Marlies'Artbeat: "Cavalleria" and "Pagliacci"-- The Verismo Duo in Live-at-the-Met-in-HD

What again? Yes –- and over 700 times! That’s how often the Met has offered Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, the Verismo duo of which the world just can’t get enough. And why not? The honest, amazingly direct, but musically luscious operas are riveting theater.

They might never have seen the light of performance, had the publisher Sonzogno not sponsored a contest for one-act operas in 1889. Both Cav and Pag won and catapulted Verismo into the opera world, and influenced stark realism in literature, plays and films right up to our own times.

The quick productions of the one-acters made rich men of the composers over night. The story goes that Mascagni, concerned with receiving possibly damaging criticism, decided not to submit the work. His wife took it upon herself to do so. As the number one winner, he reaped tremendous honors for the rest of his life. Leoncavallo was winner number three, and also benefited immensely.

It is ironic that both these top-winning and incredibly enduring operas, turned out to be the only true successes for both composers. Mascagni, who composed 15 more operas, at the end of his life is quoted saying: “It is a pity I wrote Cavalleria first, for I was crowned before I became king.”

Leoncavallo, a devotee of Wagner from whom he adopted the use of the leitmotiv as well as always writing his own libretti, tasted Verismo first hand, when early on he was a starving roommate of Puccini.

There are those who deride Cav/Pag as Kitsch. Let them, while we enjoy the tantalizing musical offerings for what they are: emotional, highly charged unsophisticated, unadorned love entanglements.

Sir David McVicar, the director from Scotland, who may be remembered for his most admirable Met stagings of Maria Stuarda and Anna Bolena a couple of season’s ago, sets Cav/ Pag in a Southern Italian town. Cav in about 1900 and Pag just after WWII in that same town, two generations later.

Cavalleria tells the story of a young man returning to the town to find his adored girlfriend Lola has since married the town’s rich cart driver Alfio. To win Lola back via jealousy, the hot-blooded Turiddu has an affair with the vulnerable Santuzza, who when he throws her over for Lola, betrays him by telling Alfio of the adultery. A duel ensues and Turiddu is killed.

Pagliacci is the tale of love gone wrong in what traditionally was a commedia-dell’arte traveling group. McVicar makes it a motley vaudeville company that has come to the town to perform. (For unqualified authenticity the Met hired Emil Wolk, a well-known actor from Brooklyn as vaudeville consultant.)

Canio, the clown who heads the group, correctly suspects his wife Nedda has a local lover. His suspicions are reinforced by Tonio, another member of the group who was rejected by Nedda. In the raucously comedic play-with-in-a-play, real tragedy ensues when Canio kills the lovers, therefore dooming himself as well. Verismo!

Marcelo Alvarez, the excellent tenor from Argentina, here portrays the lead in both operas. (A formidable challenge, not too unusual however. Jonas Kaufmann chose to do the same in Salzburg, just this Easter, to sensational reviews. Would it not be exciting if the Met invited him to do the same here, so we could compare performances? A pipe-dream, alas, in this intensely regulated opera world where performances have to be scheduled as far as five years in advance.)

Alvarez, a Met veteran since 1998, is a passionate, clumsy Turiddu; a mama’s boy who does have the grace to want to make up for the harm he did Santuzza. Frankly I considered him too old for the part, but vocally he was splendid, full-voiced with clarity and strength throughout. Far better suited to portray Canio, he manages to be a very believable Pagliaccio, an inelegant boor rather than the mere performing clown. Again the vocal performance was not to be faulted.

Eva-Maria Westbroek, the Soprano from the Hague, who can be recalled as the winning Sieglinde in the “Machine” Walkuere, here gave us both an excellent vocal and acting Santuzza. A real woman, so vulnerable she can readily break your heart. But the direction (I presume) has her hitting the floor so many times, I lost count.

Her rival Lola, the comely mezzo soprano Ginger Costa-Jackson, was so attractive you wonder that she ever allowed either Alfio or Turiddu to come near her. And she sings quite prettily, too!

The baritone, George Gagnidze, who comes from the Republic of Georgia, took on both Alfio and Tonio performances. He absolutely fits the threatening parts both vocally and physically.

His delivery of the prologue was an actual vaudeville routine far from alerting us to the “noir” to come. (It would have been brave had McVicar allowed him to utter the famed closing: “La commedia e finita.” [The comedy is finished.] Seems both some Herbert von Karajan and Riccardo Muti performances have done so, fulfilling Aristotle’s rounding principle as well as Leoncavallo’s original intention.)

The attractive but bitchy Nedda was the soprano Patricia Racette who hales from New Hampshire. As Canio’s dissatisfied wife, the singer strutted her stuff as I have never seen a Nedda do before. During intermission, we were offered a documentary of Racette’s visiting a High School music class. She came across as an insightful, marvelously well-informed and serious musician.

The set designer for both operas was London’s Rae Smith making her Met debut. (Her Broadway Warhorse staging captured her a Tony.) She staged both operas using a series of rotating platforms which in the super-bare setting of Cavalleria must have been quite confusing for anyone not familiar with the one-acter. And it was all so dark, also with the costume designer Moritz Junge having everyone dressed in black or dark grey -- on Easter Sunday, a day usually bright with celebration. All around a definite departure from the Zeffirelli type productions we’ve come to expect.

But why quibble -- musically this was a feast. All under the wonderfully able baton of Fabio Luisi, who elicited the best our fabulous Met orchestra and chorus always seem to be able to give the world – literally the whole world -- via these global transmissions.

Our lively host was the delightful Susan Graham fresh from her performance of The Merry Widow the night before.

Altogether this matinee was a decidedly impressive showcase for Verismo, which may not be the taste for every opera devotee. But it must be taken seriously as a form, for anyone taking opera seriously. Webster defines it as: The theory that art and literature should adhere closely to reality even in representing the ugly and distasteful aspects of life.

If you missed this HD performance, catch the encore at White Plains City Center or the NewRoc, at 6:30, April 29th 2015.