Stage Director Versus Verdi’s Librettist

Yesterday afternoon I returned to the War Memorial Opera House for a second encounter with the San Francisco Opera (SFO) production of Leo Muscato’s staging of Giuseppe Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera (a masked ball). Readers may recall that my previous account of this production observed that this staging “left much to be desired.” Yesterday afternoon I realized how much of an understatement this was; and, by the time of the conclusion, it was clear to me that Muscato’s poetic license needed to be revoked.

As I had already observed, this opera had been given two settings. The narrative was about the assassination in 1792 of King Gustav III of Sweden, but the political tenor of the nineteenth century led Verdi’s librettist, Antonio Somma, to relocate the setting to Boston during the period prior to the American Revolution. This involved renaming the king to Riccardo; and his two primary aides, the Counts Ribbing and Horn, were given names associated with the Revolution, Samuel and Tom. Muscato decided to jumble up these two sets of names in his casting. He even tried to explain his motives in his note for the program book, but that text was as much of an incoherent muddle as was staging of the opera.

Amelia (soprano Lianna Haroutounian) singing about the gallows that are not there in Act II of Un ballo in maschera (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO)

The bottom line is that Muscato never missed an opportunity to make a radical departure from Somma’s libretto. This was most blatantly evident at the beginning of Act II, when the first words from Amelia (soprano Lianna Haroutounian) as she enters the stage call attention to the gallows. Clearly, this was Somma’s way of letting the audience know that this was where the narrative would begin to descend; and that descent would lead all the way up to Gustav’s assassination. Sadly, there was no gallows in sight. There was only a starkly bare stage on which the performers would sing to each other, doing their best to bring a modicum of urgency to the narrative.

To be fair, Muscato does not deserve all of the blame for dramatic shortcomings. There seems to be a tradition of prolonged death scenes in the opera repertoire. This goes back at least as far as the lengthy passacaglia for the last words of Queen Dido in Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. However, Gustav’s death makes the passing of Dido seem like a walk in the park. Every time it seems as if he has taken his last breath, it turns out that he has something more to sing! Tenor Michael Fabiano did his best to negotiate the absurdity of this situation, but he was fighting a losing battle.

So Un ballo in maschera was certainly not Verdi’s “finest hour” in the history of his repertoire. Nevertheless, as I previously observed, Jose Maria Condemi managed to give it a passingly credible account when he staged it for SFO in 2014. He went “by the book.” When Amelia sang about the gallows, you saw the gallows. Hopefully, I shall not have to put up with Muscato running roughshod over another opera libretto.