Giuseppe Verdi, Stiffelio (1850)

This is an interesting one: Verdi, as was often the case, ran afoul of the censors, even more than usual with this one. This may perhaps have been inevitable given the subject matter--it's about a minister and his unfaithful wife--but good lord, people. To contemporary eyes, the idea that there could even theoretically have been anything offensive about this is just baffling. It's a story about sin and redemption. Isn't that what your religion is all about? Crikey. But in any event, he was so irritated by all this idiocy that he ended up withdrawing it from circulation, replacing it with Aroldo,a substantially reworked version in a different milieu that apparently was considered less offensive. The original Stiffelio was thought to be lost until it was rediscovered in the Verdi estate's archives in the 1960s. So here it is! How do you like that?

Well, actually, not all that much. I'm glad it was recovered and all, and the censorship is super-idiotic, but I still think the plot is a bit thin. I mean, I basically summed it up above. Stiffelio's wife Lina is having an affair with some guy named Raffaele. When this finally comes out (after a needlessly convoluted process), he's angry and jealous, and Lina's father Count Stankar isn't so happy about it either. Stiffelio is going to nobly relinquish his wife to her lover, but it turns out he's actually a Bad Seducer, and she still loves her husband. Nonetheless, they get divorced, and Raffaele is killed off-stage. Stiffelio has to give a sermon with his ex-wife in the audience, and he preaches about the woman taken in adultery, indicating that he's forgiven her. The end. In Aroldo, (wikipedia tells me) the two get back together, making it one of Verdi's least-tragic operas, but I don't think that'll happen here. Well, it might. It really would depend on how you choose to stage it.

You know, I really like this in theory. It could be a really powerful story about love and betrayal and forgiveness. And yet, as noted above, in fact I was kind of underwhelmed. The music...I don't know; it just didn't strike me as among Verdi's best or most memorable, and the characters and their relationships never came to life, for me, to the extent that I actually cared much about them. This production, I thought, was actually really good. Plácido Domingo is really excellent in the title role, and everyone else is at least fine, although through no fault of his own, Peter Riberi as Raffaele kind of looks like Walton Goggins, which is pretty distracting, although it's an extremely half-baked role anyway, so maybe that's not the main problem. I don't know. Not much else to say, really. Certainly not among my favorite from Verdi.