Hey look, it's Verdi's stab at grand opera! Well, not his only one; there's also Don Carlos, though at the time I wasn't aware enough of these conventions to know to call it that (Really, these fine varieties of opera rival the complicated taxonomy of different kinds of heavy metal). But! This one has a libretto by Eugene Scribe, who did the libretti for all of Meyerbeer's grand operas. So there you go. This is more often performed today in its Italian translation (I vespri siciliani), but I wanted to see the French original for the more authentic grand opera experience. Also, this is the one that was available on Medici, so there you go.
It's about a historical event in the thirteenth century where Sicilian rebels started a rebellion to overthrow their French rulers. Guy de Monfort is the French regent in Sicily. Some rebels do not like him. The main ones are Hélène, whose wants to avenge the death of her brother Frederic, an Henri, who turns out--shock!--to be Monfort's son. With the abduction of some Sicilian women being the inciting event, the Sicilians attack their rulers; they're defeated, but then Monfort learns about his son, and promises to let everyone go if he'll acknowledge him as his father. This he does, and more than just letting them go, he agrees that there will be peace between France and Sicily and that Henri and Hélène can be married. But the rebels have a plan to use the distraction of the wedding to attack. They...well, they do this, and kill Monfort, although the details of exactly who dies are unspecified by the libretto.
I think there's probably good reason this is less well-known than other Verdi operas of the time (it was written right after Rigoletto, Trovatore, and Traviata): there's some good music here; probably not one of Verdi's all-time best. But we really have to talk about this production, by Christof Loy, which is polarizing. I don't want to sound like a Reasonable Centrist here, but my opinion does indeed lie somewhere in the middle.
So first, the setting is updated to...when? The box copy claims the 1940s, but we see the characters' birthdays are in the thirties and forties, so it must be the sixties or seventies. But really, there's nothing culturally specific enough that you can nail it down. Really, if you want to be specific rather than general--which this clearly does--then...you should. That's a point against it. The staging is very minimalistic and a bit visually boring. Still, that's not what people think about when they think about this. So let me name two things I liked and two that I did not. First, there's a really compelling sequence over the overture (which here has been transplanted between the first two acts) of the Sicilian rebels' mugshots. Each in turn comes to the forefront, and we see their pictures de- and re-aging. This is really great, and gives us a more concrete idea of who these people are. Second, in the last act, where everything seems all cheerful for a few minutes, we first see Hélène pregnant, and then Henri comes in with a baby carriage--which seems nonsensical, but it quickly becomes apparent that this represents his tragically delusional hope that there can be genuine peace. It's smart, it's effective, I kind of love it.
And yet, there are at least as many really ill-advised things here. So during the ballet sequence--which goes on for a while; it's longer than any of Meyerbeer's--we see a flashback to Henri, Hélène, and Frederic as children. Great idea, in theory. But it badly outstays its welcome and gets weird and psychosexual in a way that makes you wonder if maybe Loy didn't sort of lose the thread of what he was trying to do here. Also, there's a very unpleasant sequence where the French authorities force the Sicilian women to crawl over broken glass. It's not exactly contrary to the libretto, which does after all strongly suggest sexual violence, but it does seem a bit de trop, and the climax of this scene, where Monfort actually slits the throat of one of them? Come the fuck on. The purpose of this is so that it can be all symmetrical when he's killed in the same way at the end (as you can see on the DVD cover--spoilers!), but really: for the tragedy to work, you should be trying to make him more sympathetic, not less. It's clearly a considered decision, but a bad one, I think.
Still, when you come right down to it, all these problems are really more related to the libretto itself than anything else. I like Meyerbeer's grand operas a lot (well, seventy-five percent of them), but all of Scribe's libretti have their issues, and this is weaker than any of them. I've never found him to be some sort of all-time great librettist. The composition process was a frustrating one for Verdi, who had problems with it and found Scribe unresponsive when asked to make revisions. He almost gave up on the opera altogether; obviously, he powered through in the end, but I think you can see the results of its troubled birth on the stage. Point being: Loy does make some bad choices, and I don't want to wholly absolve him, but on the other hand, if the libretto had provided a clearer sense of character and of the dramatic stakes involved, he probably wouldn't have felt the need to embellish it so much. Like it or not, he's not doing what he's doing just to be transgressive or arbitrary--it's considered work, and it deserves a certain amount of respect even if the results aren't always exactly what you'd want.
Of course, I say all that, but there IS the fact that, while all the other characters are in more or less formal dress throughout, Henri spends most of the opera looking like the Dude from The Big Lebowski--well, I have no theoretical or practical defense for that. It's just weird as hell.
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