La forza del destino
Oper Frankfurt, 6.19.22
When director Tobias Kratzer says that Verdi’s La forza del destino is an opera that is centrally about racism, I don’t disagree with him. It’s an opera about a lot of things—the force of history, war, how tenors and baritones never recognize each other. But when you remember that its animating force is not just the firearms accident at the start of the opera but the Calatrava family’s deep animus toward Peruvian Alvaro, it makes Carlos’s misguided obsession with vengeance seem like not only a melodramatic device but an all-too-familiar racist vendetta against miscegenation (something amply backed up by Carlos’s and Melitone’s language against Alvaro in the second half of the opera). This does seem like an opera for our times—after all, one of the main characters decides to get away from it all and hide in a cave for a few acts—as does its suggestion that what we call destiny is actually how people act.
That being said, Kratzer’s attempt to stage Forza as a story of race in America, which I think under some circumstances could have really worked, goes off the rails for reasons both theatrical and ethical. As far as I can tell this production hasn’t been scrutinized in print/internet by any actual Americans, but the opera world is international and here I am, an American.
Kratzer maps the story onto decades of American history, starting in an antebellum South and progressing through the Vietnam War to the modern era. He thus immediately recalls Stefan Herheim’s landmark Bayreuth Parsifal, which used a similar idea. Herheim, however, benefitted from a tight connection between work, time, and place. Kratzer’s production is more nebulous. He also isn’t a maximalist like Herheim, which means that it’s easier to scrutinize each decision he makes because there aren’t as many of them.
One challenge is that I think that this revival may have been poorly rehearsed, because the Personenregie was vague or absent. The cast was all new from the 2019 premiere and they may not be quite on the same page; some of it may have worked better in the original production. (I do not include the musical preparation in this and the conducting by Pier Giorgio Morandi and the orchestra were both excellent.) Also, he uses the 1862 St. Petersburg version of the score, which becomes most relevant at the very end.
Kratzer embraces the score’s eclecticism and uses a large variety of theatrical tools and languages. The antebellum Act 1 contains a video (video by Manuel Braun) in which actors silently mime the plot while the singers in front of them, equipped with identical furniture, more or less double their blocking and sing. There is a whole literature about this kind of mediatization but I can’t refer to it because the relevant Oxford Handbook wouldn’t fit in my suitcase, but I think that Kratzer is mostly doing this because the video features Black baritone/actor Thesele Kemane as Alvaro. Alvaro is implied to be a slave in Leonora’s family’s household.
This is one of the central problems of the production and I think that Kratzer should have stopped and gone back to the drawing board right here. If you want to racialize a traditionally deracialized piece (arguably the production history of Forza has historically whitened it), this is not the way to do it. I understand how opera casting works and Kratzer probably had zero say in who his Alvaro was going to be, but you are still left with a production that uses a Black man’s image on film and not his voice, having him ventriloquized by someone else (in this case Korean tenor Alfred Kim). It’s less obviously problematic than blackface but it’s still not good. If you want your production to be about Black people in America, hire some Black people who sing opera, who still face widespread discrimination and weren’t hired to sing in this revival.
I think the all-white production team is also an issue here. Just to start, the production uses images of racist violence (specifically lynching) in a way that wouldn’t be considered acceptable in the US. It’s not the US, but it might be a more effective work if it allowed meaningful connection and creative agency for communities that it is claiming as its subject. Instead they are found around the edges, silent or dead (the film, though made first, literally casts the silent actors as the backdrop to the singers—the other most prominent people are Laura Tashina as Leonora and Dela Dabulamanzi as Curra, the obligatory Black maid character). They aren’t credited on the Oper Frankfurt’s website and don’t get bios in the program.
The America represented in the production is exaggerated and clichéd, which is intentional (that’s the tone of the genre acts) but some of the images seem muddled in a way that’s odd. The hotel is an Old West saloon with a Confederate flag and soldiers in blue and grey mixing (even though it’s still mid-war because they also shoot up a Lincoln icon) and everyone wearing giant caricature heads like they wandered in from the Katharina Wagner Meistersinger. This is a hard act to make work and this one seems stiff and inexpressive, as well as not quite the West or the South or any recognizable genre of image. It’s too out of focus to work as satire, both in its reference to real cultures and as a piece of theater (this is effectively the Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri of Regietheater).
We then move to an austere religious space and one of the other hitches of the concept, which is that American Protestantism is really different from Catholicism, particularly due to its lack of monastic life (a central aspect of the opera’s plot). This version of Christianity, despite the “Jesus Saves” banner, looks very foreign to an American evangelical or Baptist culture. At the end of Act 2, when Leonora joins the monks’ community, the priesthood dons hoods and carries out a KKK ceremony, ending with a burning cross, and I think that the production team could have stood to read a bit more about what a burning cross actually signified, because it’s not this. The point is that Leonora is being integrated into a white supremacist culture but, I mean, she was already in one well before the white hoods.
The third act is set in Vietnam and is the most successful part of the production. The reluctant soldiers and war mania map onto a setting that is obviously drawn from Apocalypse Now (there is a projection of helicopters but no interpolated Wagner). The long passage of time somehow makes it seem more plausible that no one recognizes each other. Every Regie production feels obliged to do something sexy with Preziosilla in this act (one of the least clothed of operatic characters other than Salome) and here she appears as a Playboy bunny with two sidekicks, and they shoot Vietnamese people during the Rataplan. It’s gruesome and rather more effective than the previous acts because there isn’t so much artifice between the idea and its representation.
The final act is set at a food bank run by the monks in their modern incarnation, their room overseen by statues of Barack and Michelle Obama (this is where Carlos condemns Alvaro as “sangue il tinge di mulatto”). At the end, Kratzer returns to the film doubling for Leonora’s hermitage, here a hotel room. Using the St. Petersburg version of the finale, in which offstage monks intone a Misere, Alvaro dies when he is shot by the police (who are the Padre Guardiano and Carlos), who then immediately frame him. It’s again, not exactly a bad idea, but the use of the film makes it a dodge, actor Alvaro returns only to die, and the interpolation of doctored MSNBC footage of Black Lives Matter protests feels disingenuous, to be extremely generous (to be less generous: catastrophic).
It’s a lot and most of it doesn’t work, but that may have been partly due to the vague and mostly uncoordinated performances by the cast (I don’t really want to see this production again, but I am curious as to what a stronger cast would bring to it). The biggest asset to the production was Pier Giorgio Morandi’s swift, nuanced conducting and the exciting performance by the orchestra. As Leonora and Alvaro, both Izabela Matula and Alfred Kim boasted powerful, stable middle registers, a must for Verdi, but shared the same issue of singing the entire opera at a blunt, unrefined f to ff volume, which became tiresome very quickly, and neither created much of a character. Zeljko Lucic sang with much more nuance but set new records for amount of Baritone Claw and conventional hand gestures, seeming utterly at sea in as a character given great importance by this concept. Bianca Andrew did a fine, zesty job as Preziosilla and deserves a better production to be in. Einspringer bass Don Lee had the unenviable job of subbing in as Calatrava Senior and the Padre Guardiano at short notice but sounded solid.
An example of a production with a similar mission that was, by most accounts, more successful on these counts is Heartbeat Opera’s Fidelio, which I read about but didn’t see. It suggests a very different way this sort of retelling. But that’s not, for better, or for worse, German repertory opera.