When director David Alden made his Metropolitan Opera “new production” debut with an austere, intriguing and slightly undercooked production of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera, in 2012, modern-staging detractors were at the ready. On opening night, boo-birds started in with their vocalizations before the production could get out of the first act. At that point, the opera’s love triangle plot – in which Sweden’s King Gustavo III puts the moves on his chief of staff’s wife, Amelia, pushing his counselor over to the side of regicidal plotters – had barely begun.
And as the night wore on, directorial liberty piled atop liberty. (Why did a painting of a falling Icarus hover over nearly the entire opera? Why did the gypsy seem more like a cult-coven leader, and less like a predictive force? Why were no gallows present for the second act’s fated-love duet between Gustavo and Amelia?) Nor was it only subscriber-style traditionalists – the dependable ones who get apoplectic at the opera house whenever the king’s on-stage manse doesn’t look like a picture-book castle – who couldn’t cotton to the interpretation. Critics disposed to admire Alden’s probing touches were also cool to his thinking here. (It was alleged that Alden had trimmed his intellectual sails, possibly in deference to New York’s prevailing, and not terribly adventurous, tastes in grand opera.) No faction of the local community got what it wanted – not really.
Except for lead-role casting, very little has changed in the Met’s first revival of Allen’s Ballo. But what a difference a change in the lead role of Gustavo makes. Now this thing is a show. And the haters should consider coming back around, though only if they can keep quiet for a bit longer.
On the Thursday night premiere of this run (which will close the house’s season, on 9 May), Polish tenor and Met house favorite Piotr Beczala didn’t merely sing with gleaming lyric authority in each of the modes (comic, romantic, tragic) that Verdi packs into his part. Beczala also engaged strongly with Alden’s staging in a way that the prior owner of the role, Marcelo Álvarez, never did. From the opening seconds of Alden’s version – in which Gustavo wakes from a casual slumber to find his royal page, Oscar, still in the cupid-winged costume that we’ll later see at the opera’s eponymous masked ball – Beczala roamed the stage with game curiosity and intensity.
Whereas Álvarez had resorted to cliched, buffoon-like gestures to communicate the director’s “was I dreaming?” framing conceit – thereby communicating something more like “what a funny dream I just had” – Beczala glared at that infamous Icarus painting that hovers over this production. On this read, it was as though Gustavo was actually thinking about the consequences of his acknowledged indifference to anything but power, whether it be romantic or statist in nature.
This was just the first hint of how completely Beczala would elevate everything around him. That’s not to say that a few performance aspects weren’t ragged: it seemed like conductor James Levine was lagging behind the chorus in the early going, which resulted in a muddying of Verdi’s elegant juxtapositions of mood (half of the chorus is reciting rote praise of the king, while the other half is plotting against Gustavo); soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, returning in the role of Amelia, had a couple of intonation problems in her introductory minutes. But by the second act, the performance had jelled.
Radvanovsky and her wild, dark-hued, house-rocking vibrato earned a big ovation for her opening Act II aria – though the crowd response for her following love-duet with Beczala was still more extreme. Even better, considering the murky moral dimensions of the plot, the two actors looked like they might actually be on the verge of carnal action at the end of the duet. Instead of holding each other’s faces at a polite, three-inch distance, during the extended cheering, Radvanovsky placed her head on Beczala’s chin, and then nuzzled the nape of his neck. It was sexy. And it made you feel more sympathetic to baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s Renato, who more or less walks in on the embrace (though it takes him awhile to put everything together).
Hvorostovky, also a returning member of the 2012 cast, still plays Renato as steely and notably aloof from the king he’s supposed to love so much, during the first act. But the stellar connection between Beczala and Radvanovsky helps this singer’s arc work much better, too, over the course of the night. When he’s advising the king about his responsibilities to the state, he’s not doing it as a confidant worried about Gustavo’s safety – he’s doing it as a “lesser of two evils”–motivated political adviser might do in a contemporary polity. (“Sure, our ruler has flaws, but what holy hell is in the offing if we lose him unexpectedly?”) This realpolitik Renato is supported by Alden’s setting of the closing of Act I, outside the Gypsy’s lair, where a crowd of plebes doesn’t come to celebrate Gustavo as much as feverishly seem to lunge at him, hoping that his presence might suggest some near-term improvement in the neighborhood’s drab street-lighting or its grim local architecture.
The consequences of such indifferent approaches to ruling are a subtle but consistent theme of this production. And when Alden goes in for one of his favorite royal-operatic stage decorations – by plastering the king’s face on a big, ostentatious canvas that sits on the wall (here, during the first scene of the third act inside Renato’s house) – it works better than it did during Alden’s famous production of Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea.
For starters, Renato’s house (as imagined by Alden) winds up being a smaller-scale, less elegantly appointed version – complete with modernist, de Chirico-like perspectivity – of the king’s lair. (Other productions of this opera have chosen to make their two abodes more or less the same size, which is a mistake.) And the portrait of the king that dominates the smaller square-footage of Renato’s home isn’t just an explicit reminder of life under the monarch. It’s a galling thing for Renato to have to look at, after his wife’s convincing betrayal; the image helps turn him savagely, bitterly abusive against Amelia, whose third-act spotlight, Morrò, Ma Prima in Grazia, only seemed more affecting as a result.
By the time Renato goes in for the kill, during the concluding “masked ball”, Alden doesn’t try to make the approach look dastardly elegant: the director removes the dancing citizenry to the rear of the Met’s deep caverns, and draws the stage action out across a large distance. Renato, having abandoned practical considerations of the state, is lunging about in his own world – an approach which also gives Hvorostovky a little dramatic cover, when he’s pushing his voice to a near-shout. Thanks to the top-to-bottom strength of this cast, and the music Levine makes with the Met Orchestra, it’s of course possible just to follow along with the dramatic elements of Un Ballo in Maschera that have been adored forever. But the nightmare-stoking transition of Renato, and the other political touches of Alden’s staging, don’t just give Piotr Beczala’s dreaming Gustavo something to think about: they give the Met audience something to mull over, too.
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