Giuseppe Verdi’s Historical Soap Opera

By my records today was my first visit to Opera is ON since I wrote my account of Giuseppe Verdi’s Attila around the middle of last month. The fact is that more and more streaming opportunities are becoming available in an effort to restore some sense of there being a concert season, even if it does not involve sitting in a theater or other concert venue. As readers may know, San Francisco Opera (SFO) has prepared a month’s worth of weekends of free streamed performances for November; and this weekend’s offering is a production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera (a masked ball), which took place in October of 2014.

This is one of those relatively rare instances of an opera narrative that is based on a historical event: the assassination in 1792 of King Gustav III of Sweden, who was shot while attending a masked ball. The assassination was politically motivated, but the libretto that Antonio Somma prepared for Verdi turned it into an act of jealously over marital infidelity. This version had previously been captured in the libretto that Eugène Scribe prepared for the French opera Gustave III, ou Le bal masqué composed by Daniel Auber. Due to censorship problems, Verdi and Somma had to transplant the narrative from Stockholm to Colonial Boston during the emergence of the American Revolution. It was only in the middle of the twentieth century that performances set in Stockholm began to be performed regularly.

Julianna Di Giacomo and Ramón Vargas in the second act of Un ballo in maschera (from the SFO photo gallery Web page for this opera)

Jose Maria Condemi’s staging for SFO set the opera in Sweden. Nevertheless, he had to work with a libretto that was more soap opera than revolution against monarchy. Basically, we have Gustav III (sung by tenor Ramón Vargas) lusting after Amelia (soprano Julianna Di Giacomo, a Merola Opera Program alumna making her SFO debut), who happens to be the wife of his most trusted advisor, Count Anckarström (baritone Thomas Hampson). This makes for a generous offering of richly-orchestrated highly impassioned singing in a setting with rather slim dramatic intensity. Indeed, while all of the vocal work was impressively solid, much of the emotional substance could be found in Nicola Luisotti’s conducting, rather than in the comings-and-goings of the three sides of the triangle up on stage.

If all this sounds a bit grumpy, I am willing to accept that I hold a minority opinion. According to the SFO archives, Un ballo in maschera has been performed as part of 24 seasons. The earliest of these took place on September 19, 1931, and the performances given in 2014 are the most recent. For that matter, it enjoyed considerable success following its premiere performance in Rome on February 17, 1859. Since anyone can view the opera at no charge simply by visiting the SFO home page before 11;59 p.m. tomorrow, all readers as free to draw their own conclusions!