Saturday, August 6, 2022

Giuseppe Verdi, Ernani (1844)

An early Verdi opera, and, per wikipedia, his most popular until Il trovatore.  Also, fun fact, apparently it was the first opera to be recorded in its entirety, in 1904.  You could make a good argument that it was a significant lacuna in my opera-watching experience.  Actually, you could do that with any Verdi opera I haven't seen.  If I'm counting correctly (I might not be, considering all the revisions he made), there are eight of them.  I should buckle down and do it, probably.  They're all available in some form or another.

Well, this is Verdi.  You know what Verdi sounds like!  He wrote some pretty solid tchunes!  But one is forced to concede that he was not always as discriminating in his choice of libretti as he could have been, and here is an example of that.  Right, so Ernani is a bandit.  He and Elvira are in love, but unfortunately, she's engaged to marry Silva, an old duke.  Oh no!  So there's some conflict, the more so because Charles V (yes, the father of the king in Don Carlos) is also trying to seduce her.  It gets very confusing—and the wikipedia entry is not very well-written or helpful—but there's a bunch of scheming, and the upshot is that Silva and Ernani (who turns out to be a dispossessed noble) team up to try to take out Charles, who is felt to be treasonous in some way I didn't really understand.  And—here's the real “uh?” moment—Ernani swears that if Silva blows this hunting horn at any time, he, Ernani, will kill himself.  A little later, everyone's reconciled, and Charles agrees that Ernani and Elvira can marry.  But oh no, soon after they marry, Silva cashes in, and Ernani has no choice but to stab himself to death.  Cool.

A number of questions come to mind, most notably: why did he swear this oath, apropos of nothing?  Why does he seem genuinely surprised when the extremely obvious result of him doing so manifests itself?  And why does he go through with it in the end?  Obviously, this sort of self-destructive “honor”-based culture has existed all over the world; you think of samurai who were supposed to commit seppuku when their lords were killed, or Hindu widows who were meant to immolate themselves.  But in those and other situations, they're dealing with social pressure.  The people in those circumstances didn't specifically stipulate that this is what they're going to do.  This opera is just bizarre, and not in the least dramatically satisfying, great music notwithstanding.

It's based on a Victor Hugo play, which you've gotta think—I'm admittedly just guessing here—has to have been criticizing the sort of behavior that the opera wants to be in some sense heroic.  Otherwise, I have no idea what he was going for.  Not a fantastic piece of work, but this Operavision video, from Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, is a solid, traditional production that features the extremely rad Angela Meade as Elvira (a role she'd previously sang at the Met).  She is awesome.  The only issue with this production is that there are, like, two or three random extras/chorus members wearing covid masks.  I would understand and make allowances if this was the height of the pandemic and everyone had to be masked, but it's not, the result is just needless weirdness.

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