hold my hand
Joseph
Méry and Camille du Locle (libretto, based on Friedrich Schiller's Don Carlos, Infant von Spanien),
Giuseppe Verdi (music) Don Carlo / Metropolitan
Opera HD broadcast, December 11, 2010
Giuseppe Verdi's great opera Don Carlo premiered in Paris in
March 1867, the year Sigmund Freud turned eleven while attending Leopoldstädter
Kommunal-Realgymnasium in Vienna. It would be years before Freud would propound
his psychological theories gleaned primarily from ancient literary texts; but
Verdi's opera might as well be described as a template for many of Freud's
ideas about human relationships, in particular those concerning various
obstacles to love.
If there was ever an example of a
competitive struggle between son and father for the love of a mother, other
than Sophocles Oedipus Rex I can't imagine it being played out more
dramatically than in Don Carlo. Promised in marriage to Elisabeth of
Valois, daughter to King Henry II, Don Carlo (Roberto Alagna), son of the
powerful Philip II of Spain (Ferruccio Furlanetto), has disobediently traveled
to France to catch a glimpse of his intended. It is clear that he is somewhat
nervous about the impending event, but when he finally sees Elisabeth (Marina
Poplavskaya) frolicking in Fontainebleau on a winter hunt, he is overpowered by
her beauty and immediately falls in love. When the two meet up, he pretends to
be from one of the hunting parties, but as the two continue in conversation, he
finally admits who he is. She, equally taken with him, is delighted and they
sing of their joy and love.
Their marriage is to be
announced as soon as their fathers sign the peace treaty between the Houses of
Habsburg and Valois, but when the messengers arrive to tell her the news that
the treaty has been signed, she is made to understand that she shall not be
married to the infante, but to the King, Philip, himself! Knowing that
the marriage is necessary for her country, Elisabeth has no choice but to
painfully accept the proposal; Don Carlo is devastated:
The fatal
hour has sounded!
Cruel destiny
shatters this beautiful dream!
And my soul is filled with regrets;
we shall drag along our chains
until we rest in our tomb.
Cruel destiny
shatters this beautiful dream!
And my soul is filled with regrets;
we shall drag along our chains
until we rest in our tomb.
Seldom has a first scene in any
opera transformed its characters' worlds so suddenly. Don Carlo is now in the
painful position of being in love with the woman who is soon be become his
mother. Like anyone suffering from the Oedipal complex from here on he will
come to hate his father. We recognize that the opera that follows will be
centered, in part, on the struggle between the two.
Yet, in the very next scene
Verdi introduces a further sexual wrinkle in Don Carlo's life. Having returned
to Spain, he secretly visits the monastery of San Yuste, where, after his
abdication in 1516, Carlo' grandfather, Charles V, came to live out the rest of
his life before dying of malaria. There he encounters his dear friend Rodrigo,
who has obviously come to meet him. Carlo reveals his love of Elisabeth, a fact
that shocks Rodrigo, who immediately demands that Carlo join him in saving
Protestant Flanders—the birthplace of Charles V—by freeing it from the Spanish
rule.
Rodrigo is a pure idealist,
a believer in justice and evidently a fine soldier. As he pleads with Philip a
short while later for Flanders cause, he reveals what he sees as the people's
condition there:
RODRIGO
O King! I have come from Flanders,
that country which was once so lovely!
It is now but an ashen desert,
a place of horror, a tomb!
There the orphan, begging
and weeping on the streets,
falls, as he flees the flames,
on human remains!
Blood reddens the water in the rivers,
they roll on, full of dead bodies …
The air is filled with the cries of widows
over their butchered husbands! …
Ah! Blessed be the hand of God,
which through me brings
the passing-bell of this agony
to the notice of the righteous King!
Philip, the king
of a country where at the very moment the trials of the Inquisition are taking
place, cannot possibly support the reformers, nor intervene in the French
domination of that region, and rejects
Rodrigo's and Don Carlo's pleas to travel to Flanders out of hand.
It is clear that Rodrigo, in even daring
to speak of the subject with his King, is committed to his cause. Yet we soon
suspect another reason why he is so eager to have Don Carlo join him. Verdi may
have thought of their relationship as
being nothing more than a deep brotherly affection, but the bonds they express,
their continual embracement of each other, and the vows of love they repeat
over and over again in phrases such as "hold my hand" reveal their
relationship is perhaps far deeper than simple friendship. They would be
"united in love and death" and sing of their fealty as an oath before
God. As in a marriage ceremony they cry out for a "brotherly love"
that obviously is also a sexual bond. Taking Carlos with him to Flanders may be
the only way to protect the young prince from the wiles of Philip's wife and
his own undoing. Although Rodrigo is somewhat single-minded in his idealism,
jealousy, it is apparent, may have a role in his actions as well.
Their relationship, despite Don Carlo's
inability to join him in Flanders, remains one of committed love up until Rodrigo's
last act death. Not only in life do they pledge to remain together, but even in
death, at least from Rodrigo's point of view:
RODRIGO
We must take our leave!
We must take our leave!
Don
Carlos freezes, looking aghast at Rodrigo.
Yes,
Carlos! This is for me the supreme day,
let us say a solemn farewell;
God permits us still to love one another
near him, when we are in heaven.
let us say a solemn farewell;
God permits us still to love one another
near him, when we are in heaven.
We can only
wonder what Elisabeth, had she been able to consummate her love with Don Carlo,
might say to Rodrigro's dying desire.
We perceive that, like Hamlet, Don Carlo is
a confused psychological being, not a man of action like his friend. As Paul
Robinson has written in an excellent essay on Don Carlo (in Opera & Ideas: From Mozart to Strauss):
In all of opera
there can be no more improbable friendship
than that between
Rodrigo and Don Carlo. Just as Rodrigo
is the
quintessentially political animal, Carlo is one of those
people who seem
incapable of a coherent political thought.
In the course of
the opera, admittedly, he gets deeply involved
in affairs of
state, beginning with the friendship duet... But
we are never in
doubt that it is all pretend politics, and that
he understands
nothing of the Flemish cause or the ideological
principles that
all but define Rodrigo's existence.
It is also clear that Philip would have wished a son more like Rodrigo than the one he has. For that reason alone, one suspects, the King confides in Rodrigo and takes him on almost as an advisor. In a world where his rule is threatened by the church, and in which he feels he can trust no one, not even his beloved wife, Philip has no choice but to turn to the handsome man of action, his weakling's son dear friend.
It is also clear that Philip would have wished a son more like Rodrigo than the one he has. For that reason alone, one suspects, the King confides in Rodrigo and takes him on almost as an advisor. In a world where his rule is threatened by the church, and in which he feels he can trust no one, not even his beloved wife, Philip has no choice but to turn to the handsome man of action, his weakling's son dear friend.
The tension between Rodrigo's commitment to
the political and his love for Don Carlo comes to a head when the Inquisition
prepares to torture Flemish rebels. When Philip rejects the pleas of Flemish representatives to free them, Don
Carlo rushes in, a ridiculous hero, sword in hand insisting that he will be
their savior. Philip demands that his son be disarmed, and Rodrigo has no
choice but to disarm him. Don Carlo, appalled by his actions, sees it as a
betrayal of their love, but Rodrigo clearly recognizes it is the only way to
save his friend from death.
So too is Philip made to choose between his
role as a ruler and his love of his surrogate son. In the horrifying verbal
battle between the bassos, Philip and the Grand Inquisitor, the blind man of
the church insists that the King hand over Rodrigo. Once again, the choice is a
terrible one, but as a conciliator he knows he must give in to the demand.
Finally, even the pure and suffering Elisabeth, who has already been
forced into the awful choice of marrying Philip or his son, is tortured by the
oppositions between the personal and the political. Betrayed by Princess Eboli,
jealous of Don Carlo's love for the Queen, Elisabeth is asked to proclaim her
innocence before her King/husband, who is convinced that she has been carrying
on an affair with his son. The overwhelming tension between these two forces,
the domestic and the State, results in her collapse.
Throughout Don Carlo, accordingly, the characters' attempts at love are
perverted, torn as they are between their psychological states of being and the
State, the political and religious machinations that work against their love
for one another. At opera's end all have
fallen from any possibility of grace, as Don Carlo, who finally seems to
recognize Rodrigo's righteous view of the world whereupon he renounces his
heterosexual lover/mother, is quite literally dragged into the past—and, of
course, death—by the ghost of his own Grandfather, Charles V, in what is
perhaps also a metaphor of where his political actions would surely have taken
him had he attempted to save Flanders. We can only pray that, despite the
Church's proclamation, all of his forbidden loves will be permitted into
heaven.
Los Angeles, January 30,
2011
Reprinted
from Green Integer Blog (January
2011).
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