Unless I am mistaken, this weekend’s Opera is ON streaming video is taken from one of the earliest San Francisco Opera (SFO) performances to be presented in this series. By the same count, it involved a relatively rare performance of one of Giuseppe Verdi’s earliest operas, Attila, which was first performed in Venice in 1846. In the context of more familiar operas, it was composed after Ernani (1844) and before Macbeth (1847). The video currently being streamed was directed, like all other videos in the Opera is ON series (at least to date), by Frank Zamacona. In the SFO repertoire, this production, directed by Gabriele Lavia, was only the second time the opera was presented.
Consulting my Examiner.com records, I discovered that I had attended two performances of this production, the second on the evening of June 15, 2012, and the final performance, which I saw on my Sunday matinee subscription series on July 1. It did not take me long to appreciate why this opera was seldom performed. As I wrote in my first Examiner.com article, the libretto is little more than “a rather clunky account of a revenge narrative,” clunky in part because there are at least three characters in the cast that have it in for Attila. (By all rights some good wordplay on “overkill” would be appropriate here.)
The slaying of Attila (Ferruccio Furlanetto) by Odabella (Lucrecia Garcia) near the end of Verdi’s Attila (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO)
From a musical point of view, it is clear that Verdi was still cultivating his talents as a composer. The score is a far cry from the sophistication that one encounters in the later works, particularly the partnerships with Arrigo Boito as librettist, Otello and Falstaff. That said, there are ample opportunities for the vocalists to cast their talents in a more than favorable light. From that point of view, there was no shortage of either vocal skill or personality in bass Ferruccio Furlanetto’s presentation of the title role. Furthermore, he could not have been better matched than by soprano Lucrecia Garcia’s Odabella, the one of those three aforementioned characters that not only delivers the fatal blow to Attila but does it with his own sword.
(As an aside, many readers are probably aware of the principle known as “Chekhov’s gun.” The basic idea is that, if the audience sees a gun, it should expect to see it fired before the play concludes, most likely with fatal consequences. The libretto for Attila, begun by Temistocle Solera and completed by Francesco Maria Piave, basically follows a corollary: If the leading character gives his sword to a determined enemy, he will be on the receiving end of that sword before the conclusion of the narrative!)
To be fair, the casting of the other two characters determined to kill Attila presented equally impressive vocal performances. Diego Torre was the obligatory tenor of the cast, playing the role of the Aquileian knight Foresto, who is determined to marry Odabella. He is complemented by the Roman general Ezio, sung by baritone Quinn Kelsey, who sees Attila as an ally in bringing down the Roman Emperor Valentinian until Attila withdraws from Rome after confronting Pope Leo I (bass Samuel Ramey, who had sung the title role at the first SFO performance of Attila in 1991).
Finally, the overall musical resources were in the more-than-capable hands of conductor Nicola Luisotti, then SFO Music Director. The “bottom line” is that, if one concentrates only on the music (also disregarding the set designs of Alessandro Camera, which include lots of ruins, a seriously precipitous staircase, problematic for both Attila and Foresto, and the interior of an opera house, with an audience in the second scene of the second act, subsequently reduced to ruins in the third act), there is much to appreciate in both vocal delivery and instrumental context. Since the entire performance takes place in less than two hours, the overall experience is at least moderately accessible.
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