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As the dramatic music swirled Monday night, the woman walked a few steps pushing a dirty shopping cart, so hunched and disheveled that she looked like an extra, sent onstage to set the scene before the star entered.
Then she opened her mouth and a note emerged so pure and clear, widening into a scream before narrowing to a murmur, that it could only be soprano Lise Davidsen, cementing her stardom in a new production of “The Force of Destiny” by Verdi at the Metropolitan Opera.
In his still young career at the Met, Davidsen has triumphed in works by Tchaikovsky, Wagner and especially Strauss. She has quickly become the rare singer you want to hear at everything. But Verdi and the Italian repertoire traditionally belong to velvetier, warmer voices than hers, which has the cold, powerful authority of an ivory sword, particularly in the flooded high notes.
There were moments on Monday when a soprano more fiery than ivory was needed. Davidsen is statuesque and her sound is too: grand and decorous. There were moments when the anguish of Leonora, the heroine of “Forza,” would have been more crushing if her lower notes had an earthier fervor.
But we go. Objections aside, there are very few artists in the world who sing with such generosity, sensitivity and visceral impact.
And at the Met premiere of Mariusz Trelinski’s modern-suited, dark steel-gray staging, set on the confusing line between bleak reality and bleakest dream, Davidsen was part of a magnificent cast, directed with delight by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who is at his best in Verdi’s longest canvases. The orchestra sounded elegant and forceful; the choir was haunting with misty religious chants and ominously moving calls to arms.
What a way to bring this opera back to the Met. Probably no other work by Verdi has strayed further from the canon to the margins. Monday’s performance of “Forza” was the company’s 230th, more than “Don Carlos” or “Falstaff,” but only the 10th in the 21st century and the first since 2006.
Why hasn’t it been posted since then? It requires no fewer than six excellent and passionate singers and is as difficult to cast as Verdi’s “Aida,” but it lacks that work’s combination of dramatic focus and monumental spectacle.
Focus is not the strong point of “Forza,” one of the middle period pieces in which Verdi experimented with wandering rhythms and discordant mood swings. Even by operatic standards, the plot devices squeak. The gun of Leonora’s lover, Álvaro, accidentally goes off, killing his father and provoking the unbreakable enmity of his brother, Carlo. And from there, the story is full of coincidental “oh, it’s you!”-style encounters, the implausibility of which is only explained by the title’s reference to the implacable hand of fate.
A bad interpretation of “Forza” is scattered and long. Even the good ones are fascinatingly disjointed. You get beggars and nobles, the sacred and the profane, the monastery and the battlefield – the full novelistic scope of its setting in wartime 18th century Spain and Italy.
In a production first seen at the Polish National Opera last year, Trelinski brought the opera into our time, which was clear from the beginning. The curtain opens like the overture, to reveal the Hotel Calatrava. The Calatravas are Leonora and Carlo’s family, and it is suggested that her father, a general who leads a dancing crowd at a fascist-style rally, is the owner of the hotel. (The public should consider other hoteliers turned aspiring strongmen.)
Leonora, in evening dress, walks nervously through the hotel, greets the hairy, casually dressed Álvaro, and hides him so she can escape later that night. The death of her father interrupts her plans and sets in motion a plot that has dragged on for years as Leonora, Álvaro and Carlo go their separate, tortured paths.
As in Trelinski’s previous stagings at the Met, a winter double bill of “Iolanta” and “Bluebeard’s Castle” and “Tristan und Isolde” set aboard a military ship, this is very much a world devoid of color and comfort. (Boris Kudlicka designed the rotating sets; Moritz Junge, the costumes full of uniforms; Marc Heinz, the austere lighting; and Bartek Macías, the sober video projections).
The monastery where Leonora seeks refuge is not a warm and welcoming place, as always, but a prohibitive amalgam of the religious and the militaristic, an intensification of the world she is fleeing. Even Fra Melitone, the opera’s odd touch of comic relief, is played by enthusiastic bass-baritone Patrick Carfizzi with more acidity than usual.
The confusion between Leonora’s past and present is accentuated by her decision to cast the imposing bassist Soloman Howard as her father and Guardian, the father superior of the monks. Is this doubling down on her fantasy? It is real? Does it comfort her or terrify her? The production keeps everything intriguingly ambiguous.
Preziosilla, the hauntingly optimistic performer of the opera’s war scenes and one of Verdi’s strangest characters, is here a Marlene Dietrich-style cabaret performer dressed in shiny silver. Singing the part with lively energy and piercing high notes, mezzo-soprano Judit Kutasi, in her Met debut, joined a small group of prancing dancers wearing rabbit masks and long, pointy ears. (Are we supposed to think about the Playboy bunnies? “Maus”? “Cabaret”?)
Smoothing the plot’s tonal contrasts into relentless ash helps in some ways: You don’t ask, as you sometimes do in “Forza,” why a carnival breaks out in the middle of a melodrama. But those contrasts are also the strange glory of the opera; when they are downplayed, the piece can appear flatter and less idiosyncratic.
Although not in this final act. The sets in the new staging are sparse and generic until then, when the curtain rises on a painfully naturalistic, bombed-out subway station that evokes a post-war, almost post-apocalyptic mood of exhausted misery. Here the final confrontations of this embittered people take on a tragic and wounded stature.
As Alvaro, tenor Brian Jagde, tremendously emotive throughout the opera, his high notes ringing out, here, near the end, somehow ages vocally persuasively, without losing his burnished brilliance or vigor. Baritone Igor Golovatenko, as Carlo, demonstrated here, as he had done in “Urna fatale,” his earlier ardent outpouring, that his long legato lines have a dramatic purpose, underlining his relentless pursuit of his prey. of his character.
But on Monday it was Davidsen’s Leonora, reduced from a rich man’s daughter to a stooped vagabond, who stopped the show with her grand aria “Pace, pace, mio Dio,” longing for freedom from her torments.
Tired and noble, with floating filament-thin top notes and a warrior curse at the end, it provoked such a long applause that Davidsen, visibly moved, finally broke character, placed her hand over her heart and bowed her head. As she returns next season with Beethoven’s “Fidelio” and Puccini’s “Tosca,” we should be grateful for an artist like her, in each and every one of her repertoires.
The force of Destiny
Continues through March 29 (with cast changes) at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org.