The entry of a half-naked future Emperor Charles V wearing a Christmas cracker crown in a plot that already stretches credibility might easily evoke mockery. Yet director Lotte De Beer’s audacious production succeeds very well where many traditional performances have failed in conveying the ordinary banality of wickedness.
Ernani is one of three suitors for Elvira, the others being her uncle de Silva and Don Carlo, soon to be crowned Emperor. When the latter kidnaps the girl, Ernani vows to his captor Silva that he is ready to kill himself if only he can be allowed to rescue her first and gives him his hunting horn, with which the grandee can summon him to carry out that pledge.
It is hard for a modern audience to appreciate that rigid code of honour of 16th century Spain, at least as interpreted by later Romantic literature, to believe any of this.
De Beer, whose work often acknowledges the artificiality of operatic presentation, responds by presenting the piece as a bloody, dark fairy tale, in which the beauty of Verdi’s music stands in contrast to the stark scenography, and where even those who might claim some noble authority are capable of dreadful, capricious violence.
The production for the 2023 Bregenz Festival is not one for those who love a colourful spectacle. There is no suggestion in Christof Hetzer’s designs of the brigands’ mountain redoubt, while castle and palace are represented only by rough flagstones, catacombs by a simple graveyard. Elvira’s apartment is merely a bed in a white box, into which her attendants enter by a sort of trapdoor, bringing unwanted gifts, presumably from the amorous uncle, on one of which she stamps.
It is a bit much, however, that the poor soul spends the entire opera in crinoline underwear, with or without hoops, a sort of unhappy princess in the tower, I guess.
A strong cast respond to the requirements of the production. Saimir Pirgu first appears as a distinctly hungover Ernani, still with the force of character to command such a band of roughnecks, and seemingly with the swift power of recovery for his graceful opening aria. Guanqun Yu is as impressive an Elvira as one can be in awkward undies and is beautifully expressive in the wide-ranging, difficult cavatina that marks her entry.
The star of the show is Franco Vassallo who plays Carlo as if his pantomime villain had wandered into a horror movie, pleasantly tickling a severed head, smiling while his cutthroat band scatter enough blood to keep the Silent Witness pathologists busy for a season. Such was the power of malevolence in the performance that it made it even harder to give credence to the man’s final clemency toward Ernani, his rival in love as in war—the whimsy of a tyrant perhaps.
Vassall’s performance, malicious humour combined with an emollient, smooth high baritone, gives meaning to the whole production. Bass Goran Jurić too brings an insistent intensity to the role of Silva, one that in its solemn imprecations reminded me of the Grand Inquisitor, still to come in Verdi’s Don Carlos.
Ernani, his fifth opera, marks a step forward in characterisation from earlier works, and the Wiener Symphoniker under Enrique Mazzola play with sensitivity to its changing moods.
The excellent Prague Philharmonic Choir set exactly the right tone for "Si redesti il Leon di Castiglia"—a more subtle patriotic chorus than "Va, pensiero" two operas earlier in Nabucco—and the clever integration among their number of gymnasts from Stunt-Factory greatly invigorate proceedings. There is even a little space for light-hearted fun—an element in Victor Hugo’s 1830 drama but absent from Francesco Piave’s libretto—with the partly-clad chorus in a routine that might come from the Morecambe and Wise playbook.
These may comprise an odd mix of ingredients, but they combine into an original and surprisingly effective and affecting interpretation of a musically rich, dramatically challenging, early Verdian masterpiece.