Streaming Opera--La Forza del Destino

The Met has been streaming a different opera every day--you can start listening at 7:30 P.M. but you have to watch it before 6:30 P.M. the next day (I think) when it disappears from the free category. I managed to listen to a classic 1984 performance a week or so ago of one of my favorite operas, Verdi's La Forza del Destino (The Force of Destiny.

It was conducted beautifully by James Levine, then in his prime as Music Director of the Met, and starred Leontyne Price, Giuseppe Giacomini, Leo Nucci, and Bonaldo Giaotti. The traditional sets were by Eugene Berman, who was best known for his production at the Met of Don Giovanni, which was on the boards there for decades. Everything clicked, right of course from the glorious start--one of the most famous overtures in all of opera--to the magnificent finish--Price as Leonora singing the great soprano aria Pace, pace, mi Dio. 

Giacomini and Nucci as Dons Alvaro and Carlo, tenor and baritone, sang beautifully, especially the Act II and III duets. The plot, as with much of Verdi and opera generally, is nothing to merit much praise. But the whole cast did the libretto proud, as did Levine and the Met orchestra the music. Old Met hands like Bonaldo Giaotti as Padre Guardiano, Isola Jones as Preziosilla, and Anthony Lacira as Trabucco added verisimilitude to the story, which will always be a stretch at best, I didn't recall Enrico Fissore, who was Fra Melitone, but he too was excellent.

One of the factors that makes this a great opera is the way Verdi weaves his theme of destiny through the opera, He anticipated Wagner's use of the leitmotifs in The Ring some years later: La Forza premiered in St. Petersburg in 1862. The melodrama begins right after that fabulous overture in an opening scene that sets the plot quickly and definitively but then e are in the Inn scene, which is a rollicking excursion into the full world of eighteenth-century Spain. Preziosilla and Trabucco, who cater to the wants of the strong drinking crowd, make their first appearance, and when we get to the second act, with everyone transported from Spain to Italy, where Alvaro and Carlo, unknown to each other, are battling on the same side--whichever it is--while Preziosilla and Travucco, hoined now by Fra Melitone, sell to what seems like a remarkably similar crowd that populated the inn in Spain.

We also have the rousing music of Rataplan launched by Preziosilla and picked up by the mob/chorus. Fra Melitone is the bad-tempered monk whose misanthropy (and probably misogyny) are held in check by Padre Guardiano who reacts as a good priest that he is to Leonora's plea for refuge and consignment to a distant mountain refuge as a hermit. Melitone returns to start the third act by berating the beggars to whom he is ungenerously ladling soup; the Padre arrives to chastise him gently and then to direct Alvaro to where his love Leonora has gone.

Carlo is one of the most obsessed crazies in opera as he pursues Alvaro--for all of Act Two until the very end he does not know that his firm fighting friend is really the man whom he has been seeking to murder as revenge for Alvaro's accidental shooting of  Carlo and Leonora's father, the Marquis, in the first scene as Alvaro and Leonora were preparing (and taking too long) to make their getaway.

Alvaro and Carlo--Giacomini and Nucci--take out their swords in the opening of the last act and then Alvaro takes off to find Leonora. Carlo of course pursues him and after Price sings that fabulous aria, the opera ends in a classic bloodbath where two of the three perish.

There's wonderful contrasts in the opera--the somber tones of the Convent scene--sandwiched between the rollicking Inn and Camp Followers' settings. When I first saw La Forza at the Met, the delightful Inn scene had been cut. Levine restored it, I believe, which was an act of brilliance. The opera house had occasionally performed the Convent scene along with the Verdi Requiem as an alternative on Good Friday afternoon to the traditional Parsifal. 

La Forza has never been as popular as some of the Verdi canon in the spectacular middle period that gave us Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata, among others. But right from its mighty overture it is magnificent. I also watched much of Verdi's much less popular Luisa Miller, based on a Schiller play. It's a fine opera, but probably has languished as a lesser light in the Verdi firmament because it has few if any memorable arias. The Met did well by it, though, and I enjoyed seeing it all the way through.