Alemania
A House Divided
Jesse Simon
Riccardo
Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini was intended to be the 2021 instalment in
the Deutsche Oper’s ongoing reappraisal of neglected works from the early
twentieth century, a highly rewarding series that has thus far featured
rarities from Schreker, Zemlinsky and Langgaard, among others. Although the
première performance took place as scheduled, lockdown restrictions meant that
it was performed to an empty house (for the purposes of live-streaming), and
would have to wait another two years for its first public performance. Between
Christof Loy’s unsettling staging and a captivating performance of the title
role from Sara Jakubiak, the evening provided an ideal introduction to a work
of challenging intensity.
Francesca is not perhaps as
much of an obscurity as some of the previous entries in the Deutsche Oper’s
series. The opera, based on D’Annunzio’s tragedy (itself based on a passage
from Dante), had a successful première in 1914 and was still highly-regarded
enough at the dawn of the LP era to merit a full studio recording. Both the demanding
title role and the tenor part of Paolo il Bello have attracted enough champions
over the years that the work has never vanished entirely, and its relative
neglect may be due primarily to the difficulties it poses, both to its principal
singers and its prospective audience.
Zandonai: Francesca da Rimini. Ivan Repušić, conductor. Christof Loy, director. Berlin, Deutsche Oper Berlin, May 2023. © 2023 by Monika Rittershaus.
Tristan
und Isolde
looms large over Zandonai’s opera, as it did over many late-romantic works
dealing with uncontainable passion. Yet what makes Tristan immortal is Wagner’s
willingness to deny its central characters the completion of their love: even
the rapture of Isolde’s Liebestod only hints at the explosion of passions that
will occur after the two are finally joined in death. It often feels that
subsequent composers and librettists were so infuriated by the thwarted union
of Tristan and Isolde that they took it upon themselves to ensure that their
doomed characters lost themselves to wild ecstasy at least once before dying … albeit
with variable results. While Zandonai was arguably better than many of his
contemporaries at illustrating those moments of insensible bliss, he could also
be fearless when it came to pushing them completely over the top. Instead of
one climactic duet, he gives us no fewer than three, each more fired-up than
the last; and if the union of soprano and tenor at the end of the third act is
thrilling in its unchecked force, the sudden quiet appearance of the offstage
choir takes the scene dangerously close to parody.
Yet
there is much to admire in Zandonai’s score and, with singers of absolute
commitment and a staging of relative restraint, there are many pleasures –
guilty and otherwise – to be found. Fortunately the Deutsche Oper’s production
had both. Director Christof Loy – who was also responsible for Schreker’s Der
Schatzgräber last year and the excellent production of Korngold’s Das
Wunder der Heliane five years ago – offered a claustrophobic reading of the
story that established a near-perfect mood of unspecified terrors constantly
threatening to break through a thin veneer of civility. The late-medieval
setting of the original may have been updated to the early twentieth century,
but the elegant suits worn by the Malatesta clan could not disguise their
essentially barbarous nature.
Zandonai: Francesca da Rimini. Ivan Repušić, conductor. Christof Loy, director. Berlin, Deutsche Oper Berlin, May 2023. © 2023 by Monika Rittershaus .
The
brutality of the staging was no less unsettling for being largely implied. When
Samaritana appeared on stage in the first act she had the stunned, bruised look
of one trapped in an endless cycle of domestic violence; yet Mr Loy was just as
often able to create unease by populating the stage with silent, sinister
onlookers, figures who may not have appeared in the libretto but were essential
to the mood of hemmed-in hopelessness that dominated the evening. The few
moments when Francesca and Paolo found themselves alone came as a kind of
relief.
Although
the staging maintained its own logic, Mr Loy seemed less interested in delineating
the drama than establishing the right emotional foundation for each scene. In
the battles of the second act, which featured numerous figures whirling around
the stage as though whipped by a violent storm, the action did not illustrate
the events of the libretto so much as underline the escalating tensions between
Paolo and Francesca. Even in the relative calm of the third act, Mr Loy’s
pessimistic vision of Francesca’s situation provided a necessary counterbalance
to the excitability of the music and yielded a tragedy of rigorous clarity.
The
greatest strength of the evening, however, was its vocal performances. Sara
Jakubiak gave the production a thrillingly focussed embodiment of the title
role that started at a high plateau of intensity and continued undiminished
until the opera’s final moments. Even in the first act, her clearly crafted
lines – paired with a succession of distant, trance-like stares
– established a troubled presence at the centre of the drama; by the end
of the second act she had consolidated her dominance, not merely over the
Malatesta brothers, but over the audience as well. Yet for all her compelling
moments, Ms Jakubiak allowed no indulgence to invade her performance: her
willingness to remain fully immersed in Francesca’s escalating torment gave
depth and nobility to the climactic duets in the third and fourth acts. And
despite the demands of the earlier scenes, she maintained enough strength to
ensure that her haunted solo scene near the end of the fourth act occupied its
rightful place as the opera’s high point.
Zandonai: Francesca da Rimini. Ivan Repušić, conductor. Christof Loy, director. Berlin, Deutsche Oper Berlin, May 2023. © 2023 by Monika Rittershaus.
As
Paolo il Bello, Jonathan Tetelman had the right mixture of big tone and
projective power to match Ms Jakubiak in the duets. While no one would argue
that Paolo is a character of comparable complexity, the force of Mr Tetelman’s
ardour rendered the doomed relationship with Francesca both credible and
exciting. Nor were the evening’s vocal strengths limited solely to the central
lovers: Ivan Inverardi was especially commanding as Gianciotto, bringing a
sudden jolt of authority to the frenzied second act and, in the first scene of
the fourth act, locked in an outsized struggle to keep doubt and jealousy at
bay. The quartet of Francesca’s ladies in waiting – Meechot Marrero, Elisa
Verzier, Arianna Manganello and Karis Tucker – were also responsible for
several fine moments, especially in the third and fourth acts.
Ivan
Repušić spent the evening highlighting the opera’s frequent moments of
excitability while resisting the temptation to push them too far. Instead he
concentrated on maintaining balance within and between the various orchestral
sections, and building the rhythms of the drama to their inevitable peaks. The
resulting performance rarely drew attention to itself, but neither did it
attempt to underplay the score’s most vigorous passages: the manic energy of
the second act would have been compelling even without the stage action, while
in the most rapturous sections of the third act the orchestra displayed a
refinement that elevated the passions of the characters by keeping them just
barely in check.
Indeed
the staging, the singing and the conducting were all of sufficiently high
quality that one was able to spend much of the evening considering the merits
of the opera itself. As with many of the other “rediscoveries” in the Deutsche
Oper’s ongoing series, it is not difficult to see why Francesca has failed
to secure a more permanent spot in the repertoire: the fervour of its emotions
and the underlying cruelty of its action – both in fashion in the early decades
of the twentieth century – seem slightly at odds with the early twenty-first
century’s understanding of itself. Yet the new production was enjoyable as far
more than a curiosity: if Zandonai’s opera has its inevitable moments of
excess, it also contains passages that achieve exceptional force by bringing us
closer to uncomfortable emotional truths.
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