34 The New York Reviewsustain, as if invisible magnetic poles
repelled every attempt at uniting. The
most fervent embraces are those
between Carlos and his friend and
liberalizing political mentor the Mar-
quis of Posa (magnificently sung by
Etienne Dupuis); but these have their
own tension. Carlos clings to Posa as if
to draw a renewing energy out of him,
desperate to persuade himself that
he has succeeded; Posa, on the other
hand, since Carlos is incapable of find-
ing his own way, will direct him toward
his own idealistic political purposes.
But it is after all a drama whose flare-
ups of action and spectacle—fainting
fits, drawn swords, public executions,
assassination, riots—only underscore
how much it is about inaction, frus-
trated action, action belated, action
misfired. Grand though it is, Don Car-
los does not depend on luxuries of dec-
oration or eye- popping deployment of
multitudes; the music would be mise-
en- scène enough, and the music is at
its most powerful when action is sus-
pended. Accepting a core of unknow-
ability in his characters, Verdi creates
a durable psychological realism embed-
ded not in words but in the relation be-
tween words and music. The notes are
far more precisely calibrated than the
words to which they impart precision.
Rhythmic and tonal shifts continuously
interpret the intimate impulses and pres-
sures that cannot be fully articulated.
Verdi here does not so much set
words to music as put the words to the
test, probing the distance between what
people say and what they mean by what
they say and pinpointing the moments
when feeling, frustrated in finding an
outlet, overwhelms the limits of lan-
guage. In the extraordinary dialogues
between Philip and Posa, and later be-
tween Philip and the Grand Inquisitor
(John Relyea), the feints of ostensibly
intellectual discussion acquire a sonic
dimension that exposes their unspo-
ken threats and hidden force fields. All
these nuances seem even more strik-
ing in the French text—at many points
more concise and pointed than the
Italian translation—to which the music
was originally set.
Within its vast frame, Don Carlos
records with delicacy the moment- to-
moment instability of emotions, loy-
alties, and intentions. It is at times so
compressed that a single exchange or a
handful of notes stand in for what could
have been extended scenes. The monu-
mentality of scale suggests the weight
oppressing each character—the forces
of circumstance, temperament, auto-
cratic rigor, or superstitious faith that
baffle every attempt to resist them or
get around them. Resistance, however
bewildered or insufficient, is the heart
of the opera. It is not so much about
the great themes of which its characters
so often sing—peace, death, love, lib-
erty, justice, law, the divine—as about
humans bedeviled by systems they are
unable to control and large historical
patterns they cannot navigate.
That entrapment is distilled in the
fourth act quartet in which Elisabeth,
her unfaithful friend the Princess
Eboli, Posa, and Philip simultaneously
pour out their entirely incompatible
motives and worldviews. The voices of
the intimately estranged blend into a
music none is capable of hearing. No
one can break free of the roles and
fates to which they feel condemned,
and power crushes even those who
wield it. Philip finally must tremble be-fore the Grand Inquisitor, and even the
blind Inquisitor is consumed with the
gnawing sense that the world is escap-
ing his grasp. (His loss of balance, just
after he has successfully intimidated
Philip in their basso- to- basso confron-
tation, was a nice directorial touch.)At the Met the cast—and the orches-
tra, directed by Yannick Nézet- Séguin—
rose repeatedly to those moments of
tremulous uncertainty and simmering
conflict that the music invites. As Carlos,
Polenzani embodied the prince’s un-
stable turbulence, his cascades of emo-
tional clarity diverted by mood swings,
his tenderness curdling into neediness.
Yoncheva, by contrast, made clear the
deep- rooted self- control with which
Elisabeth keeps Carlos’s and her own
passion at bay, as well as the exhausted
resignation in her great fifth- act aria at
the tomb of Emperor Charles V.
Together they brought out the over-
whelming, jagged intensity of their duetin the second act: oscillating between
love scene and pitched battle, Carlos
pleading, Elisabeth finally acknowl-
edging that to live with him would
have been paradise, Carlos fainting
away, Elisabeth reviving him with her
pitying voice only to fiercely reject his
embrace, evoking an image of bloody
parricide. The staple “love” of operatic
tradition is broken down into compo-
nents of unappeasable longing, self-
pity, compassion, and deep anxiety
and loneliness. The scene can only be
ended by an abrupt separation—Car-
los running off cursing his fate (“Ah!
Fils maudit!”)—never resolved.
We come to know the characters in
the ways they change, signaled by whip-
lash lurches of trust and perception. No
relation or identity is secure from sus-
picion or a sudden change of heart. As
Princess Eboli, whose misconstruing
of Carlos’s feelings for her helps spur a
disastrous outcome, Jamie Barton bril-
liantly suggested layers of contradic-
tion. The self- confident show- off whosings the “Veil Song” (a solitary oasis
of light music) to entertain the queen’s
ladies in waiting swivels with her venge-
ful outbursts in the third act. These
transformations prepared the way for
the resounding force with which she
tore into the aria “O don fatale,” shed-
ding earlier selves to let out the anguish
under her cultivated courtly persona.
As Philip—whose contradictions are
the most consequential, since they are
the contradictions of power itself—
Eric Owens made a somewhat opaque
impression. He expressed the king’s
loneliness and fatigue more vividly
than his capacity, despite any residual
regrets, to murder for reasons of state.
That someone who philosophically ac-
cepts the morality of killing his own
son can still elicit sympathy is a mark of
Verdi’s refusal to reduce his characters
to types or symbols. He finds out who
they are and lets them become that.
At most they are compelled by circum-
stance to perform, however anxiously or
imperfectly, symbolic roles; thoroughly
human, they lend themselves to reinven-
tion by each singer who performs them.
Posa, for example, the stalwart freedom
fighter who finally achieves martyrdom,
could easily be a stick figure. But Du-
puis, aside from the sheer beauty of his
singing, was able to suggest at every turn
Posa’s Machiavellian skills, possessed in
full even if he chooses to apply them to
virtuous ends.
The circumstances under which the
performance I saw took place deci-
sively shaped its effect. A few nights
earlier, at the premiere, the Ukrainian
national anthem had been sung at the
outset. Such explicit acknowledgment
was not required as Posa and Philip
launched into their fraught second-
act duet, Posa confronting the king
with the Spanish oppression of Flan-
ders—“a place of horror, a tomb...
the air is filled with the cries of widows
for their slaughtered husbands”—and
Philip responding, “Only with blood
can there be peace in the world.” With
the orchestra’s discordant clamor and
Posa’s interjection—“Terrible peace!
The peace of cemeteries!”—the out-
side world broke into the theater.
The “peace” so constantly evoked is
the most slippery of terms. It denotes in
the beginning an end to the sufferings
of war; in Philip’s mind it is something
bought with slaughter; by the last act
Elisabeth declares, “My heart has only
one wish, the peace of death.” Yet the
opera itself does not settle resignedly
into the “sweet and profound peace”
of the tomb, and there is little sense of
consolation in the monks’ chanting of
dust and ashes: the memory of Span-
ish heretics being marched to the stake
onstage is a little too fresh. The op-
era’s conclusion is notoriously sudden
and ambiguous: Carlos and Elisabeth,
discovered together by Philip and the
Inquisitor, are threatened with death;
Carlos draws his sword; a monk (who
may or may not be Charles V, who may
or not be a ghost) pulls him into the
depths of the convent (which may or
may not be a symbolic representation of
his death). In this production, Carlos is
apparently welcomed into the afterlife
by the martyred Posa, yet it would take
more than that image to wrap this “big
heap” neatly up. Perhaps it is an opera
that simply cannot end. It wants to go
on; too many questions remain unan-
swered. There is a promise of freedom
in that very capacity to leave things so
far from settled. QPOTATOES AND
POMEGRANATESWinter had come to Nicosia
and as the last daylight went
braziers flared on the sidewalk.
In some language of Crimea
—or Medea—the men’s heads bent
toward an ancient clock.Was it a dream? I ate potatoes
“fluffy as a buttered cloud,”
and sensed the red earth as “read,”
like Aphrodite’s lips in the throes
of love: she mouthed aloud
the tale of grave Adonis’s bed.Earth-apples, so-called, gather
the soil’s nutriment into flesh
pale as moon rocks. They keep
in cellars, huddling together
in cool dampness to stay fresh.
Resistance in them runs deep.(Just ask the knife that tries to
cleave them raw.) Age nine,
my orphaned grandmother was sent
to pick them in the fields and grew
into a figure unrelentingly benign
in a world that proved malevolent.She was forgotten and trapped there,
in the potato cellar, for hours,
till someone discovered the error.
Entombed, then freed, she had a share
in rebirth, and now all bowers
had a whiff of pomme de terror.Indeed, indeed, the seed I was
found itself inside her like a spud
the hour my mother’s embryo
developed ova: by nature’s laws,
dipped in the vitamins of blood
and coming to light like a memory.—Ange MlinkoO'Brien 33 34 .indd 34 3 / 23 / 22 2 : 56 PM