TUESDAY August 30, 7:30 p.m. (finishing at approx. 10.30 p.m.)
LUISA MILLER
Melodramma traggico in three acts
by Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901)
Libretto by Salvatore Cammarano (1801-1852)
after Friedrich von Schiller's play Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love)
First performed in Naples in 1849
Cast
Production
A 2012 production from the Malmö Opera, Sweden
Directed by Stefano Vizioli
Stage design by Cristian Taraborrelli
Costume design by Anna Maria Heinreich
Lighting design by Guido Petzold
Malmö Opera Orchestra and Chorus
(chorus master: Elisabeth Boström)
conducted by Michael Güttler
Synopsis
ACT 1
Scene 1: A village in the Tyrol
On Luisa's birthday, the villagers have gathered outside her house to serenade her. She loves Carlo, a young man she has met in the village and looks for him in the crowd. Luisa's father, Miller, is worried by this mysterious love since Carlo is a stranger. Carlo appears and the couple sing of their love As the villagers leave to enter the nearby church, Miller is approached by a courtier, Wurm, who is in love with Luisa and wishes to marry her. But Miller tells him that he will never make a decision against his daughter's will. Irritated by his reply, Wurm reveals to Miller that in reality Carlo is Rodolfo, Count Walter's son. Alone, Miller expresses his anger.
Scene 2: Count Walter's castle
Wurm informs the Count of Rodolfo's love for Luisa and is ordered to summon the son. The Count expresses his frustration with his son. When Rodolfo enters, the tells him that it is intended that he marry Walter's niece Federica, the Duchess of Ostheim. When Rodolfo is left alone with Federica, he confesses that he loves another woman, hoping that the duchess will understand. But Federica is too much in love with him to understand.
Scene 3: Miller's house
Miller tells his daughter who Rodolfo really is. Rodolfo arrives and admits his deception but swears that his love is sincere. Kneeling in front of Miller he declares that Luisa is to be his bride. Count Walter enters and confronts his son. Drawing his sword, Miller defends his daughter and Walter orders that both father and daughter be arrested. Rodolfo stands up against his father and threatens him: if he does not free the girl, Rodolfo will reveal how Walter became count. Frightened, Walter orders Luisa to be freed.
Scene 1: A room in Miller's home
Villagers come to Luisa and tell her that her father has been seen being dragged away in chains. Then Wurm arrives and confirms that Miller is to be executed. But he offers her a bargain: her father's freedom in exchange for a letter in which Luisa declares her love for Wurm and states that she has tricked Rodolfo. Initially resisting, she gives way and writes the letter at the same time being warned that she must keep up the pretence of voluntarily writing the letter and being in love with Wurm. Cursing him, Luisa wants only to die.
Scene 2: A room in Count Walter's castle
At the castle Walter and Wurm recall how the Count rose to power by killing his own cousin and Wurm reminds the Count how Rodolfo also knows of this. The two men realise that, unless they act together, they may be doomed. Duchess Federica and Luisa enter. The girl confirms the contents of her letter.
Scene 3: Rodolfo's rooms
Rodolfo reads Luisa's letter and, ordering a servant to summon Wurm, he laments the happy times he spent with Luisa. The young man has challenged Wurm to a duel. To avoid the confrontation the courtier fires his pistol in the air, bringing the Count and his servants running in. Count Walter advises Rodolfo to revenge the offence he has suffered by marrying Duchess Federica. In despair, Rodolfo abandons himself to fate.
A room in Miller's home
In the distance echoes of the celebration of Rodolfo and Federica's wedding can be heard. Old Miller, freed from prison, comes back home. He enters his house and embraces his daughter, then reads the letter she has prepared for Rodolfo. Luisa is determined to take her own life, but Miller manages to persuade her to stay with him. Alone now, Luisa continues praying. Rodolfo slips in and unseen pours poison into the water jug on the table. He then asks Luisa if she really wrote the letter in which she declared her love for Wurm. "Yes," the girl replies. Rodolfo drinks a glass of water and passes a glass to Luisa, inviting her to drink. Then he tells her that they are both condemned to die. Before she dies, Luisa has time to tell Rodolfo the truth about the letter. Miller returns and comforts his dying daughter; together the three say their prayers and farewells. As Luisa dies, peasants enter with Count Walter and Wurm and before he too dies, Rodolfo runs his sword through Wurm's breast, declaring to his father "Look on your punishment!"
One of our members expresses his own enjoyment of
this "most underestimated of all the Verdi operas":
A surprise and a joy
Luisa Miller is perhaps the most underestimated of all the Verdi operas.
It comes right at the end of the first of the three periods we can divide his works into, where Verdi was moving from a 'personal' style to an approach to opera in which, as the critic David Kimbell expresses it, Verdi shows a "growing freedom in the large scale structure ... and an acute attention to fine detail."
Like Macbeth and Nabucco, this opera has had to more or less wait until now to be recognised. To most people it is considered to be the gateway to the great three – Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and La Traviata.
The first act is beautifully constructed, with duet finales to the first two scenes and a masterly third scene with a brilliant and original finale. The second act runs equally as powerfully. The third act may seem a little slow at the beginning but comes to a very rapid conclusion with the double suicide, murder and death happening within seconds.
So, to sum this opera up in a few words: it is the one where the hero is an imposter, the heroine is thought to have double-crossed him ... and they both drink poison too soon to enjoy what could have been ... a happy ending.
Musically Luisa Miller is a surprise and a joy. The music definitely overrides any criticism that might be levelled at its somewhat unusual libretto.
As with Don Carlo, there is an impressive duet for two basses, maintaining an unbroken melodic line which eventually leads into a wonderful quartet, and in the case of this opera, an unaccompanied quartet, which makes a heavy demand on the musicianship of each singer. Look out for this quartet near the end of the second act.
The role of Luisa must surely be one of the most difficult from the soprano Verdi repertoire. The singer may not have the opportunity of showing her ability with one or two well-known arias found in other Verdi operas. However, there are extremely difficult musical entries throughout this opera, including a great deal of accuracy required for the unaccompanied quartet. The soprano actually replaces the orchestra for the quartet – a most unusual treat.
- Neil Jenkins, July 2016
NEXT MONTH: Tuesday September 13, 7.30 pm
La Favorite
One of Donizetti's most beguiling scores, in Vincent Boussard's arresting new (2014) production that has been called "extraordinarily beautiful". Three international principals take the main roles, with fine backing from the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse under Antonello Allemandi.
Click here to view a subtitled preview
of this production
Wurm (Lars Arvidson) blackmails Luisa
(Olesya Golovneva) into signing a false confession
Verdi, Schiller, and Shakespeare make a potent operatic cocktail, says Tim Ashley, in The Guardian:
Three giants
Verdi's operatic output is stalked by two of the masters of European literature: Shakespeare and Schiller. During his long career, he based operas on plays by both writers, producing works that on occasion equal their sources. Verdi wrote operas based on three Shakespeare plays, while four of his operas derive from Schiller - including Luisa Miller.
In later life, Verdi kept copies of the works of both writers on his bedside table, and many have subsequently assumed that his attitudes towards them were similar. They weren't. Nowadays, we view Shakespeare and Schiller as the pinnacles of English and German literature respectively - but the 19th century saw them very differently. The Romantics elevated Shakespeare over all other dramatists.
Schiller, however, was deemed transgressive: a libertarian and a revolutionary, a threat to the political status quo. To turn Shakespeare into an opera was to approach the holy of holies. Adapting Schiller was playing with fire, and getting an opera based on his work on stage could be risky, in Italy above all.
Most of Verdi's operas were written against an unstable political background, as foreign armies criss-crossed a divided country, and foreign monarchs held sway over its principalities. Royal censors, arbiters of thought and conscience, watched his every turn. Schiller's radicalism struck deep chords. Even before Verdi produced his first Schiller adaptation, Giovanna D'Arco, based on The Maid of Orleans, Donizetti had fallen foul of censors and politicians with Maria Stuarda, drawn from Schiller's take on the life of Mary, Queen of Scots.
Verdi's second Schiller opera, I Masnadieri, based on The Robbers, was composed to a libretto by Andrea Maffei, Schiller's Italian translator. Both Giovanna d'Arco and I Masnadieri have moments of raw power. But neither is a masterpiece, nor does Verdi come close to Schiller's depth of characterisation.
With Luisa Miller, however, written for Naples in 1849, Verdi's intellectual alignment with Schiller finally clicked into place. The opera's source is Kabale und Liebe - Intrigue and Love - premiered in 1784. Turning it into an opera, however, proved tricky, for the play itself is arguably Schiller's most blistering attack on Enlightenment absolutism, as well as a fierce critique of the divisive power of the class system.
at the Zwickauer Gewandhaus
The setting is a north German state governed by an unnamed Prince, absent from the stage though controlling the characters from afar. Schiller simply calls the Prince's main henchman the President. A power-crazed creature, like many who have held the title since, he is cynically aiming to further his own status by marrying off his son, Ferdinand, to the Prince's mistress, Lady Milford, a Jacobite refugee from Britain.
Ferdinand, however, is in love with Luisa, daughter of Miller, a music teacher. Their love, as far as Schiller is concerned, is quite literally made in heaven, though politics and prejudice will wreck it on earth. The aristocratic President considers Luisa to be the local tart, while Miller, ever the bourgeois, sees Ferdinand as an upper class seducer bent solely on robbing his daughter of her "honour".
Between the characters shuttles the suitably named Wurm, the President's revolting steward, who arrests Miller on a trumped-up charge, blackmails Luisa to fabricate evidence of infidelity to Ferdinand, and forces her to swear at the price of her father's life, to proclaim she has acted voluntarily. Ferdinand, falling for the plot, poisons first Luisa, then himself, after which the truth comes horrifically to light.
It was soon apparent to Verdi and his librettist Salvatore Cammarano that this could never reach the operatic stage as it stood. Schiller's name was doubtless mud in Naples. The local monarch, also named Ferdinand, was a relative of Louis XVI, sent to the guillotine by the very revolutionaries who adored Schiller's work and had made him an honorary citizen of the newly formed French Republic in 1792.
His hero was promptly rechristened Rodolfo, and Cammarano also argued, to Verdi's annoyance, that the prudish Neapolitan audience would never accept a prince's mistress on stage. The glamorous Lady Milford consequently became the more subdued Federica d'Ostheim, Rodolfo's widowed cousin. Prince and President were conflated into a single figure, Count Walter, a Macbeth-like figure, who has murdered his predecessor. More importantly perhaps, the world in which Luisa and her father move has been changed from an urban bourgeoisie to a rural proletariat. Where Schiller attacks the boundaries between aristocracy and bourgeoisie, Verdi pits the populace against a usurping despot.
Luisa Miller represents a colossal step forward in the subtlety and ambiguity with which Verdi delineated his characters. Rodolfo's love for Luisa is at once rapturous and obsessive. Miller is by turns noble and excessively solicitous. Luisa's gentleness is offset by the fury with which she rounds on Wurm. Even the appalling Walter remains just the right side of empathy. Racked by guilt and isolated by his own conscience, he pre-empts the terrifying yet tragic figure of Phillip II in Don Carlos, Verdi's final Schiller adaptation composed 18 years later.
Don Carlos is the finest of all operatic adaptations of Schiller. Together with Luisa Miller, it marks the high point of the relationship between Italy's greatest composer and the extraordinary German writer who both, in different ways, lambasted political tyranny, espoused radicalism and demanded freedom of thought and conscience as an essential human right.
- Tim Ashley, The Guardian, April 2003