who under the command of the Earl of Tyrone fought what would now be
called a guerrilla campaign and decimated Essex’ troops. Essex returned home to
England and, depending on which historical account you believe, led his troops
into London either as a show of strength, an attempt to get them taken care of
despite his defeat, or an outright act of rebellion intended to depose Queen
Elizabeth and take the throne in her place. Elizabeth finally, albeit
reluctantly, signed his death warrant and Essex was hanged. From that
Donizetti’s librettist, Salvatore Cammarano (who’d written the libretto for Lucia
di Lammermoor and would go on to write the
libretto for Verdi’s Il Trovatore),
spun a tale which pretty much eliminated the political and judicial aspects of
the tale and created a romantic rectangle: Queen Elizabeth (Sondra Radvanovsky)
loves, or at least is infatuated with, Essex (Matthew Polenzani); Essex has the
hots for Sara, Duchess of Nottingham (Elina Garança), whom he dated some years
previously but when he went off on one of his earlier military campaigns
Elizabeth, to get rid of the potential competition, ordered her to marry the
Duke of Nottingham (Mariusz Kwiecien).
The opera opens with a choral scene in
which the courtiers spy Sara reading a book about the legendary medieval
heroine Rosamond, and lamenting that she can’t just die once and be done with
it but suffers a death-in-life experience every day she lives and Essex isn’t
part of her life. Then Elizabeth enters and announces that she’s confronted
with a dilemma: her court wants her to sign the death warrant for Essex, but
she’s still in love with him and wants to spare his life if he’s still in love with her, but not if, as she
suspects, he’s found another girlfriend. Earlier Elizabeth gave Essex a ring as
a pledge of her commitment to him and said that if he ever got in trouble, all
he had to do is show the ring and she would pardon him no matter what he’d done. She asks Essex point-blank if he’s in
love, and he says no. Then Nottingham comes in and he and Essex sing a
friendship duet — yes, it’s one of those operas in which the male leads are
buddy-buddy until one of them realizes that the other is either sleeping with
or at least is after his wife. Meanwhile, Sara is so broken up about her
situation she’s taken up needlepoint (as Anna Russell said about another opera,
“I’m not making this up, you know!”) and has made an elaborate gold-trimmed
blue scarf which serves a similar plot function to the handkerchief in Shakespeare’s
(and Verdi’s) Othello. Got all
that? The scarf? The ring? These will be on your test and be 25 percent of your
grade. Eventually the truth comes out when Essex gives Sara the ring, Sara
gives Essex the scarf, Essex gets arrested and can’t present Elizabeth the ring
that will save him because he no longer has it, instead the scarf slips out of
his clothes when he’s searched, Nottingham instantly jumps to the conclusion
that Essex and his wife have been having an affair (though Cammarano, who like
a Production Code-era Hollywood screenwriter tried to have it both ways, has
Essex insist to Nottingham that he and Sara never actually got it on),
Elizabeth orders Essex’ execution but in the middle of a formal court function
takes off the big red wig she’d been wearing and reveals the little scraggle of
grey that’s all the hair she had left (this is historically accurate, by the way; the Tudors
weren’t into bathing and they took such lousy care of their personal hygiene
Elizabeth lost all her hair and had to wear wigs whenever she appeared in court
or in public, and the two times Bette Davis played Queen Elizabeth — in The
Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, 1939;
and The Virgin Queen, 1955 — she
had her hair shaved to give herself the longer forehead Elizabeth had acquired
when she started going bald), symbolizing her disgust with the whole idea of
ruling and her readiness to die.
Ironically, Donizetti’s three “queen” operas
were pretty well forgotten until Maria Callas revived Anna Bolena at La Scala in 1957, and a decade later Beverly
Sills and conductor Julius Rudel at the now-defunct New York City Opera decided
to perform them as a trilogy. The Met did right by Roberto Devereux, hiring a conductor (Maurizio Benini) who actually
kept the music going at a good clip, and a fabulous cast headed by Sondra
Radvanovsky, whose voice is a bit bigger and thicker than the usual stereotype
of a coloratura soprano. Not that I minded; that was one of the attractions of
Callas in this repertory (though La Divina never sang this part), and though Radvanovsky’s voice doesn’t have the
unmistakable personal quality of Callas’s she’s also a good deal more secure
technically — I noticed only one passage where she had a bit of wobble. The
other singers were also well up to their roles, especially Kwiecien, who sings
with such power and authority (here as well as in other productions, including
the heroine’s bad-guy brother in Lucia di Lammermoor) you feel for him for being a baritone and thereby
always getting cast either as the villain, the tenor’s best friend or someone’s
father. The staging was by Sir David McVicar, and the Met co-created this
production with the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris (which may explain why
the Met credited the libretto to a French writer as well as Cammarano — I guess
the French production was sung in French and the other writer was the
translator), though inevitably I found myself comparing this to the 2001
Barcelona video of Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana, the only other major opera I can think of based on
the Elizabeth-and-Essex story. That production (shown on Spanish TV with
Spanish subtitles but blessedly sung in Britten’s and librettist William
Plomer’s original English) was done by Phyllida Lloyd, director of the musical Mamma
Mia! (Benjamin Britten and ABBA: one degree
of separation!), whose production was considerably more stylized than McVicar’s
but also a good deal more creative (I especially liked the giant box which
Queen Elizabeth inhabited for most of the production, an obvious symbol for the
way her role as queen constrained her as a woman and a human being), though
there were some nice symbols in McVicar’s set, notably the statue of a skeleton
holding a Grim Reaper scythe, an obvious reference to the threat of death that
hangs over this story.
This production of Roberto Devereux had just about everything a great opera production
needs … except one: a great opera. Through all too much of Devereux, as these great singers and this great conductor
plodded their way through a surprisingly uninteresting score, I couldn’t help but
think, “Ah, Lucia without the
great tunes.” About the only time Donizetti really comes alive as a composer in
this one is in the recriminatory duet between Sara and Nottingham that opens
the last act (Act III in Donizetti’s and Cammarano’s original design, though
the Met, seeking to cut down the number of intermissions so they don’t have to
pay their musicians overtime, jammed the first two acts together into one),
when the music speeds up and the emotional temperature boils over — this really
sounds more like early Verdi than Donizetti — but the rest of the music is
pretty slow and droopy, and there isn’t even a mad scene to put the singer to
“a test of skill with the first flute” (as George Bernard Shaw once described
the Lucia Mad Scene) and add to
the level of sheer fun. One can’t listen to Roberto Devereux and not think of all the composers who did
situations like this better — and not just later composers, either; it occurred to me that Mozart’s La
Clemenza di Tito is essentially Roberto
Devereux with the genders reversed (Roman
Emperor Titus debates whether to kill or save the accused terrorist who’s also
his former girlfriend), but even within the insane strictures of opera
seria, a genre already considered old-fashioned when Mozart
composed Tito in the last year of
his life (1791), Mozart brought far more power and genuine emotion to this
story than Donizetti did. (Once again, class, there’s the difference between
talent and genius.) I haven’t heard Britten’s Gloriana in a while but I remember it as a flawed opera but
considerably better than this one, though the Elizabeth-and-Essex opera that should have been composed is one by Erich Wolfgang Korngold
that would have drawn on his film score for the 1939 Private Lives of
Elizabeth and Essex movie — and though
Sondra Radvanovsky and Matthew Polenzani are not unattractive people, they are big and bulky enough that in the opening preview
shots I couldn’t help but think, “Well, they’re not Luciano Pavarotti and
Montserrat Caballé, but they’re also not Bette Davis and Errol Flynn.”
