At the Met, Great Voices and Overwrought Choices in La Forza del Destino
Opera has the power to make us delight in other people’s suffering. All arts traffic in pain, of course, but they don’t all deliver the upwelling of sensual satisfaction in despair that comes near the end of Verdi’s La Forza del Destino. In Act Four of the Met’s new production, Lise Davidsen, as Leonora, staggers out of a hermit’s lair and into the ruins of her world, accompanied by an urgent slithering of strings. The orchestra comes to an abrupt halt, and in that hiccup of silence, she floats a quiet F that sinks an octave to frame the word pace. We know that there’s no hope of peace, and now, when hours of tumult are distilled into that simple fusion of voice and harp, Verdi keeps us glad that it will never come, because then this moment of ravishing wretchedness will have to end.
Director Mariusz Treliński, last seen at the Met flagellating Tristan und Isolde and now the auteur of the company’s first Forza in decades, seems not to trust music or musicians to manage the tension between the audience’s pleasure and the character’s pain. Davidsen, a soprano who emits enough power to replace a small nuclear reactor, could sing that aria in total darkness and still give off an exquisite gleam. Instead, costume designer Moritz Junge dresses her in apocalypse casual (a perv’s stained raincoat and a hacked blonde wig), and she picks her way through a bombed-out subway station, competing for attention with a choir of flickering fluorescent tubes and a rotating set that shows off different segments of the same rubble. With all those visual distractions, it’s a wonder we can hear anything at all.
The Met keeps doing this: forcing splendid casts into the arms of directors determined to wring meager and obvious social commentary out of old but opulent scores. Verdi had plenty to say about power, prejudice, the lure of vengeance, the competitive heat of male friendship, and the awful consequences of pride. He painted portraits in music of each of these ageless human foibles. You can’t miss the thrill of a character hurtling toward some disastrous new misjudgment. The story of Forza starts with a doomed interracial love and an accidental killing and wends its way through tender lamentations, sparkling entertainments, devotional prayers, tuneful duels — the whole rich panoply of Verdi’s dramatic techniques. None of it gets any extra poignancy from a few smears of graffiti on subway tile.
The conductor Yannick Nézét-Seguin gets it, deftly piloting cast, chorus, and orchestra from one calamity to the next, balancing rhythmic propulsion with the leisure to savor all those velvety chords and roiled melodies. Tenor Brian Jagde gets it, fortifying the role of Don Alvaro with unquenchable intensity and a voice that vaults to a trumpeting clang. He may not have all the character’s shades of feeling and vocal nuance, but he does command the extremes, and he’s convincing in the final act, struggling between monkish meekness and big-lunged, murderous ire. So does Patrick Carfizzi, leavening Act Four with fine-tuned grumpiness as Fra Melitone, resentfully handing out food to the poor.
And most of all, Davidsen gets it. She has migrated into Italian opera from Wagner and Strauss, where her immense sound and emphatic phrasing make some roles seem as if they had been made for her. In a recent concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, she gave a phenomenal performance of Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, full of smoky half-lights, and followed it with an encore of “Dich, Teure Halle,” from Tannhäuser, that brimmed with unfeigned joy. There, she gradually turned up her voice from quiet glow to dazzling blast and could probably have easily given the dial another couple of spins. Not all that awesomeness translates into Italian. Davidsen doesn’t have a natural feel for the lively suppleness of Verdi, though she has clearly made efforts to acquire it. What she does have, though, is more important: a sure sense of how to wrap an aria around a state of mind, how to paint flickering emotions with her voice, how to draw and hold the audience’s attention so that when she’s singing, nothing else really matters. How, in other words, to save an opera from the director’s clomping.
Treliński makes his mark even before the overture begins. Leonora, already miserable and angry in a pre-cataclysm magenta gown, storms out of a reception in a generically fancy hotel and stands on the sidewalk, furiously pulling at a cigarette. Then she storms back in through the ballroom, where her caudillolike father is giving a speech, into an office, around the desk, back through the doors, across the ballroom, and out onto the street again. We see all these locales thanks to the Met’s giant turntable, which rotates and reverses directions ceaselessly, like a drunken carousel. Once you get used to the movement, it’s an effective operatic equivalent of a long tracking shot; Leonora’s frustration remains constant as she paces from room to room and the overture speeds through its many moods.
After that, though, Treliński tries to make the librettist Francesco Maria Piave’s disjunct plot cohere by pasting its various pieces against a backdrop of total war. We get films of slo-mo helicopters and a stubble-chinned soldier pushing through wintry woods. Set designer Boris Kudlička keeps things nice and gloomy with plenty of barbed wire and hospital beds. Leonora survives a car crash in the rain, which is a terrific opportunity to adorn the stage with a crumpled chassis on its side. Once she has clawed that gaudy dress off in Act One, the color scheme revolves around mud, concrete, and ash. The problem with all this is not even the insistence on murk or the sartorial clichés — not another long black leather coat! — or the fussy stage business. It’s the belief that the range of human passions, from the petty to the transcendent, that Verdi mapped so perceptively onto music must be reimagined as a tale of total war. It’s as if the director believed that a discerning audience would find all the opera’s relationships and events too frivolous to accept unless they were legitimized by a dose of savagery and annihilation.
La Forza del Destino is at the Metropolitan Opera through March 29.
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