OPERA The Italian Opera Company of Chicago

Verdi's Don Carlo has enjoyed a significant growth in popularity in recent years and rightly so, because the work contains some of the master's best music. Along with the opera's popularity has come a wealth of new analysis and criticism, mostly quite favorable. Some critics have even gone so far as to pronounce it the composer's "greatest opera". Included in many of these discussions, some quite excellent, are numerous assertions as to how Verdi was so influenced by "French opera" or the "French style" or "grand opera." This is the case with the latest edition of the well respected Grove Dictionary of Opera, which, in its articles on Don Carlo and Giuseppe Verdi, repeatedly emphasizes the "French influence" on Verdi's later works. This French business is understandable and appropriate to some extent. Besides Don Carlo, Verdi produced three other operas for Paris - Jérusalem in 1847, (a revision of I Lombardi), Les Vêpres siciliennes in 1855 (an original work commissioned by the Paris Opéra) and Macbeth in 1865 (a revision of his earlier opera). As astute a man of the theater that ever lived, Verdi would have been mad not to cater to French tastes on these occasions. This meant that he would compose a ballet for each work, prepare his scenes to accommodate the greatest amount of spectacle possible and even resort occasionally to French musical forms, not to mention shaping melodic elements to fit the language. To maintain, however, that Verdi's personal style was altered or that his artistry was enhanced by French opera, is a misleading exaggeration.

Like Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti before him, Verdi was inclined to encourage and accept French commissions for several reasons. In the 19th century, Paris was the First City of Europe; it was the most modern and the most sophisticated. For any artist to succeed there (like New York in the 20th century), it was a great honor and the mark of stellar accomplishment and unsurpassed international prestige. Opera composers also earned far much more money there for their efforts than anywhere else. Aside from the fame and the money, Verdi was attracted to Paris because there were certain aspects of performance practice and theatrical production that were more suited to him than in Italy.
(We recall that in 1844 Verdi broke with La Scala in disgust after Giovanna d'Arco because of shoddy all-around production standards.) The orchestras were more competent than those in Italy and the scenery, set machinery and costumes were more professionally designed, advanced and varied than their Italian counterparts. (The Paris Opéra would be the world's first opera house to use electric lighting.) And, naturally, the ballet corps was the best to be found anywhere. Yet despite all the nice trappings, each of Verdi's Paris endeavors were personally disappointing to him and left a bad taste in the composer's mouth.

Verdi knew full well what he would be getting into when, in 1865, he was offered a commission to compose a French-style opera for the Paris Exposition of 1867. While preparing Les Vêpres ten years earlier he had written: "A work for the [Paris] opera is enough to stun a bull!…Five hours of music. Phew!" He was of course referring to the Meyerbeer type of opera that would be expected in the tradition of such ponderous (and now all-but-forgotten) works as Les Huguenots (1836), Le Prophète (1849) and L'Africaine (1865). But Verdi was genuinely excited by the synopsis of Schiller's Don Carlos that was proposed by Paris, and gently pressured to accept the commission by Giuseppina, who longed for a vacation in her favorite city and to escape temporarily from the "idiots" in Busseto. And so, for the last time, Verdi agreed to endure the ordeal of composing for Paris.

When it was all over, and he was approached once more for yet another French opera, he refused, putting his views on the exercise in clear perspective: "In your musical theaters…there are too many Savants [meaning the stage director, chorus master, dance master, set designer, theater director and orchestra leader]. Each one wants to air an opinion, express a doubt; and after living for a long time in this atmosphere of doubts, the author can't help being eventually shaken in his convictions and he ends by correcting, adjusting, and, I would even say, spoiling his own work. Thus you finish up not with an opera cast at a single throw, but a mosaic* - a fine one, if you like, but still a mosaic. To this you'll reply that at the Opéra you have a string of masterpieces all composed that way. All right, I'll grant you, they're masterpieces; but allow me to say that they would be still more perfect if one wasn't aware from time to time of the clipping and tinkering. Certainly no one will deny Rossini's genius; and yet for all that genius, you can discern in Guillaume Tell the fatal atmosphere of the Opéra, and sometimes - though more rarely than in other composers - you feel that there's a bit too much here and not quite enough there, and that the piece doesn't move as freely and surely as Il barbiere.

These words are not those of one who has a deep admiration for French opera, nor of one who was susceptible to being influenced by it. Indeed, his characterization of the differences between the two named Rossini operas could be easily applied to his two "grand" operas - Don Carlos of 1867 and Aida of 1871. The first of these necessarily was conscientously constructed on the French model because it had to be for its Paris premiere. The second was a "grand" opera only in its emphasis on spectacle and the inclusion of a ballet, standard requirements for a typical French opera. But Aida, although based on an original French synopsis, is decidedly an Italian opera in every way musically, and eminently Verdian in its sharply focused dramatic structure. (It is, of course, considerably shorter in length than the earlier work). Artists have always picked up ideas wherever they went and Verdi was no different in this regard, but to ascribe to Verdi's later work a strong French influence goes way too far in light of the composer's well reasoned approach to drama and musical composition.

Unlike operas like Rigoletto, Il trovatore, La traviata and Aida, Verdi’s Don Carlo has many problems along with its sublime moments. Its main difficulty stems from the original play itself. Schiller composed it over a period of four years (from 1783 to 1787) and its own dramatic focus is uncharacteristically diffused, resulting in a number of episodes that are confusing or not clearly explained. Having actually read the entire play, Verdi saw these problems and went so far as to add material from another source for the first act, namely the 1848 play, Phillipe II Roi D'Espagne, by Eugène Cormon (the librettist for Bizet's Les pêcheurs des perles). In an attempt to make the drama more visually spectacular, Verdi also added the auto-da-fé scene for the finale of Act III. But Verdi could do very little with Schiller's concern for a multiplicity of subjects and tragic figures, none really more central than the rest. The plot contains a complex love quadrangle with Carlo, Filippo, Elisabetta and Eboli, and well-defined, but dramatically abstract, conflicts between liberalism and absolutism and between Church and State.

As a composer whose musical inspiration feasted on dramatic conflict, Verdi made the most of his subject's various tensions but, try as he might, working under the strict French conventions, he could not solve the problem of blurred dramatic focus. When he finished the score, he saw immediately that it was insufferably long-winded and made wholesale cuts here and there, only to make some additions and restorations when he perceived that his cuts had weakened, not strengthened, the piece. As he lamented in the above letter, he was indeed "shaken in his convictions," and thus resorted to "correcting and adjusting", which resulted in the referred-to despised "mosaic." And all this occurred throughout the interminable six-month rehearsal period leading to the opera's premiere, during which the various "Savants" battled and intrigued amongst themselves, while singers fought each other like spoiled children. Drained by the ordeal, Verdi did not even attempt to resolve his librettists' (not Schiller's) unsatisfactory and incomprehensible ending, when the mysterious monk, or the ghost of Charles V (or whoever he is), saves Carlo from the wrath of Filippo and the Inquisitore in a decidedly deus ex machina device.

After the March 11, 1867 premiere, which Verdi declared was "not a success" (even though it ran for over forty performances that season), the opera was translated into Italian and played to audiences in a number of houses in Italy. (Initially, it met with great success only in Bologna, under the direction and baton of Angelo Mariani, who was said by one critic to have created "another Don Carlo." This published comment hastened the ultimate rupture of the Verdi-Mariani relationship.) In 1884 Verdi cut the first of the opera's five acts - the Foutainbleau scene - for La Scala, but even this somewhat shortened version did not really triumph. Three years later he restored the first act, only to achieve another lukewarm result. It is this five-act Italian translation that is most often performed today after almost a century of obscurity. Despite all the recent critical acclaim, in terms of performance frequency, it will never break out from the "second tier" of excellent Verdi works like Un ballo in maschera and La forza del destino.

With all of its obvious problems, why, then, is Don Carlo performed and recorded as much as it is? Simply because its story is interesting, much of music is gorgeous and some of its prominent characters have been made dramatically powerful by Verdi's master touch. While the title role is dramatically weak, and not really fleshed out all that well, the first act tenor aria, "Io la vidi," is a fine lyrical piece and the part's best solo. Carlo also shines in the ensuing duet with Elisabetta, "Di qual amor." His most memorable music (and that of the entire opera) comes in the second act in the duet with Rodrigo and its stirring cabaletta, "Dio che nell'alma infondere," clearly reminiscent of the composer's earlier works. The baritone, Posa, has stature, but not the great kind of music found in similar Verdi roles. Nor does the soprano, Elisabetta contribute much more than her duets with Carlo, especially the Act II "Perduto ben, mio sol tesor."

By far the most compelling characters, both musically and dramatically, are the mezzo Eboli and the bass Filippo. Eboli is a typically complex Verdi character similar to Azucena and Amneris. Her Spanish/gypsy-style aria, "Nei giardin del bello," or the "Veil Song," is one of Verdi's best ever for this voice type. Similar to the roles of Rigoletto and Boccanegra, Filippo is the opera's most sympathetic and psychologically deepest character. He dominates the first scene of Act IV, which contains perhaps Verdi's finest work in the piece. After the hauntingly beautiful and searingly emotional aria, "Domirò sol nel manto mio regal," he joins another bass, the Inquisitore, in a morbidly beautiful dialog much like the sinister encounter between Rigoletto and Sparafucile, powerfully emphasizing the conflict between Church and State. Underlying the voices is one of Verdi's very best instrumental scores, deriving its appropriately dark color from the highlighting of the lower strings, horns and woodwinds.

Yet with all these wonderful elements, the French Don Carlos is still, as Verdi put it, a "mosaic" and not as consistent as the Italian masterpiece that followed, Aida.