Frédérique Toulet/Paris National Opera |
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The
bass-baritone Evgeny Nikitin, front, and the tenor Chris Merritt
in “Ill Prigioniero” in Paris. |
Evgeny Nikitin as
Dallapiccola’s prisoner at the Palais Garnier. |
A 12-Tone Cry of Despair Assaults Hearts in Paris
By
© Anthony Tommasini
[Source: © New York Times, April 23, 2008
- http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/arts/music/23pris.html?_r=0]
PARIS — Many directors of American
opera companies would never even consider presenting Luigi
Dallapiccola’s one-act “Prigioniero,” a bleak, 12-tone, boldly
modernistic work from the mid-20th century about a despairing
prisoner during the Spanish Inquisition. But unlike many of his
timid counterparts, Gerard Mortier, the director of the Paris
National Opera, has faith in audiences.
How many operagoers have actually heard “Il
Prigioniero” or know about it other than from its intimidating reputation?
So Mr. Mortier has mounted a new Italian-language production, which opened
on April 10, directed by Lluís Pasqual at the opulent, Old World Palais
Garnier. I attended an enthusiastically received performance on Monday
night, and in this stark staging, with a compelling cast and the conductor
Lothar Zagrosek drawing a rhapsodic, shimmering performance from the fine
orchestra, “Il Prigioniero” emerged as an intensely dramatic, musically
arresting and grimly moving work.
Dallapiccola had a personal connection to the
subject matter. He was born to Italian parents in 1904 in a town now part of
Croatia. His father was headmaster of an Italian-language school. But
because of ethnic and regional conflicts the family was interned in Austria
for a period during World War I. During World War II the composer, who was
openly anti-Fascist, was forced for a time into hiding in Italy.
“Il Prigioniero,” composed during the mid-1940s to Dallapiccola’s own
libretto, is a protest work lasting less than an hour. The simple story
concerns a Spaniard who has been imprisoned during the Inquisition. Visited
by his tormented mother, he tells her that during the height of his
suffering he was befriended at the prison by a jailer who called him
brother, “fratello.” But after fleeting moments when the prisoner believes
he will escape, he falls into the arms of the jailer, who is revealed to be
the Grand Inquisitor himself. For the duped prisoner having hope has been
the ultimate torture.
After beginning his career composing in a richly chromatic, quasi-tonal
language, Dallapiccola became the leading exponent of 12-tone technique and
serialism in Italy by the 1950s. But a composer cannot grow up in Italy
without succumbing to that opera-mad country’s feeling for lyricism. The
12-tone musical style of “Il Prigioniero” is certainly complex — tremulous
with astringent harmonies and fraught with skittish thematic lines. Yet
Dallapiccola used the 12-tone language in a sensually lyrical way. Vocal
lines sing and plead. Chords are stacked with intervals that produce
plaintively consoling sustained harmonies.
And even during fitful outbursts the writing for the orchestra is never
clogged with counterpoint or needlessly fussy. Everything is audible,
textures are lucid. Truly the music should hardly be more challenging to
audiences than Berg’s “Wozzeck,” which was just presented at the Paris
National Opera in a well-
attended and successful production.
Mr. Pasqual’s staging of “Il Prigioniero,” with sets by Paco Azorín and
costumes by Isidre Prunés, is dark, imposing and powerful. In the first
scene we see the mother, the mezzo-soprano Rosalind Plowright, who brought
anguished vocal colorings and fierce intensity to her portrayal, treading
her way to the prison, hobbled with grief as she walked on a shifting
section of the stage floor that keep her, metaphorically, stuck in place.
Barely visible behind her is the prison, a gargantuan construction of
slatted walls and staircases that slowly rotates.
When we meet the prisoner, the stentorian bass-baritone Evgeny Nikitin in
an impassioned portrayal, he is tattered, bloodied and exhausted. A
harrowing choral scene depicting the inmates takes place within the rotating
prison, though the audience’s view is inhibited by the slatted walls.
But enough is visible to make the moment gruesome. A bare-chested
prisoner, suspended upside down from a rope tied to his ankles, is pushed
back and forth by brutish guards with clubs as if he were a human piñata.
The other prisoners look on in horror. The choral director, Alessandro Di
Stefano, is visible. Yet his conducting of the prisoners becomes a visual
metaphor for their servitude.
In the final scene, when the jailer, the dynamic tenor Chris Merritt in a
coolly menacing performance, morphs into the Grand Inquisitor, he removes
his clerical robe and is revealed as a priest-doctor in a white lab coat,
syringe in hand. The prisoner is strapped to a gurney and administered a
lethal injection. In the final line of the opera, he sings, “La libertà?”
More than worthless hope, death would seem to hold the only promise of
freedom.
One challenge in presenting “Il Prigioniero” is finding a work to pair it
with, to make a full evening of theater. This production began intriguingly
with Schoenberg’s “Ode to Napoleon,” a 15-minute piece composed in 1942. The
work is a setting of Byron’s poem castigating the fall of a tyrant, in which
the text is spoken by a reciter, accompanied by string quartet and piano.
Schoenberg seized on the text to vent his antipathy to Nazism.
In this performance the text was spoken, with occasional half-sung
phrases, by the American baritone Dale Duesing, dressed in drag like a 1920s
Berlin cabaret singer, with the band nearby. During the course of his
recitation, which broke into bouts of hectoring, Mr. Duesing gradually
changed costumes, slowly putting on the striped uniform of a
concentration-camp prisoner.
The performance was compelling, and the piece set the mood for the
Dallapiccola opera. But I can think of another tragic, 20th-century, one-act
Italian opera about a prisoner that might be performed in a double-bill with
“Il Prigioniero.” How about Puccini’s “Suor Angelica,” which tells of a
young Italian woman banished for life to a convent after having a child out
of wedlock? She too is visited by a relative, her aunt. And death is
similarly presented as the only sure path to freedom.
“Il Prigioniero” runs through May 6 at the Palais Garnier in
Paris; 011 33 892 89 90 90 or operadeparis.fr. |