Top-Drawer Verdi

Lise Davidsen sang Jenůfa last fall in Chicago, but what Leoš Janáček made her do was mostly not “singing” as we recognize it, so let’s see what Verdi has for her in New York, in La Forza del Destino.

He has a lot.  This is a great soprano show, and Janáček could have taken some tips from Verdi, had he not been so hell-bent on moving into the 20th century.  But Verdi knew what he was doing, and for the first two acts, Davidsen is a knockout as Leonora.

The tenors and basses handle most of the last half. They are perfect in this production, too, and certainly this is the place to hear Verdi’s music played, sung and performed flawlessly.

Big Scenery, Circling the Stage

But what overshadows all of that is the heavy work on the sets.  No budget limits here; let’s go and build everything we can think of, for every scene.

Looks like they’re aiming to keep the revolving stage from getting rusty, and eager to keep the guys who run the merry-go-round fully employed.

I’m not sure we truly needed all three of the scenes that rotate in and out in the first act.  It’s a hotel, with a living room and a study (but no bedroom), and a nice entryway.   But nothing happens in the entryway, other than Lise dashing in and out with a cigarette.  And nothing happens in the two rooms that couldn’t be done in either one of them.  Why all the turning? 

It’s a beautiful set, but something this complex should be used for, I don’t know, the entire four-week Parma Verdi festival.

In Forza, they use just one room to shoot the aging father.  Alvaro points out that it’s an obvious accident, but brother Carlo becomes permanently angry. 

I wish these two guys had picked a place to stop and talk it out with Leonora – either room, or even the lovely entryway would do – and found some peaceful way to move on with their lives.  But they don’t discuss, and their lives don’t move on peacefully; everyone is a total mess, forever.

Now It’s a War Story

Even with all the elaborate stage gear, they still drop the curtain and ask for “a brief pause”.  Not the best.  They bring in all new things for the barroom scene, and staff it with soldiers and Playboy Bunnies.  They don’t have to rotate around and around the Fortune Teller, but they do.

The soldiers are a new feature too, and that’s okay, since Piave the librettist might have written that Carlo was a “cadet” and not a “student”, or maybe in Italian they are the same thing.  Either way, he’s stalking his sister Leonora, but he cannot find her. (Carlo! She’s right there in the bar with you!)

After this point, everyone is a soldier (or a monk), because this is a terribly sad story, and in New York in 2024, Forza is leaning hard on the war angle.  After Alvaro accidentally kills Leonora’s dad, the titles tell us that the old guy was a general, and therefore the whole country is now plunged into war.

With napalm and smoke and Vietnam-era helicopters.   Visuals of the world in flames.  Oh boy.

Leonora drives away to escape all the rotating scenery, crashes her car, and is discovered alive by a monk.  She ends up at the monastery, which also goes around and around, on and on.  But she steps off the circular platform and goes to live in a tiny undisturbed hermitage, with a bell she can ring in case she is about to die.

And that’s it for Lise Davidsen for a couple of hours.

Kinda Missing Leonora Now

Remember how in Trovatore, the action seems to slow down at about the halfway point, and you sit there nodding through some relatively slow story-telling for most of act 3?  Well, it happens in Forza, too.  

Verdi might have learned something from Janáček about keeping the narrative alive and interesting.   You don’t need to have a grandmother who murders a child, like in Jenůfa, but you need something.

(Note: Even Il Trovatore had a child murderer, yes, but I contend that this is not always required for good opera. At another time, we will discuss the category of operas that present ill-treatment of youngsters. Medea. Norma. William Tell. Ermione. Maybe Idomeneo. A surprisingly popular plot device!)

In this production of Forza, the action comes from even more sets, all rotating: there is another barroom scene with the sexy Bunnies, and an encampment, and a hospital, and more soldiers, and more scenes that turn and turn.  It makes you tired, and dizzy.

Along the way, we get a few spectacular arias and duets from the powerful tenors and basses.  My key criterion is “as loud as Speedo Green”, and these guys make the grade.  No complaints there. 

But, as in Trovatore, they stretch it all out with the characters thinking about how life could and should have been.   True, life could have been better than this, but Verdi’s not very interested in goal-setting and mindful self-improvement.

Death in the Side Yard

So Alvaro and Carlo are enemies, then friends, then enemies again, and finally the two aging hotheads are ready to duke it out with knives, and they make their way, by chance, to Leonora’s tiny hermit hut.

It’s not at all tiny, though. She’s been living large, with her little bell, in a full-sized two-story house, which fills the entire gigantic stage area, and of course it rotates.  This is a worse disconnect than the helicopters.

I guess we have to feel sorry for Leonora, even so, because this house is the most dilapidated split-level we have ever seen.  As before, no expense is spared on the distress of the hermit hut, and this one has crummy staircases crowded with vagrants, bare upright structural beams, sagging doors, busted windows, short-circuiting fluorescent lights, trash bags all around, household debris on the rooftop, and the ominous Father Superior lurking here and there but failing to tidy things up.

(One reviewer wrote that this place is, instead, a subway station.  I say, sure, or it could be a speedboat on the Nile, with as much justification.)

Around and around goes the house or whatever it is, and Alvaro kills Carlo, then after that Carlo kills Leonora, and the Father Superior limps around the place like a ghost.  (In Verdi’s earlier version of Forza, Alvaro also kills himself, but now he just goes on living, abysmally sad.)

The Downside of Everything

It’s getting pretty late at night in New York City, and nothing is going right for anyone on the stage.  All these miserable forces of destiny are almost too much to take in, even if you’re sitting comfy in a nicely upholstered seat in the Family Circle.

• Can one really shoot Leonora’s father by tossing a pistol onto the floor?

• Can Carlo, just for once, try to imagine that that this incredible freak event was just an accident?

• Will Carlo ever calm his fixation and accept that Alvaro and Leonora never did anything premaritally?  (What if he thinks about that until his hair is gray and he’s really old?  And Al and Lea are really old too?  This issue may not matter so much any more, Carlo!)

• Can the war-torn country at least look a little better than central Gaza in March ’24?

• Can even one character in this story have some uplifting side-interest or parallel plot, so their life is not a complete catastrophic breakdown? 

• Can we draw any sort of positive lesson from the unfortunate sequence of events that followed that wild pistol shot?

• Can the stage finally, finally, please stop turning around, dammit?

No.  No to all of those.  It’s a Verdi tragedy, it’s depressing through and through, and it’s a little too long.

Go for the music, sad as it is.  Go for a perfect performance by the orchestra and the singers. 

Go so you can see a crashed car on the Met stage, and so you can see Alvaro calmly grab a burning steel drum in his bare hands, and keep on singing.

But not for the satisfying epic human story of it all, and certainly not for the laughs.  For Verdi, this time around, the force is strong, and the destiny is worse than bleak.