Paging through the chapters is an eerie experience. At the
start of each one, there’s Karajan on screen, his face
inscrutable, a mask of – what? He projects, at best, a statue-
like institutional persona, “Herr Music Director of All
Europe,” as he used to be sarcastically called, in charge not of
music, necessarily, but of musical institutions. Flip from one
chapter to the next, and he looks the same. No New Year’s
froth for him; whatever’s at stake here, it seems deadly seri-
ous, and I’m not the only one to find this unsettling. Two
friends, both seasoned musical professionals, found it
strange, as well, and one of them even told me that Karajan –
his unmoving, not quite human face – disturbed her children.
The operas are happier experiences. Verdi’s Attila is far
from his greatest work; it was the product of a rushed time
when he was building his career, a period he later called his
“years in the galleys.” There are moments when you know his
heart isn’t quite in the music that he’s writing, maybe because
at times he was too rushed to write music that he really liked.
When I’ve seen it on stage, the
work comes off like an animated
poster, broad and bold but never
subtle, though it has wonderful
moments, like most of the last act,
where there’s a tenor aria that
ranks with Verdi’s best, and a trio
that’s simply ravishing.
This performance is broad and
bold, but never quite involving. For a start, I’d blame Samuel
Ramey, the Attila, and the reason for many of the opera’s more
recent revivals; not many works provide such a juicy title role
for a bass, and Ramey’s huge and oaken voice is perfect for it.
(So is his bare chest, as almost any woman who saw him in the
part will tell you.) His problem is that he doesn’t give us any
notion of the person behind the music. Attila, as a dramatic
character, doesn’t go very deep, but he’s more than a cartoon,
depicted, in fact, as the only honest human being on stage, the
only one who isn’t plotting against anybody, the only one who
rejects cowardice and rewards courage, whether shown by
friend or enemy. Ramey can’t show us any of that, and plays
the role mostly as a force of nature, powerful but blank.
Cheryl Studer, as the Italian warrior woman Attila falls heav-
ily for (and who ultimately kills him) is another
blank, completely unable to convey either her character’s
strength, her anger, her conflict, or her swirling, lost love for the
tenor, to say nothing of all of these together. The tenor, Kaludi
Kaludov, is far better, a manly persona with a ringing sound (it
helps, too, that he gets much of Verdi’s best music); his only
problem, as video so mercilessly shows us, is that he looks Slav-
ic, hardly his fault, since he’s Bulgarian. But he’s supposed to be
Italian, and, unfortunately for him and us, this matters here,
because the most convincing of the principals, baritone Giorgio
Zancanaro, looks, with his fine, chiseled Italian face, exactly like
what he’s supposed to be, an ambassador from Rome. “Bring the
Roman envoy to me,” Ramey sings to a servant, and when Zan-
canaro comes on stage, reality, for one brief moment, settles
into place, because a Roman is precisely what Zancanaro looks
like. Nor is his solid baritone voice a disappointment. This is the
one moment of dramatic truth in this performance; everything
else, even Riccardo Muti’s conducting – strong but blank, like
his two leading singers – falls short by comparison.
Adriana is another kind of stew. Cilea was a minor com-
poser of Puccini’s era, the early Twentieth Century, with a gift
for
these in this opera, most of them familiar
excerpts, like the soprano’s two arias, “Io son l’u-
mile ancella” and “Poveri fiori,” or the tenor’s
two. Everything else is empty boilerplate, and
one principal character, the vengeful
has no real musical existence at all. The plot of the opera posi-
tively creaks, and should have been turned into a French farce.
The Princess, at one crucial point, is hidden in a back room, not
knowing that everybody knows she’s there; it’s meanwhile
essential that everyone onstage should have a different notion
of who she is. One intelligent question from anybody, and the
whole tired house of cards would collapse.
So why perform this nonsense? Because it gives a soprano
diva a commanding role, and this rendition features two divas
at once, Mirelli Freni in the title part, and Fiorenza Cossotto as
the Princess. And they’re not just divas; they’re aging divas,
whose combined experience and charisma gives the perfor-
mance a kind of stature, much loved
in opera, that lies halfway between
star appeal and utter camp. There
are some problems, though. One of
them is Cossotto’s character, an
older woman who, if she can’t have
the younger man she loves, would
launch nuclear missiles, if only
they’d been invented, to destroy the
world. This all is so absurd that, as I watched Cossotto, I almost
had to look at the calendar to make sure it wasn’t Halloween.
Another problem is Freni’s voice, originally a lyric soprano,
and too light for this role, even though it’s been strengthened by
age and artifice; it still negotiates (rather than simply conquer-
ing) music that’s too low for it. And the final problem, I’m
afraid, is Freni’s age. I can enjoy a battle of the
but the whole point of the confrontation in this story is that
Freni’s character is young and beautiful, and therefore gets the
guy Cossotto can’t keep. We even hear about her age right near
the start, when a devoted older man falls in love with her.
Worse yet, Freni’s one moment of real dramatic truth is only
bearable if she’s young. Her character is supposed to be a
famous actress, and when she first comes on stage, she’s wor-
ried about a passage in a role she’s about to play. “I’m just a
humble handmaiden of art,” she tells us, and those sentiments
from the lips of an older woman would be disastrously self-
involved, too disingenuous to take seriously, even for a
moment. From a woman of about 22, they’ll pass, but Freni has
not seen 22 for quite a while.
Beyond this, there’s not much to say. The tenor, Peter
Dvorsky, playing a character whose irresistible manly charms
provoke everything, sensible or silly, in the story, sings in a
manly fashion, while looking like a stable, proper bourgeois.
The many minor characters are fine, except the scheming little
Abbott, tenor Ernesto Gavazzi, who has a sharp, clear voice,
but mugs relentlessly, underlining every utterance with a sim-
per or a pose. I wanted to swat him like a fly. I can’t finish,
though, without a cheer for Maestro Gavazenni, whose alert,
rapt, and passionate conducting deserves every drop of the
audience’s adulation. Gavazenni was music director of La Scala
in a bygone era; Riccardo Muti, who conducts the Attila, is
music director now. The difference between them – one man’s
art has character, the other is a flashy empty suit – tells a sad
story about what’s become of opera in our modern age.
