Mercoledi Musicale

Sevilla has served as the setting for several of the more famous operas. Rossini's Barbiere not only practices his tonsorial talents there but proudly proclaims his home town in song and title. Mozart's Don spectacularly fails to seduce any of the maidens in his birthplace (or at least not in DaPonte's version). Leonore, disguised as Fidelio, rescues her husband from the clutches of the evil Don Pizzaro after his long stay at a suburban prison. Verdi's Leonora plans to run away from Sevilla with her Peruvian boyfriend get botched in Act 1 and then she doesn't see him again until Act 4 then promptly dies.

And Bizet's Carmen - well now that's a story isn't it? She works in the Real Fábrica de Tabacos rolling cigars when she isn't rolling customs guards in the nearby Sierra Madres.   And I'm told tour guides in Sevilla are more than happy to show you were she worked and, though I'm not sure how true this is, the odd one can show you the spot, if not the blood stain, on the the Plaza de Toros where Don Jose stabbed her!

I've oft recorded that one of the great evenings I spent at the opera was back in May of 1980 at the Opéra Comique in Paris.  Teresa Berganza had agreed to sing Carmen the year before at Edinburgh provided that the "Spanish" cliches were avoided.  Conductor Claudio Abbado, producer Piero Faggioni and designer Ezio Frigerio built a production around her that was low-keyed, restrained and superbly successful.  Unfortunately by the time it reached Paris Abbado - in a dispute over which orchestra was to be used - had bowed out and was replaced by Pierre Dervaux,   But the main draw remained: Teresa Berganza as Carmen.

In 1984 in conversation with Bruce Duffie she had this to say about the role:

BD:  Is Carmen at all a nice lady?

TB:  Yes, she’s a delightful lady – enchanting.  The problem with audiences going to see Carmen is that they don’t understand who she is.  She has so often been presented as a bad prostitute, and she is not a good or a bad prostitute.  She is a gypsy woman.  Audiences don’t often understand that.  If she were a prostitute, she wouldn’t be working in a cigar factory.  She would have accepted Don José and then given him horns [deceived him] with 5 or 6 men at the same time.  If she were a prostitute, she would have a rich lover and be covered with jewels.  And, if she were a prostitute, she wouldn’t have stood up to José and let him kill her.  She would have fled.  But she is not that.  She is a free spirit, a special woman. . . a liberated woman.

BD:  Do these kinds of women still exist?
TB:  Of course.  It is important to understand the gypsy people, because they are free people.

BD:  Does Carmen plan a few steps ahead or does she just let things happen around her?
TB:  Carmen believes in destiny.  She believes in the cards, so as to preparation, she doesn’t believe that it would make any difference.  The destiny is there.  She has read it in the cards and she goes forward to meet this destiny at the end.  This is the story that Mérimée wrote in his nouvelle and this is the story that Halévey and Meilhac wrote in their libretto and what Bizet put into the music.

BD:  So she goes to meet it rather than fight it?
TB:  She does not fight.  She accepts.

© 1984 Bruce Duffie

And that's exactly how she played and sang it - and when she suggests to poor Don José (Placido Domingo) what happens Près des remparts de Séville he doesn't stand a chance.

You might just hear me - from my first row Circle seat - amongst the cheering audience that glorious night in May.  This video brings back some wonderful memories of an glorious evening.

Mr Duffie's interview with one of, in my opinion, greats of the operatic world is available here. 

March 26 -1351: Combat of the Thirty : Thirty Breton Knights call out and defeat thirty English Knights.

Mercoledi Musicale

When the great castrato Giovanni Carestinti first sang the role of Ruggerio in Alcina he was not pleased with the aria Handel had written for the Crusader hero in Act 2.  Charles Burney recorded the singer's displeasure and the composer's reaction:

Verdi prati, which was constantly encored during the whole run of Alcina, was, at first, sent back to Handel by Carestini, as unfit for him to sing; upon which he went, in a great rage, to his house, and in a way which few composers, except HANDEL, ever ventured to accost a first-singer, cries out: "You toc! don't I know better as your seluf, vaat is pest for you to sing? If you vill not sing all de song vaat I give you, I will not pay you ein stiver."

It is a deceptively simply aria, basic ABA, with very little opportunity for the florid ornamentation that Carestini was famous for.  But its very simplicity makes it a challenge for any singer.  I first heard it on a recording - I think possibly the first LP I ever owned - issued by London Records back in 1962.  Looking back now I realize it was a pioneering effort as very few of Handel's operas were consider saleable quantities at that time.  No doubt London recorded and released it at the insistence of Joan Sutherland who was one of their brightest stars in what was one of the starriest list of  operatic voices on the planet.  London was not stingy when it came to casting the other roles - Monica Sinclair, Graziella Scuitti, Luigi Alva, a very young Mirella Freni supported the slightly droopy - not many consonants in sight - Australian diva and as Ruggerio the incredible Spanish mezzo Teresa Berganza. I fell in love with Berganza from very first listening and my favourite track was "Verdi prati" - I'm sure I drove my mother up the wall playing it over and over again.

A rehearsal photo of Teresa Berganza as Ruggerio in the 1978 production of Alcina at the Aix-en-Provence Festival.  I found it while going through a box of old programmes that had been in storage.

Sutherland sang Alcina on stage in Venice, Dallas and London but to the best of my knowledge Berganza only appeared in it once - at the 1978 Aix-en-Provence Festival.  It was a banner year for Aix and I saw Janet Baker in Dido and Aeneas conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras; Don Pasquale with Gabriel Bacquier; and  Christane Eda-Pierre, Ann Murray, Valerie Masterson and my beloved Teresa in Alcina led by Raymond Leppard.  The weather that year was perfect, Aix was at its most festive, the food was incredible and the music...   as I said it was a banner year.  And if it had been sixteen years since Berganza recorded "Verdi prati" the passage of time had only enriched her performance.  Fortunately it was preserved on video for French Television and I am able to relive that magical experience.

Ruggerio, a crusader knight, has fallen under the spell of the enchantress Alcina, who turns former lovers into rocks, trees and wild beasts.  Brademante (Ann Murray in this clip), Ruggerio's beloved, has disguised herself as a knight to gain access to Alcina's magic island and attempts to save the knight.  He is given a magic ring which restores him to his senses and he sees the island as it really is—a desert, peopled with monsters. Appalled, he realizes he must leave,  and sings "Verdi prati" ("Green meadows") where he admits that even though he knows the island and Alcina are mere illusion, their beauty will haunt him for the rest of his life.

While going through a box of programmes in an effort to get rid of "stuff" I discovered the rehearsal shot of Berganza neatly tucked into the book from that year's Festival. It brought back memories of that summer and a magical evening of music under the stars in the courtyard of the Archbishop's Palace.  The programme and the photo went back into the box - how could I rid myself of anything that brings back such happy memories?

24 agosto/August - San Bartolomeo

Mercoledi Musicale

One of the great nights - and in the past 50 years there haven't really been all that many - I've spent at the opera was May 14, 1980. I shared this memory in a posting back in February of 2007:

Standing in line for five hours at the Opera Comique waiting for a cancellation for the Berganza-Domingo Carmen. Enduring the abuse of the lumpy spun-sugar blond vendeuse at the box office. "Vous-etes fou d'attender" she heckled repeatedly, then magically produced a front row 1st loge seat 2 minutes to curtain time. The abuse was worth it - one of my great evenings at the opera.

The performance was being broadcast that night by Radio France and when I finally got my hands on a copy of the DVD memory had not deceived me or romanticized the event.


Teresa Berganza simply was Carmen - sly, seductive, playful and ultimately tragic. Not for her the hip wagging slattern that so often passes for Bizet's gypsy. And she did it all while singing like an angel.


And though Domingo may have sung "La fleur que tu m´avais jetee" with more subtlety on other occasions that night it was the dramatic core of the opera. The tragedy that followed found its impetus in that aria.

It's the standard by which I've - fairly or not - judged every other performance of Carmen since.

25 giugno - San Guiglielmo