simon boccanegra

By: 24 News English 

 “Actually, it can only go wrong”, said Christian Gerhaher shortly before the premiere. Indeed, many things could have gone wrong with this production at the Zurich Opera House. But if the adage is true, necessity makes inventive, then the hour has struck for artistic director Andreas Homoki to turn the Corona emergency into a new operatic virtue. There is already talk of a “Zurich model”. 

The media attention that the premiere of the opera “Simon Boccanegra” by Giuseppe Verdi now received through the live stream on Arte proves that Homoki is right. Only fifty spectators sit in the stalls, a handful of journalists in the first tier. As soon as they get home, they can envision the complete performance again at Arte, which is also a new operatic experience. You can see a double theater of illusions over many transmission channels. Even the live event is an illusion, because the choir and orchestra under the direction of Fabio Luisi will be transmitted to the opera house from a rehearsal room one kilometer away in an optimal sound mix via fiber optic cable. And the peak of the illusion is reached when you even think you can hear long-distance trumpets from behind the stage announcing the appearance of Doge Simon Boccanegra – that’s how amazing the work of sound engineer Oleg Surgutschow is. And the small choir of revolting plebeians who once storm the background of the stage consists of masked extras. 

You still have the long shot in your head, now it is broken up in the stream by many details that create a kind of multi-perspective sequence of images. Although the choreography of the revolving stage in the stream loses clarity, the truthfulness of the portrayed increases with each zoom: You experience facial expressions and gestures almost up close, and only in the close-up do you see how involved the protagonists are in the action down to the blink of an eye. Homoki as director emphasized that this Verdi opera is a serious matter that does not tolerate any frills even under normal conditions. He cleverly circumvented the traps of the rules of distance, only in two places they really got virulent, when Boccanegra wanted to hug his found daughter Amelia and he later, as a dying man in the finale of the opera, asked her to hug him to her heart. But even for this one could still use Verdi’s own statement about the “Simon”: “It is bleak because it has to be bleak.” 

The basic gloom reflects the gray of the stage design by Christian Schmidt, an interior made up of tall, coffered doors that gradually open up using a revolving stage and lead into interiors that suggest either a palazzo, a seat of government with a modernly furnished council chamber or a monastery. But all movements of the revolving stage lead back to the symbolic prop of this staging, to the boat, stranded diagonally in the vestibule, reference to Simon’s past as a corsair and the setting for many flashbacks, and finally Boccanegra’s mythological vehicle to the afterlife. Father and daughter experience their separation traumatically independently of one another, Boccanegra still looking for the lost little girl and her carer, Amelia, not knowing where she actually belongs. Jennifer Rowley, also a debut role, she sings very enthusiastically, but with some diva-like bad habits. In the touching final picture, little Amelia and her mother Maria, who died in the prologue, lead Simon out – the last illusion of a fulfilled hope. The grown-up Amelia and her husband Gabriele Adorno stay behind, whom the tenor Otar Jorjikia does not always portray reliably, but with vocal verve. What should go wrong with such a reflective singer like Christian Gerhaher? His debut in the title role was an example of naturally flowing vocal culture and a psychologically permeated character study, the precision of which is more evident in the stream than on stage. In the prologue with a plebeian worker cap he looks like a man who doesn’t really understand what’s going on here – he is supposed to be elected Doge, but actually only wants to marry Maria, whose father Fiesco, a patrician, is his archenemy and a horrible one to him Provides an ultimatum – that’s how he matured twenty-five years later to become a statesman and peacemaker. 

Filled with heavenly light. But the political and private spheres interpenetrate with Simon, which Gerhaher is striking. If ever a budding hope has found musical expression, it is in the first act, as soon as Simon has found his daughter again, filled with heavenly light and exuding a tenderness that must have accumulated in him over twenty-five years. Despite the vehement appeal to plebeians and patricians for peace and love, Simon is also guided by feelings of revenge, which are reflected in the curse of Paolo (sonorous and appropriately vile: Nicholas Brownlee) with apocalyptic drama. But: Simon too is bowed down by these words, as if he were terrified of himself, lonely and alone, only accompanied by a bass clarinet. Only slowly does he straighten up again and leave the council chamber with his head held high. The production was in top form again in the finale, in which the two opponents Simon and Fiesco are reconciled and despair of Fiesco’s self-posed question “Why the truth so late?” – not only the interior is in ruins, but the lives of two elderly people , broken men who vocal harmonize incredibly well with each other. When Fiesco, embodied by the third role debutant of the evening, the stage character bass Christof Fischesser, cries and an inexorable rhythm marks the passage of time until the music itself falls into ruins, Simon comes over for the last time with that tenderness that only wants one thing : Peace, Eternal Peace.

 ACHIMDANKE

 

 

VIDEO - SIMON BOCCANEGRA - 2020 - 9/10 - Zürich - Fabio Luisi, Andreas Homoki