SFO Lucrezia Borgia

Lucrezia Borgia

SAN FRANCISCO

San Francisco Opera

9/23/11

In Review Lucrezia Borgia hdl 1211

Fabiano and Fleming in SFO's Lucrezia Borgia © Cory Weaver 2011

Renée Fleming returned to San Francisco Opera on September 23 in the title role of Lucrezia Borgia. The company's first production of Donizetti's 1833 opera seriagenerated considerable interest, and the casting of Fleming as the murderous Lucrezia guaranteed strong sales at the box office. Yet the uneven opening-night performance suggested that San Francisco has yet to see a definitive production of this tragic mother-and-child reunion, a loose retelling of history with a libretto by Felice Romani based on the play by Victor Hugo.

Director John Pascoe, who created this staging for Fleming and Washington National Opera in 2008, was also credited as production designer. Pascoe used a heavy hand and a relentlessly dark scheme to create the Italian Renaissance setting of the opera. He favored massive stone facades, wide stairways, slow-motion swordplay and smoke-emitting dungeons bathed in gloom (lighting by Jeff Bruckerhoff). Pascoe dressed the cast in brocades and form-fitting leathers and employed stock scenes of drunken soldiers, lock-stepping guards and whip-wielding torturers, all in service of depicting, according to the program notes, "a time of male domination." Into this milieu came Fleming's Lucrezia, making her first entrance under a massive gold "Borgia" insignia suitable for a couture house. 

Pascoe clearly views Lucrezia as victim rather than villain, yet Fleming's performance offered scant evidence to support either extreme; for the most part, the soprano struck poses indicating peevishness or exasperation. Her lyric soprano retains much of its vocal strength and golden hue, yet the demands of the role were frequently left unmet; trills were often sketched in or approximated rather than fully articulated, and her voice thinned under pressure. Act I was particularly uninspired, with Fleming's wan "Com'è bello" the dubious highlight. Thereafter, the performance intermittently cohered, thanks to the artists surrounding Fleming. The Gennaro of tenor Michael Fabiano and the Maffio Orsini of mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong were especially persuasive. Pascoe made the pair lovers as well as warrior-brothers: the director outlined their relationship in several hot clinches, though the visual statement seemed rather extraneous in view of these artists' impassioned vocalism and emotional clarity. Fabiano, despite a costume that suggested an extra from Barbarella, managed to project heroically; he was vigorous in action, firm and warmly expressive of voice, particularly in his final arioso. DeShong's Orsini was also impressive; the petite mezzo deployed large, vibrant tone capped by an exemplary brindisi. The pair's Act III duet was the evening's highlight, supplying a large measure of the urgency missing elsewhere. As Duke Alfonso, Vitalij Kowaljow offered a sturdy, mahogany-toned bass that was a decided asset. Daniel Montenegro (Rustighello) and Ryan Kuster (Astolfo) made the most of their duet. Ian Robertson's chorus sang with dark-hued resonance.

 

In his company debut, conductor Riccardo Frizza made a favorable impression. The Italian maestro savored the delicacy and elasticity of Donizetti's score, drawing luxuriant sound from the strings and plangent contributions from the woodwinds. Frizza sometimes faced an uphill battle with his cast, but the orchestra sounded shapely throughout and delivered with enveloping intensity in the finale; here, the company, Fleming included, rose to the occasion.

– A Story of Love and the Misogyny of History

https://sfopera.com/globalassets/streaming-pages/lucrezia/lucrezia-borgia--synopsis.pdf 

by John Pascoe | Insider Info

To understand the emotions behind the dramatic story line of Lucrezia Borgia, I feel that it is vital to bear in mind the social and historical background of the characters. Despite the fact that Lucrezia Borgia has been known primarily as a beautiful poisoner, there is an excellent case for viewing her as more victim than villain. Donizetti’s romantic score aids us in this attitude, as does a review of the mythology of her life. These indicate that Lucrezia may have been sexually abused by both of her brothers—Cesare and Giovanni—and also by her father, the future Pope Alexander VI. As family backgrounds go, it is hard to imagine a more horrifying one.

However, when viewing the roles that these males played in both her life and the world in which they all functioned, Machiavelli’s famous (and frequently misquoted) line, “The end justifies the means,” comes appropriately to mind. Machiavelli’s nearly 500-year-old treatise on male power-play The Prince was a virtual celebration of the exploits of Lucrezia’s brother, the power mad Cesare Borgia. He not only rampaged around what we now know as Italy—attacking castles at will and taking all he wished—but also reputedly killed Lucrezia’s second husband as well as his own brother Giovanni.

The fratricide appears to have been the direct result of Cesare’s discovery of the reputed affair between his brother and their sister. If a child was produced by this union it would certainly have been hidden by Lucrezia in order to protect its life from the jealous Cesare. So there seems to be every reason to accept the premise that the son referred to in Donizetti’s opera as Gennaro is in fact the product of the incestuous union with her murdered brother, Giovanni Borgia.

HISTORY
To state the obvious, the fact that history has traditionally been written by men has given us a distorted view of the past. Men are viewed as being heroes for killing and women are described as villainesses when they dare to fight back. Fortunately for us, Donizetti does not agree with this view of womankind: his music for Lucrezia is full of power, passionately expressed love, and the purest beauty.

The story of the opera commences some twenty years after the birth of the mysterious child, and it spins around the tangled rapport that Lucrezia has with her brutal husband Alfonso d’Este, her now adult son Gennaro (who has been raised in ignorance of both his and her identity), as well as with Gennaro’s friend Maffio Orsini.

The relationship between Gennaro and his lover Maffio (for whom Gennaro ultimately sacrifices his own life) arguably provides the only purely loving element of the story. The fact that this relationship is between two male warriors, in my view, gives the opera an added modern kick.

All of this melodrama might appear to have all the makings of the most lurid plot of a television series, yet none of the characters seem cardboard and the plot’s twists seem anything but artificial; courtesy of the stunning flow of passionately melodic modulations from Donizetti. For me it is his music that transforms a story of blood and violent passions—where revenge and murder become the wages of love—into a transfiguring drama.

I am deeply honored to be presenting my production of Lucrezia Borgia in San Francisco, the magnificent house where I made my international debut as a set designer so many years ago with Handel’s Giulio Cesare. But it should be said that to endeavor to create a production of this seminal work without a great bel canto conductor at the helm and a true prima donna at its center would be a task doomed to failure. Maestro Frizza and I have been aiming to work together for years, and I am deeply excited to do so on this project. At its center singing the role of Lucrezia is the glorious Renée Fleming, who has, for the many years of this project’s gestation, been the prime and blazing inspiration for its very creation.

I am also grateful to David Gockley, who has been involved with the project from the beginning, for inviting me to present Lucrezia Borgia here in San Francisco. May I venture to trust that aided by Donizetti’s stunningly dramatic music, the complex world surrounding the beautiful Lucrezia, her son Gennaro, and his doomed relationship with his warrior lover Maffio Orsini, will once again live and perhaps even have the power to make us shed a tear for hopeless love?

Note: This essay was published in a 2011 edition of San Francisco Opera Magazine.