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Music Review

An Italian in Paris: How a New Stage Lifted Verdi

Verdi’s “Vêpres Siciliennes,” at Caramoor on Saturday in Katonah, N.Y. The work stands on its own, even as it offers a precursor to his operas like “Simon Boccanegra,” “Aida” and “Don Carlos.”Credit...Gabe Palacio

KATONAH, N.Y. — Verdi’s operas for the French stage have become rarities, but in honor of his 200th birthday in October, “Verdi in Paris” is the focus of this year’s installment of the invaluable Bel Canto at Caramoor series, which opened here on Saturday evening with a concert performance of “Les Vêpres Siciliennes.”

While Verdi certainly spent time in Paris, he didn’t always adore it. “I’ve been here for two days,” he wrote to a friend during a stay in 1847, “and, if I continue to be as bored as this, I shall be back in Milan immediately.”

But he had little choice in the matter. Beyond being, as Verdi wrote, the city “where one is said to acquire some civilized manners,” it was the place where opera had acquired a scale and sophistication, and an audience eager for innovation, that the art form often lacked in Italy.

While Verdi thought little of the Paris Opera — “I have never heard more awful singers or a more mediocre chorus,” he wrote, adding that the orchestra was little better — its lavish aesthetic, with months of rehearsals, ballets, multiple choruses and special scenic effects, was the pinnacle of operatic style by the mid-19th century. Any composer worth his salt wanted — needed — to come prove himself on that most extravagant of stages.

Verdi had brought the Italian tradition to a new level in the early 1850s with works like “Rigoletto,” “Il Trovatore” and “La Traviata.” He now had in his sights the legacy of the master of French grand opera: “your enemy Meyerbeer,” as Verdi’s ever-wary companion, Giuseppina Strepponi, called him.

In 1847, Verdi, like Rossini and Donizetti before him, had tested the Parisian waters with an adaptation of an existing work: “Jérusalem,” a new version of his 1843 “Lombardi.” But “Vêpres” (1855), a quasi-historical account of a Sicilian uprising against French occupation in 13th-century Palermo, was his first opera in the true five-act French style.

As scholars like Andreas Giger have shown, in “Vêpres” Verdi did not just pay lip service to the superficial aspects of a form that was new to him. (Double chorus? Check: one male, one mixed. Ballet? Check: an allegory of the four seasons.) He buried himself in the details, adopting Meyerbeerian ideas, paying close attention to aspects of French verse that were unfamiliar to Italian opera librettos and bending his music to accommodate the eight-syllable “octosyllabe” line.

French melodic style seemed, to Italian ears, to lack symmetry in its febrile responsiveness to minute changes in the text. Verdi embraced such alert shifts, even later incorporating them into the fabric of Italian works like “Otello” and “Falstaff.” The French taste for juxtapositions of tragedy and divertissement, sketched by Verdi in “Vêpres,” influenced his experiments with genre in “Un Ballo in Maschera.”

Clearly benefiting from the experience of “Jérusalem,” Verdi, in “Vêpres,” smoothly combined the French style and his own in a score filled with touches that feel uniquely his: the crushing winds in Hélène and Henri’s first love duet, in Act II, and the pearlescent accompaniment to their second, in Act IV.

The second act ends with the Sicilian women abducted by French soldiers and taken to a ball. As the Sicilian men intone shocked syllables in a martial rhythm, a carefree barcarole suddenly emerges from a passing boat carrying ladies and gentlemen to the ball. The contrast caused a sensation in Paris, and it recalls nothing so much as the moment when Rigoletto, exulting over what he believes to be the Duke’s body, hears the happy, horrifying strain of “La donna è mobile” in the distance.

Conducted on Saturday with lively authority by Will Crutchfield and featuring an eager chorus, “Vêpres” revealed its swirling vigor. The Orchestra of St. Luke’s played with an energy that underlay even the lyrical passages; Mr. Crutchfield deftly balanced courtliness and anxiety in the tarantella introduction to the Act II finale.

The soprano Angela Meade, as the noble, agonized Hélène, was as precise as ever, her coloratura assured. But her singing feels fluorescent; it has brightness but little heat or sweetness.

The tenor John Osborn, his high notes tightly ringing, was more effective than elegant as her beloved, the Sicilian Henri. More refined was the baritone Marco Nisticò, too light in voice and manner for the imposing French governor, Montfort, who turns out — in a twist that makes no one happy — to be Henri’s father. The bass Burak Bilgili rumbled darkly as Procida, the rebel leader.

“Vêpres” eventually became better known — adapted and in a punishingly poor translation — as the Italian “Vespri Siciliani.” But the fortunes of the French original are improving. The work finally returned to the Paris Opera in 2003. The Frankfurt Opera just mounted a sleekly modern “Vêpres,” and in October the Royal Opera House in London opens a highly anticipated production by the deconstructionist Stefan Herheim.

The plot, with its painful conjunctions of personal desire and political duty, stands on its own, even as it offers a precursor to operas like “Simon Boccanegra,” “Aida” and “Don Carlos,” Verdi’s French masterpiece, which will be performed at Caramoor on July 20. (You know its Italian version, “Don Carlo.”)

While “Don Carlos” is the greater work, it would have been unthinkable without “Vêpres,” a turning point and learning experience for a voracious genius, and a work of robust beauties. “Pardon my bad French,” Verdi wrote, in 1855, to the head of the Paris Opera.

No such false modesty was necessary.

A correction was made on 
July 10, 2013

A music review on Monday about a concert performance of Verdi’s “Les Vêpres Siciliennes” in the Bel Canto at Caramoor series in Katonah, N.Y., misidentified the act that ends with the Sicilian women abducted by French soldiers and taken to a ball. It is the second act, not the third.

How we handle corrections

Verdi’s “Don Carlos” will be performed in the Bel Canto at Caramoor series on July 20 at the Venetian Theater at Caramoor, Katonah, N.Y.; (914) 232-1252, caramoor.org.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: An Italian in Paris: How a New Stage Lifted Verdi. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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