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Wow. This one will make you stop and listen, and suffer and nearly die with the small cast of tortured souls. Lucio Silla is damned serious, nothing like Mozart’s early buffas, and far clearer than Mitridate in its story and impact. You want three hours of gripping drama, with sensational music, here it is.

One of the keys is to find Jérémie Cuvillier’s production, recently added to Medici.tv, from Madrid’s 2017 season. In truth, I can’t tell whether its success follows primarily from this design, or equally from the stage direction of Claus Guth and Tine Buyse, the set work of Christian Schmidt, and the uniquely poignant acting and singing of this cast.

And these remarkable components are built on top of Mozart’s exquisite music; once again, I listened, guessing that I’d be delighted enough just to hear Lucio Silla as a three-hour concert.

Silla has been around since 1772, but it is very rarely performed. To me, this is a mistake, and, as occasionally happens, I can’t figure out why this opera isn’t far more commonplace, because it is a knockout.

Just Another Dictator Pining for a Married Lady

The big draw is not the story, I can tell that much. “Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix” really was in charge of Rome, 100 years BCE, and it sounds like he was an unmatchable general on the battlefield (and, coincidentally, the Roman who finally defeated Mitridate over there in Pontus). At home, he was more of a wingnut that Rome really wanted, administering inconsistent justice as an unreliable dictator.

I haven’t found any historical support for the notion that Silla spent his time pursuing a woman named Giunia, but in this story he’s definitely sent Giunia’s father to his grave, so it’s easy to imagine that Giunia wasn’t keen on linking up with Silla the dictator. Also, Giunia was already married to someone else.

So all that could have happened, and that would make a pretty standard opera story, wouldn’t it? The guy in charge decides he wants this woman, but the woman’s husband and everyone else thinks he’s misguided with this attempt a romance, but being the dictator of the Roman empire brings a lot of privileges, and egomania.

Sorting out the story isn’t difficult, but even if this is historical truth, the librettists would have helped me by changing some of the names. Because I needed a little chart, and an hour or so, to work out the differences between people named Silla, Cinna, Celia, and Cecilio. (And two of those people are also named Lucio. The easy ones for me, of course, were Giunia and Aufidio.)

The tale is a frightening near-tragedy, as love triangles involving a dictator always are. What saves it from ending as a Shakespearean bloodbath is the documented unpredictability of Silla.  That’s good for everyone in the cast, certainly, but the last scene felt unnatural, until I read how this guy flip-flopped all the time, as a matter of historical record.

Eyes on the Stage

Madrid and Cuvillier make this simple story interesting to watch, by putting up stage constructions that add complexity and mystery. The Medici.tv writers say this is “minimalist”, but I don’t agree. (To me, “minimalist” means you’ve done L’Orpheo with nothing but rose petals, or Castello di Kenilworth with actually nothing.) In Madrid’s Lucio Silla, these backings and buildings should be called “unidentifiable”, or “bafflingly symbolic”, not “minimal”.

The story starts in an alley, where two fellows whose names begin with “C” are talking about the capture of Giunia by the dictator, and how to go see her, because one of these guys is her husband, and he’s also a political exile. But the point is, the alley is made of very tall walls, partly crumbling, and the walkway is a cavern, disappearing into a dark narrow passageway heading backstage. Quite a few nameless bums are there, doing nothing, and there’s a 3-set of shabby airplane seats by the wall, and a door. Absolutely everything is some shade of gray, or just white.

So none of the set has anything to do with the plot, or with the lost Giunia, and the guys don’t walk down the alley.  Why all the bricks and mortar? For me, it worked to show how secretly the conspirators were talking, and that they had no status or rights for implementing their plan. The hugeness simply amplified that message, and the gray and white theme told me that this first scene is way outside the center of the action. In scene one, I was alert! I was informed! The set designers were doing a big job already!

Here's another one. Silla the dictator has his room, kind of a kitchen, with tiled walls, and a door at the top of a stairway. On the right is a large elevated area, like another stage, or a podium or pulpit to speak from. He gets messages from an assistant at the doorway, and sometimes he’s talking down at a few people, from up in his pulpit area.

This is terrific, because Silla, at the head of the Roman Empire, is almost always there by himself, worrying. There are no adoring crowds, no crew of busy servants. This powerful dude hangs by himself nearly all the time, unhappy, and stewing about Giunia, who hates him. When he speaks from above, he looks like a guy lost in a cave, not the heroic conqueror of Pontus.

The kitchen, especially, says a lot. When Silla finally gets Giunia into his house, the big dictator is setting the table all by himself, putting up the candles and flowers, and admiring the ring he’s purchased for her. As a sensitive romantic, he makes a great battlefield commander. Nobody helps him, nobody cheers him on, no one is there. (He does occasionally get poor advice from his butler, Aufidio, but mostly, this leader of the Romans is pathetic.)

It goes on: the secret meeting at night takes place via shadows; the senators and crowds are all seen through windows, distant and uninvolved. A weird little lamp that looks like the Colosseum spins and spins, and finally is set on fire. Ha! Now we know what this administration is doing to the greatness of Rome!

Again, I cannot tell what is meant by everything on the stage, but each scene grabs my attention. Every one of them forms a good fit with the tragic love triangle and the machinations of the friends and relatives, all trying to save their own necks, while Silla pursues his foolish romance.

Young Mozart, Working on His Style

The singing in this production is great, even though they are all sopranos (including Cecilio the bereft husband), teamed with Silla and Aufidio who are tenors. As usual, I have nothing to say about quality of singing – it was all much better than I can offer, myself.

I wish there were more than three choruses, because those three are vigorous and fun, but I believe audiences in the 1780’s would have to wait about 50 years for choruses to flourish in operas.

Between those few choruses, the nature of Mozart’s Silla is this: each scene is usually just one song, and each song is extremely long – something like five minutes. There are a couple of melting duets toward the end, but mostly, we’re going to hear extended solos, with very repetitious lyrics. Sounds like the librettists are offering a few choice words, and then Mozart (age 16) and the orchestra are doing the heavy lifting. You don’t need very many subtitles, because once you get the gist of the song, it just repeats, minute after minute.

But also, you don’t have to merely enjoy the music, because the directors have set everyone up with action (mostly symbolic) during these lengthy songs, and so the action keeps moving. (I like this presentation of Mozart’s songs much better than the famous “Berlin Mitridate”, where the singers froze in place for the duration.)

It Hurts to Watch

The standout performances were by Patricia Petibon (as tortured Giunia) and Kurt Streit (as Silla), because of their stage performances as actors. Giunia doesn’t just worry, she speaks with her arms and hands, contorts her lovely features, bends and crouches in fear or horror, and collapses slowly onto the floor in desperation. Singing beautifully, the whole time.

Her high point, to me, is her Act 2 “Wailing and Weeping Song”, a title I made up on the spot. (Mozart calls it "Ah se il crudel periglio".) There don’t seem to be many words here, but we know what’s happening to her. Mozart even gives her some true a cappella time to share with us her terrible desperation.

Silla is almost as expressive: here’s the war general fretting and dithering over being rejected, not just singing it through for us, but darting back and forth on the stage, wringing his hands around shards of his broken wine bottle, and staring aghast at the flow of his blood. These people are in serious trouble, psychologically, and they are telling us that with every muscle of their body, their arms, and their eyebrows.

(What does this look like from the audience in Madrid? Here is a case where the close-in camera and the delivery of video appears to matter enormously. If they bring the Cuvillier to town, don’t buy a cheap ticket.)

In a few scenes, we see two people, but understand that one of them is not really present. The silent one is there to react, to reach out from a distance, or to move in tandem. This shows, with implied presence, the closeness or remoteness or shared purpose, while the singer expresses the feeling. (Example: Giunia, alone and angry, takes a wild swing with a fist; Silla is seen opposite on the stage, taking the hit and going down, wordlessly. He’s not there.) I love this stuff.

So, this is really top notch stage work, and I’ll be searching for these directors (and these singers) in the future, because they know how to make an old-fashioned opera right into your head and your heart. Silla in 2017 was an extremely powerful production.