The New York Review of Books - USA (2022-04-21)

April 21, 2022 33

Verdi’s Decentered Epic

Geoffrey O’Brien

Don Carlos

an opera by Giuseppe Verdi,

at the Metropolitan Opera,

New York City, February 28–

March 26, 2022

The first act of Verdi’s Don Carlos is

almost an opera in itself: in a matter

of minutes the prospect of a happy

destiny is born, blooms, and dissolves.

The elements of its setting—a forest in

winter, a fire kindled in the wilderness,

a starry sky—have a poetic openness

not to be found in the sterner scenes

toward which the story is headed. Per-

haps that separateness accounts for its

being so frequently omitted as inessen-

tial, although the loss seems drastic:

in the Met’s persuasive and powerful

new production, this prelude seems the

indispensable glimpse of a world else-

where, whose possibilities are never to

be revisited. In retrospect it makes the

setting of the four remaining acts—the

Spain of Philip II in 1560—an even more

hermetically sealed place of detention.

Two strangers encounter each other

in the woods of Fontainebleau. They

have never met, although they are

engaged to be married. Don Carlos

(Matthew Polenzani) has come from

Madrid surreptitiously, braving his

royal father’s anger, and, having merely

glimpsed his promised bride, Elisabeth

de Valois (Sonya Yoncheva), has fallen

in love. She, lost in the woods and not

yet aware of his identity, “afraid of the

unknown,” is about to be married off

as part of a diplomatic settlement to a

drawn- out conflict between Spain and

France—a war trophy exiled to a for-

eign court. Within moments, once the

situation has been suitably clarified,

they surrender to the elation of an in-

stantly discovered mutual love. Their

celebration has an almost frantic haste,

appropriately since this is the first and

last glimpse of happiness or freedom

that will be afforded them.

It is shattered immediately by news

that the peace agreement stipulates

that Elisabeth marry not Carlos but

his father, Philip II (Eric Owens). A

chorus rejoices while the shocked pair

sing of death and the abyss. There is

only one formality: Philip has sent word

he will only marry her if she assents.

She has at least in theory the oppor-

tunity to say no, and there is a pause

before—surrounded by Frenchwomen

pleading for an end to the war—she

answers with a faint Oui. The pause—

punctuated by three widely separated

pizzicato chords—feels like a chasm.

It clears an area of silence around the

syllable forced out “with a dying voice”

(according to the score’s specification),

a tone caught perfectly by Yoncheva at

this early pivotal moment. As Elisabeth

affirms, under pressure, the opposite

of what she feels, wispy possibilities re-

verse into implacable realities. A con-

tradiction is made audible in the clash

of chorus against solo voices: what for

the chorus marks the return of peace for

Elisabeth and Carlos is the end of hope.

Their story thus is essentially over

from the start; whatever they were

looking for in each other will not be

found or even properly defined. They

will be thrown back on their original

sorrows: he on an anguished relation-

ship with his father now made even

more torturous, she on her inconsol-

able grief at separation from her na-

tive land and the world of childhood.

Involuntarily uprooted, Elisabeth is no

longer at home i n the world, wh i le C a rlos

never was at home. Their story, though,

is not precisely the story of the opera,

just as Don Carlos is far from being its

hero, far even from being an indepen-

dent agent, but then who is? It is a decen-

tered epic, or at any rate an epic whose

ostensible hero has no fixed center.

The unconsummated passion of Car-

los and Elisabeth will in the course

of the opera figure merely as one ele-

ment to be shunted about in a com-

plex of political struggles: the Dutch

revolt against Spanish oppression, the

attempt by a liberal faction to achieve

some degree of religious tolerance,

the uneasy relations between Philip’s

autocracy and the ecclesiastical power

represented by the Grand Inquisitor.

Each principal character will grasp at

quite separate ends, by means extend-

ing from moral exhortation to espio-

nage and blackmail, attempting to align

their wishes with outer circumstances

but never quite achieving the desired

connection. Nothing is finally to be at-

tained, everything will be postponed

to an afterlife in an opera that, as de-

scribed by Eugenio Montale, “develops

and unfolds by successive additions

and expansions, giving the impression

that it can never reach a conclusion.”

Montale’s description mirrors the

decades- long process of Don Carlos’s

creation. Written in five- act form for

the Paris Opera, it opened there in 1867

in a version already significantly cut.

What Verdi initially composed on the

basis of Joseph Méry and Camille du

Locle’s libretto (largely but not exclu-

sively derived from Friedrich Schiller’s

drama) exceeded even the allowable

limits of French grand opera. Its more

than five- hour running time failed to

accommodate the audience’s dining

and commuting convenience, and thus

significant dramatic sequences were

sacrificed while still allowing room for

the lengthy ballet considered manda-

tory by Parisian operagoers (and now

routinely omitted).

Over the next two decades Verdi re-

turned sporadically to Don Carlos, re-

vising music, adding new text, cutting,

replacing, reinstating. He expressed

quite different opinions at different

moments about the various elements—

cutting the first act entirely in 1883, for

instance, to make the opera “more con-

cise and vigorous,” and then restoring

it two years later in his final published

version. As Verdi wrote to a friend be-

fore the Paris opening: “See what a big

heap this opera is! We’re never done

with it!”^1

No version has become definitive;

Don Carlos continues to be performed

in countless variants, often in four acts,

usually in Italian translation (as Don

Carlo), but in recent years increas-

ingly in French as well and with res-

torations of previously omitted music,

including the cuts made for the Paris

premiere that were reconstructed only

in the 1970s. It is a mysterious mas-

terpiece that refuses to settle down,

as if continuing on its own to prompt

new shapes and aspects into being.

The Met is staging the French version

for the first time in its history, or more

precisely one possible French version,

restoring some early material while ac-

cepting many late revisions. I regret the

decision to omit (perhaps, again, for

reasons of length, though the Met has

included it in some previous produc-

tions) the very strong original opening,

cut before the Paris premiere, in which

woodcutters and their families lament

the privations of war, a scene that, as

many have noted, sets up a compassion-

ate motive for Elisabeth’s acceptance of

marriage to Philip. Aside from its great

beauty, it also establishes from the out-

set a wider perspective on the political

and psychological turmoil to come.

The opera is a historical fresco hav-

ing, as Verdi well knew, very little to

do with history. In her study The Don

Carlos Enigma, Maria- Cristina Necula

charts the disparity between the actual

life of Don Carlos, the Spanish crown

prince who died mysteriously in 1568 at

the age of twenty- three, and its trans-

mutation over centuries, through an

influential seventeenth- century novel,

Schiller’s eighteenth- century drama,

and Verdi’s opera, into a myth of ro-

mantic rebellion more expressive than

the murky facts that prompted it.

The “real” Don Carlos, to the extent

that he can be known at all, appears to

have been an erratic young man, “much

given” (according to a foreign diplomat)

“to violence to the point of cruelty.”

He was said to be fond of torturing

animals and abusing serving women,

and he cracked his skull while chasing

a woman downstairs, an accident that

exacerbated his mental difficulties. As

in the opera, Carlos did involve him-

self in the cause of Philip II’s Flemish

subjects, but he was foiled in his efforts

and, judged insane, placed in confine-

ment by Philip until his death soon

after. As Necula sifts the historical evi-

dence, she speculates on how much the

surviving accounts may themselves be

politically calculated fictions and con-

cludes that Verdi’s opera “refuses to

give us a closed- ended, definitive Don

Carlos. But then so does history.”^2

Don Carlos is at once intimate and

immense, a series of chamber operas

punctuated by crowded epic intervals

(the announcement of the peace treaty,

the auto- da- fé, the uprising against

Philip). The immensity is laid out in

the Met production’s set design, with

its high, oppressive walls and stony

spaces, modified from scene to scene to

serve as monastery interior, nocturnal

palace garden, candlelit royal study, or

dungeon. Sometimes a bit of sun is al-

lowed to peep through, as in the long

and crucial scene in the convent garden,

before darkness resumes. From time to

time a gigantic swinging censer and an

even more gigantic figure of the cru-

cified Christ reinforce the sepulchral

religiosity of Philip’s era, an impres-

sion extended by predominantly black

costuming. The motif of immuring

has been established at the outset by a

curtain depicting prison bars emerging

from a murky blue background.

David McVicar’s staging is likewise

suggestive of constraint. Characters

are often spaced widely apart in al-

most statue- like isolation, even when

addressing one another, their gazes

averted; and when they do come into

contact there is the effect of separate

spheres colliding. The embraces of

Carlos and Elisabeth seem to require

tremendous effort and are hard to

Eric Owens, center, as Philip II; Sonya Yoncheva, wearing a crown at left,

as Elisabeth; and Etienne Dupuis, third from right, as the Marquis of Posa,

in the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Don Carlos

Ken Howard /Metropol

itan Opera

(^1) Letter to Count Opprandino Arri-
vabene, December 10, 1866; quoted by
Harvey Sachs in his illuminating dis-
cussion of Don Carlos in Ten Master-
pieces of Music (Liveright, 2021).
(^2) Maria- Cristina Necula, The Don Car-
los Enigma: Variations of Historical
Fictions (Academica, 2020), p. 124. The
novel that substantially created the leg-
end on which Schiller and Verdi drew
is César Vichard de Saint- Réal’s Dom
Carlos, nouvelle historique (1672).
O'Brien 33 34 .indd 33 3 / 23 / 22 2 : 56 PM