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polutropeSo, I had my first experience of La forza del destino last night.
As a disclaimer: It is my firmly held belief that La forza del destino has, dramatically, the worst libretto of any opera I have listened to. Including La Gioconda. It requires severe suspension of disbelief, it has silly plot threads (Don Alvaro is the son of an Inca princess?), and what is quite possibly the worst death ever (The marquis is killed, fifteen minutes or so into the opera, by a gun that goes off when it hits the ground. {Further, I'm pretty sure that's impossible. Wouldn't the bullet go either vertically down or horizontally, thus making it difficult for any wound inflicted to be fatal?}). And the soprano and tenor speak to each other twice over the course of two and a half hours, once at the very beginning, once at the very end.
Aside from that, it seems to want to be two different operas. One is melodramatic in the extreme and the other is buffo. The two meet at certain points, but only tangentially. While I struggled to sleep, I was trying to isolate exactly why this bothered me so much. It's just as annoying to me when a work of fiction, be it a novel, a movie, an opera, or a play has no variation in mood. In the case of La forza, I think it's just because it's not done well.
The two examples of dramas that do 'do it well' I came up with were Don Giovanni and Hernani (The Hugo, not the Verdi. The Verdi does violence to Hugo's artistic vision, but that's another story). The two are very different - Don Giovanni is a dramma giocoso, with emphasis on the giocoso, and Hernani is essentially a melodrama, but with a certain lightness of tone.
In Don Giovanni, there is more physical than verbal humor, the catalog aria excepted. Masetto's beating, the comedy of which is disputable, and the sextet in which Leporello's disguise is penetrated are slapstick, and depend on the visual. Hernani does have some physical humor, but the scene which stayed with me most is a speech of Don Ruy's, in which he refuses to give up the bandit Hernani to the king.
It is a moment of high drama, yet it is shadowed with absurdity. Don Ruy, an old man, shows the king the portraits of his ancestors in his hall and describes their deeds. Throughout his speech, the king shows his impatience, since neither he nor the audience understands the point that Don Ruy is making. This point is that he would dishonor his illustrious ancestors if he surrendered Hernani. Very dramatic, no? But the fact remains that it's an old man talking about the portraits in his hall. It is with moments like that that the play avoids the trap of dead seriousness into which Verdi's opera falls.
The main difference between Forza and the other two is that there are two different sets of characters for the drama and the comic relief. The gypsy Preziosilla has absolutely nothing to do with the main plot of Alvaro and Leonora and Carlo; Fra Melitone, the comic priest does, a little, but the drama would not suffer if he were lost. This contributes to the feeling of separation between the two halves. Especially in Don Giovanni, the characters have both serious and comic roles. Donna Anna doesn't often descend to the comic, nor does Masetto mount to the dramatic, but the rest switch. Elvira must be laughed at and commiserated with. Leonora and Alvaro, our hero and heroine, are never anything but most blackly dramatic.
In sum, oh, Francesco, you used to be the one who didn't write terrible libretti! How could you do this to me?
As a disclaimer: It is my firmly held belief that La forza del destino has, dramatically, the worst libretto of any opera I have listened to. Including La Gioconda. It requires severe suspension of disbelief, it has silly plot threads (Don Alvaro is the son of an Inca princess?), and what is quite possibly the worst death ever (The marquis is killed, fifteen minutes or so into the opera, by a gun that goes off when it hits the ground. {Further, I'm pretty sure that's impossible. Wouldn't the bullet go either vertically down or horizontally, thus making it difficult for any wound inflicted to be fatal?}). And the soprano and tenor speak to each other twice over the course of two and a half hours, once at the very beginning, once at the very end.
Aside from that, it seems to want to be two different operas. One is melodramatic in the extreme and the other is buffo. The two meet at certain points, but only tangentially. While I struggled to sleep, I was trying to isolate exactly why this bothered me so much. It's just as annoying to me when a work of fiction, be it a novel, a movie, an opera, or a play has no variation in mood. In the case of La forza, I think it's just because it's not done well.
The two examples of dramas that do 'do it well' I came up with were Don Giovanni and Hernani (The Hugo, not the Verdi. The Verdi does violence to Hugo's artistic vision, but that's another story). The two are very different - Don Giovanni is a dramma giocoso, with emphasis on the giocoso, and Hernani is essentially a melodrama, but with a certain lightness of tone.
In Don Giovanni, there is more physical than verbal humor, the catalog aria excepted. Masetto's beating, the comedy of which is disputable, and the sextet in which Leporello's disguise is penetrated are slapstick, and depend on the visual. Hernani does have some physical humor, but the scene which stayed with me most is a speech of Don Ruy's, in which he refuses to give up the bandit Hernani to the king.
It is a moment of high drama, yet it is shadowed with absurdity. Don Ruy, an old man, shows the king the portraits of his ancestors in his hall and describes their deeds. Throughout his speech, the king shows his impatience, since neither he nor the audience understands the point that Don Ruy is making. This point is that he would dishonor his illustrious ancestors if he surrendered Hernani. Very dramatic, no? But the fact remains that it's an old man talking about the portraits in his hall. It is with moments like that that the play avoids the trap of dead seriousness into which Verdi's opera falls.
The main difference between Forza and the other two is that there are two different sets of characters for the drama and the comic relief. The gypsy Preziosilla has absolutely nothing to do with the main plot of Alvaro and Leonora and Carlo; Fra Melitone, the comic priest does, a little, but the drama would not suffer if he were lost. This contributes to the feeling of separation between the two halves. Especially in Don Giovanni, the characters have both serious and comic roles. Donna Anna doesn't often descend to the comic, nor does Masetto mount to the dramatic, but the rest switch. Elvira must be laughed at and commiserated with. Leonora and Alvaro, our hero and heroine, are never anything but most blackly dramatic.
In sum, oh, Francesco, you used to be the one who didn't write terrible libretti! How could you do this to me?
