Roberto Abbado conducts Verdi's UN BALLO IN MASCHERA at the Parma Verdi Festival 2021: late Graham Vick's last production

«Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera opened the Parma Verdi Festival at the Teatro Regio on September 24, presenting the masked ball on stage to a masked audience, just as opera seasons are cautiously opening to a predominantly vaccinated public. The production was conceived – though not executed – by Graham Vick, the great British opera director, who died of Covid in July. The climactic assassination of the historical protagonist, King Gustavus of Sweden, at the masked ball in the final scene, was, in Vick’s conception, anticipated from the beginning with an omnipresent funerary monument surmounted by an ascending angel. According to Vick’s notes, the king acted «with the self-destructive genius of an artist whose greatest creation was his own death».

When Verdi was initially planning this opera for Naples in the late 1850s he called it Gustavo III, and conceived it as a historical piece about the enlightened monarch who had been assassinated in 1792 at a masked ball in the Stockholm Opera House. «Here is the libretto for Gustavo to present to the censorship», he wrote in 1857 to the director of the Naples opera. The censors responded with an unexpected barrage of specifications, and Verdi withdrew the opera from royal Naples, producing it in papal Rome in February 1859 as Un ballo in maschera, set in British-ruled colonial Boston instead of Stockholm. Gustavo became «Riccardo» and his assassin Count Anckastrom became «Renato» – patrician Bostonians. Verdi was not permitted to stage the assassination of a European monarch, but his opera appeared as Italian political life was about to be radically upended by national unification, sweeping away the multiple princes of the peninsula. Parma has restored the original uncensored libretto for Gustavo III, while Vick provided the principles for a production that would explore the subversive intimations of the opera by referring to the historical rumours of sexual ambivalence surrounding Gustavus and his court.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the production, directed, in the end, by Jacopo Spirei, was the dominant presence of Oscar the king’s  page, a trouser role for light coloratura soprano. While Oscar usually comes across as perky or cute, here he/she was the avatar of sexual subversion at court – Oscar Wilde, in checked pants, black waistcoat and wavy dark hair to the shoulders, leading the chorus of courtiers from the very first scene. In the second scene he brings the court to visit the witch Ulrica – who in this production turns out to be the mistress of an underground gay club. During the pause between these first two scenes, a woman in the balcony began to voice her disapproval of the production – «Giuseppe Verdi is turning in his grave!» - while other audience members shouted her down. Italian national devotion to Verdi remains meaningful at many cultural levels; the bookshop of the Teatro Regio was selling a new comic book involving Donald Duck (Paperino) in the search for a lost Verdi score in Parma.

The conductor, Roberto Abbado, worked brilliantly with the raucous and subversive elements of the production, taking them as cues to integrating the unusual musical polarities of this Verdi score, which is certainly a dramatic tragedy – though every scene except the last one has an exuberantly composed, partly comical finale. Attending closely to the excellent Italian tenor Piero Pretti, Abbado integrated all the emotional modulations that characterize Gustavo musically. He begins in fully lyrical voice as a light-hearted libertine in the spirit of the Duke of Mantua from Rigoletto, and even when Ulrica foretells his death, Gustavo brings the finale ensemble of the scene back to the light-hearted spirit of a crazy joke – «è scherzo od è follia» – even as darker musical forces are being conjured. When the king’s confidant, Anckastrom, discovers that his own wife Amelia is the king’s secret lover, the drama gives way to an ensemble of mocking laughter at the married pair: «la tragedia mutò in commedia piacevolissima» – the tragedy has become a most enjoyable comedy.

Abbado told me that the crucial point of reference for trying to integrate the comic and the dramatic in the opera is Verdi’s lifelong devotion to Shakespeare: from Macbeth to Otello to Falstaff. On the podium Abbado beautifully managed the mixed moods of the score, discovering not just a sort of classical equilibrium, but even a particular musical pathos in the ways that libertine freedom and lyrical energy give way to the darker forces of betrayal and tragedy.

Together with Pretti there were two other superb Verdian singers in the leading roles of Amelia and her husband Anckastrom: the Italian soprano Anna Pirozzi and the Mongolian baritone Enkhbat Amartüvshin. Pirozzi gave a great diva performance, somewhat removed from the swirling currents of ambivalent court sexuality all around her, fully focused on Gustavo, in beautiful control of her voice. Later, when Amelia and Anckastrom sit beside one another at home, their marriage ruined, her chair mysteriously carries her across the stage away from her husband as she begins her big aria, «Morrò ma prima una grazia», with its marvellous cello obbligato. The choreographer Ron Howell, Graham Vick’s partner, told me afterwards that the pathos of the moving chair was the moment in the opera that made him think most powerfully of Vick. Distance and distancing have many new meanings for us now in the climate of the pandemic, and the separation between the chairs on stage also spoke to the carefully separated seating in the Teatro Regio.

Pirozzi’s aria was followed by Amartüvshin singing the opera’s great baritone aria, «Eri tu», his denunciation of Gustavo, whom he will soon assassinate. Howell told me that Vick was interested in whether the production could support an erotic connection between Gustavo and Anckastrom – the sort of tenor-baritone homoeroticism that Verdi deployed in Don Carlo – but in the end it was decided not to push it. Amartüvshin sang gloriously of his betrayal by his royal friend, and then offered a gorgeous treatment of Anckastrom’s nostalgia for his lost world of love and friendship – «O dolcezze perdute, o memorie …» with his powerful, velvety smooth voice and a deeply Italianate style. (Amartüvshin, who trained in Ulan Bator and is only thirty-five years old, told me his models are Ettore Bastianini and Piero Cappuccilli.) Pirozzi will sing Lady Macbeth at the Royal Opera House in London in November, and Amartüvshin will sing Nabucco in December, both roles they have sung at the Parma Verdi Festival in recent years.

The masked ball of the final scene allows Gustavo and Amelia to meet one last time, masked, and sing a duet of exquisite restraint to the courtly dance music – a mazurka with the elegance of a minuet – as she begs him to flee, and he fatefully refuses. Overhead, high above the masked ball, a lone trapeze acrobat performs in trancelike movement to the same music that animates the dancers down below – the bare-chested avatar of Gustavo’s fierce sexuality and predestined death. His acrobatic balance and, at the same time, his vulnerability, the possibility of a fall, felt as though they underlined the precariousness of our human enterprise, as we all undertake the carefully conceived balancing act that may allow us the possibility of a masked return to the opera house.»
The Times Literary Supplement, Larry Wolff