Sometimes opera directors come up with a twist to a plot hat is illuminating without requiring pretzel logic to actually align it with the libretto. I think Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabit’s production of Wagner’s Lohengrin for the Wiener Staatsoper in 2024 manages that pretty well.
Miecysłav Weinberg’s The Idiot, based on the Dostoevsky novel, was composed in 1986/7 but didn’t get a full premiere until 2013 in Mannheim. The neglect of Weinberg’s music in USSR/Russia is probably explained by him being a Polish Jew but why he’s so little known elsewhere is a bit of a mystery as The Idiot shows that The Passenger wasn’t a fluke. Anyway, The Idiot got a second outing at Salzburg in 2024 in a rather complex production by Krysztof Warlikowski.
Rossini’s early opera seria Tancredi is set in Syracuse in the early 11th century and turns on two rival families coming together in the face a threat from both Byzantines and Saracens. The hero is the knight Tancredi, secretly in love with the daughter of one of rival families. Jan Philipp Gloger’s production filmed at Bregenz in 2024 updates it to the present with the families being rival drug gangs and the “threat” the police. There’s a further twist. Tancredi is a mezzo role and always sung by a woman. Here Tancredi is played as a woman pretending to be a man; at least to everyone except her lover Amenaide.
Gluck’s Orpheus opera; in either Italian or French guise, is usually presented as a short and cheery “love conquers all” with an uncomplicated happy ending. Pierre Audi in his production of the 1774 Paris version of Orphée et Euridice, recorded at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in 2022 takes a different tack. Here Amour, who is on stage 100% of the time, forms a love triangle with Orphée and Euridice and while she’s happy to work to reunite the lovers Orphée gets in a snit in the last act when he realises that her interest isn’t entirely altruistic and comes close to violence when the two girls show more interest in each other than in him!
Vivaldi’s pasticcio Il Bajazet was composed for carnival season 1635. It sets an earlier libretto by Agostino Piovene concerning the defeat and capture of the Ottoman sultan Bajazet (Bayezid I) by the Tartar leader Tamerlano (Timur) in 1403. Tamerlano is contracted to marry the Princess of Trebizond, Irene, but falls for Bajazet’s daughter Asteria to the consternation of his Greek ally Andronico who is in love with Asteria. Various plot twists and turns happen before Bajazet poisons himself, Tamerlano marries Irene after all and Asteria returns to Andronico. Andronico also has a sidekick Idaspe.
Resphigi’s 1931 work Maria Egiziaca was originally conceived as a concert work but very early on it became more common to perform it fully staged. That’s how it’s presented in a production earlier this year from Venice’s Teatro La Fenice though it actually took place in the smaller Teatro Maliban. It’s quite a short work; a little over an hour, and as the composer’s description of it as a “symphonic triptych” suggests it takes place in three scenes.
Verdi’s Ernani is set in the reign of Charles V of Spain just before he becomes Holy Roman Emperor (1519), not that there’s anything remotely historical about the plot which is classic love and revenge stuff. The reason I mention it is because I’m trying to understand what director Lotte de Beer is driving at in the production staged and filmed at Bregenz in 2023.
Bohislav Martinů’s The Greek Passion is a 1961 opera based on the novel Christ Recrucified by Nicos Kazantzakis. The English language libretto is by the composer. It was staged in the Felsenreitschule in Salzburg in 2023 in a production directed y Simon Stone and recorded for video.
Damiano Michieletto’s production of Rossini’s La donna del lago filmed at the Rossini Festival in Pesaro in 2016 has some odd features but at least it’s not as all around annoying as the Met production the year before.
Puccini’s Tosca is a work that seems to turn the boldest directors conservative. Up until now the only one I had seen that wasn’t set in Rome in 1800 was Philip Himmelmann’s production in Baden-Baden. That starred Kristine Opolais and so does Martin Kušej’s 2022 production at the Theater an der Wien. And like the Baden-Baden work this sets the piece in some sort of Christofascist dystopia but a very different one from Himmelmann.
operaramblings 