By Nikita Gourski and Gianmarco Segato

Verdi goes to Elsewhere, U.S.A.

Why would Verdi set A Masked Ball in 17th-century Boston, a colonial outpost he knew little about, located on the other side of the world?
To ask that question is to trace the history of the opera’s genesis, and discover that Verdi’s America – a place more imagined than real – gave the composer his best shot at creating an enduring work about the contradictory, often destructive, nature of our passions. The award-winning, critically acclaimed directorial team of Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito has given due consideration to the origins of A Masked Ball and set their production in an equally mythological America, extending Verdi’s edict that “to copy reality can be a good thing, but to invent reality is better, much better.”

Before Verdi Starts Writing

1792: The progressive and widely adored King Gustav III of Sweden is shot at a masked ball in Stockholm and dies several days later. The gunman, an aristocrat named Anckarstroem, is revealed to be part of a larger conspiracy seeking to bring down the monarchy.

1833: About 40 years later, French playwright Eugène Scribe uses the incident for his libretto Gustave III, ou Le bal masqué, which is set to music by Daniel Auber to great success in Paris. Scribe substituted a knife instead of a gun, and gave the assassin a jilted lover’s logic by introducing a wholly invented love triangle into the plot: King Gustav loves Amelia, the wife of his closest friend and adviser, Anckarstroem. When Anckarstroem discovers Amelia in an apparently compromising situation with Gustav, he joins a fermenting conspiracy against the king.

1857: Commissioned to write an opera for the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, Verdi, for the first time in his career, decides to adapt an existing libretto: Scribe’s Gustave III. By composing to a French libretto, Verdi opted to use musical forms associated with 19th-century French opera. This is especially true of the music he wrote for the page Oscar, who often sings in straight-forward French couplets (two-versed songs) that lighten the emotional register with fun and mischief.

Three False Starts
Naples in 1857 was under the rule of Bourbon authorities who weren’t particularly enthusiastic about depicting the murder of European monarchs on stage. To pacify their concerns, Verdi and his librettist, Antonio Somma (who was adapting Scribe’s work) substituted 17th-century Stettin (a city in modern-day Poland) for the original Stockholm and demoted King Gustav to a duke. Yet just as Verdi submitted this new draft for approval, Napoleon III was the victim of an attempted assassination in Paris. Eight people died, 150 were injured, and one of the bomb-making conspirators turned out to be an Italian with connections to the nationalist unification movement – all of which made the royal censors in Naples more hesitant than ever to rubber-stamp an opera about political murder. The Neapolitan Chief of Police got involved, demanding rewrites that would alter key relationships and scenes in the opera. The management of the Teatro San Carlo obliged him and threw together a new libretto called Adeglia degli Adimari. When Verdi saw it, however, he refused to continue with the opera in its present form. Lawsuits followed and the courts ruled in the composer’s favour, releasing him from his contract with Teatro San Carlo.

Finding America
As soon as it became clear that his opera had no future in Naples, Verdi looked for a partnership elsewhere, finding a suitable venue at the Teatro Apollo in Rome, where the censors still pressed Verdi to move the action away from Europe and reduce the main characterin rank.
 
The suggestion of Boston in the late 17th century came from Verdi, who also proposed a governor, “Riccardo, Count of Warwick,” as a substitute for King Gustav III. The character of Anckarstroem became “Renato” while Mademoiselle Arvidson, the fortune-teller who predicts that the next person to shake the king’s hand will kill him, was recast as “Ulrica, a fortune-teller of black race.”

And so, seven months after coming to a dead end in Naples, Verdi’s project was suddenly rejuvenated in Rome as A Masked Ball. Verdi regarded the American setting positively, and thought the libretto had improved by moving to colonial Boston. It wasn’t an historically accurate portrayal– it’s hard to imagine a glitzy masked ball in 1690s Boston or “young Creole girls” whirling to the sounds of a mazurka at the Governor’s mansion – but that was beside the point for Verdi. The opera’s genesis shows that what was critical for the composer of Masked Ball was not so much the outer detail – a particular city or a nobleman’s rank – but the universal structures that govern our most private and public relationships.

A Modern American Setting
Called “unashamedly entertaining” by Bloomberg News, this production from Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito takes place in an America of the 50s and 60s, but makes references to symbols and iconography outside that epoch – for example the extravagant outfit Oscar wears to the masked ball is a theatrical wink citing Björk’s “swan dress” at the 2001 Oscars. In drawing from a broad spectrum of real and mythic American tropes, this production presents a completely invented “modern America.”

The period of the American civil rights movement, i.e. 1950s – 60s, provides a fitting historical analogue for exploring some of A Masked Ball themes. Verdi’s music draws clear contrasts between Riccardo, the progressive reformer who champions the marginalized and the oppressed, like Ulrica, and the cadre of reactionary politicians who oppose such causes, seek to assassinate Riccardo, and undo his liberal reforms. “The destinies of thousands and thousands of other people are linked to the life that smiles on you, full of hopes and joy,” sings Renato to his best friend, the governor Riccardo, expressing a sentiment that could be a refracted version of attitudes about populist figures like U.S. presidents John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. Interestingly, A Masked Ball played a small role in the history of American race relations when Marian Anderson became the first black singer to perform at the Met in 1955. She sang the part of Ulrica.

Morabito and Wieler
The directorial team is well known for immersing itself in an opera’s score and closely following its nexus of music and words to arrive at a production concept. Over the last 15 years, they’ve become two of the most celebrated directors in continental Europe by giving the utmost attention to the musical and dramatic structure of their source material. In a review of a recent production, the Financial Times of London pointed out that Wieler and Morabito have an “unshakeable faith in the score.” As their work is rarely seen in North America, the COC’s presentation of Wieler and Morabito’s A Masked Ball is truly a special opportunity to discover the opera in which Verdi went to the USA.

Insert photo of Wieler Morabito

in 2002 and 2012 Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito were elected “Directorial Team of the year” by an international panel of 50 critics contributing to the magazine Opernwelt, and in 2006 and 2012 were the recipients of “Der Faust” – a major German theatre award – for best opera staging. The German newspaper Die Welt has referred to them as “two of the world’s leading opera directors.”

A Masked Ball runs from February 2 to February 22 at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. To learn more and to purchase tickets, click here.