I vaguely remember a school history lesson about Queen Elizabeth I, Good Queen Bess, the Virgin Queen, the speech at Tilbury and the defeat of the great Spanish Armada, even gallant, crafty Francis Drake laying down his cloak for his sovereign—and a knighthood.
But while history has dwelt upon the achievements of one of England’s greatest monarchs, writers of fiction have been less kind, tending to concentrate on Elizabeth the woman and the conflict between her public and personal life. The one who reigns cannot live for themselves, as the chorus sings at the end of Roberto Devereux.
This was the last of the Donizetti’s four Tudor operas, set in 1598, toward the end of Elizabeth’s life, and the more poignant for depicting what must always have been a one-sided love affair between the aged queen and the dashing Roberto, Earl of Essex.
In this all-British production for the Bergamo Donizetti Festival, director Stephen Langridge and designer Katie Davenport constantly play around with the idea of mortality, the image of a skull worked into the queen’s gown, a table resembling a painterly memento mori, a puppet skeleton conducting a dance of death behind Elizabeth and tapping the ill-fated Essex on the shoulder.
The conceit becomes a little overplayed with a multiplicity of the grinning heads set out across the stage like cabbages, and particularly as old bony carries off a near-naked young man in what I take to be a distracting and out-of-place reference to AIDS.
I have no quibble, however, with the set design, a large white frame enclosing most of the stage, within which events unfold beyond Elizabeth’s control, figures such as David Astorga’s Cecil often remaining in half-shadow. And while the queen sits before it, ensconced on a scarlet throne, above hangs the scarlet bed of her love rival, Lady Sara.
Conductor Riccardo Frizza largely follows the original 1837 version of the opera rather than the more usual revised form written for Paris a year later. That means only a few bars of orchestral introduction before one is straight into the drama, in which Donizetti’s music digs into the psychological depth of his characters as seldom before.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the majestic performance by British-Australian soprano Jessica Pratt as Elizabeth, whose agility in negotiating the large leaps in the vocal lines seems to reflect her conflicted emotions, by turns imperious or ardent, her top notes either a cry of bitter determination or a soft, heart-rending sigh.
American tenor John Osborn gives a similarly nuanced performance as Roberto, arrogant at his first meeting with the queen after his return from the wars, vulnerable in his love for Sara and achieving a sort of pathos as a man unjustly sentenced to death. (In reality, Essex was condemned not for his affair but for a seditious plot.) If his final cabaletta seems a little too upbeat in the circumstances, one can understand the composer wanting his leading man to go out with a bang, and the Bergamo audience explodes with enthusiasm at Osborn’s stirring performance.
Baritone Simone Piazzola makes an immediate impression as the Duke of Nottingham, a big man weighed down by the melancholia of an unhappy marriage. His duet with Elizabeth that dominates the second act is one of the highlights of the opera, as is his final act duet with the equally expressive Raffaella Lupinacci as his wife Sara.