things change
by
Douglas Messerli
Salvadore
Cammarano (libretto), Gaetano Donizetti (composer) Roberto Devereux / LAOpera,
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion / the production I saw with Lita Barrie was on Thursday,
March 5, 2020
In
his opening night review of the LAOpera production of Gaetano Donizetti’s opera
Roberto Devereux, Los Angeles Time’s music reviewer Mark
Swed began by noting how the composer himself felt that his 1837 opera had been
jinxed. The opera as Swed notes, was born out of his own wife’s death and written
and performed during a cholera outbreak in Naples.
When Swed wrote his review, it had not yet
been perceived just how much California itself was already being effected by the
new coronavirus, an equivalent of cholera (fortunately, the Dorothy Chandler
Pavilion production played to a mostly full audience, although any intermission
cough was duly noted by its audience).
The beautiful Spanish singer Davinia
Rodríguez was to have performed the most important role in this opera—not fully
realized as the masterpiece it is until the 20th century rediscovery
of the role by Beverly Sills, who Howard and I saw perform it at the Kennedy
Center in Washington, D.C.—after developing health problems, replaced by the
American singer Angela Meade (a native of Centralia, Washington), who will
reprise this role in September in the New York Metropolitan Opera production.
It is Meade, this time around, who
un-jinxed this work, bravely singing the role of Elizabeth I, without any stage
rehearsal time on opening night, from a stage-side music stand, while the
choreographer Nicola Bowie equally bravely acted out her movements on center
stage.
I was too young and operatically naïve to
remember or, even then, have been able to evaluate “Bubbles” Silverman (the
early incarnation of Beverly Sills), although we also saw a couple of her other
major operatic presentations. But Meade certainly now owns this role, singing
powerfully and yet scintillatingly beautiful, and suddenly coming onto central
stage in the production I saw with friend Lita Barrie, as a bit more zaftig
version of the queen than Rodríguez might have represented, but perhaps more
dramatic for that very fact. If she loved Roberto Devereux (the truly excellent
Mexican-born singer, Ramón Vargas) she is equally terrifying in her willingness
to revenge his evidently quite chaste love of Nottingham’s current wife, the
lovely soprano, in the production I saw, Ashley Dixon.
Her color is blue, and she is the closest
we can get to an early 19th century version of a blues singer. After
all, she has been forced by her very best friend, the Queen, to marry the
less-than-dashing Nottingham, who loves her but also attempts to lock her away
and violently punish her for his own jealousy.
At the heart of this opera, and certainly
in director Stephen Lawless’ long-traveled version of it, is death, the many
murders of Elizabeth’s father, some of which are encased, like museum morgue
victims, in glass. Elizabeth’s desperate need for love, despite her
childhood-taught lessons of killing off anyone who you felt had betrayed you,
is the tragic center of this work. She clearly wants to save her former lover—a
simple return of the ring she has given him might save his life—but despite all
best intentions, the couple who are most involved in this love tale, Devereux
and Nottingham’s wife, are locked away into worlds which the powers that be
cannot comprehend their innocence. Devereux is tried as a traitor for even
attempting to escape his proclivities, while Sarah is held as a prisoner in her
own home for having even imagined a more robust lover in Devereux.
All of the singers in this production were
excellent, along with Grant Gershon’s remarkable chorus, singing through the
almost voyeuristic portals, represented in their appearances, through Benoît
Dugardyn’s simple wooden set. There may be far many more complex visions of
Elizabeth’s court, but his simple design allowed us to see how the constantly
peering figures of the Queen’s courtiers and women associates help allow her to
destroy those she most loves. The tragedy here is not simply the Queen’s temperament,
but the inexplicable interferences of the court itself. When Elizabeth heartily
taps her cane to send them all running, you can truly comprehend her
frustrations of being ruled by history itself.
And in her last scene, we recognize that
now, as an old woman, without her crowed head of hennaed hair, that she has
lost her regal power as well as having lost any opportunity for love. Meade is
totally brilliant in her version of a Donizetti mad-moment. Covered in white,
we recognize she is as pale as death itself. Earlier versions of those killed
by history, again encased by glass, are wheeled out. After all, isn’t British monarchical
history actually a list of killers and their victims up until the current day?
Finally, given all the operatic heroes who
made this operatic production significant—Meade, Bowie, and Kelsey in
particular—one cannot ignore the amazing wonders of conductor Eun Sun Kim,
recently appointed music director of the San Francisco Opera. All LAOpera fans
love conductor James Conlon; yet she brought out a sound from the LAOpera orchestra
that shifted its usual muted acoustics to something that was quite glorious. The
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, which has long recognized problems of muted
orchestral sound, suddenly seemed to open up to new possibilities. If I am
growing a little deaf, last night I heard every brilliant cord of Donizetti’s
previously jinxed opera. And it was as if this opera’s sometimes clotted and
unclear motivations of his composition had suddenly sprung into new life. I can’t
wait to see Meade wow the Met audiences.
Los
Angeles, March 6, 2020
Reprinted from USTheater,
Opera, and Performance (March 2020). 
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