Louise T. Guinther

If you are a lover of the human voice — or even if you’re not yet a lover of the human voice but would like to become one — run, don’t walk, to the Metropolitan Opera House to hear Lise Davidsen in La Forza del Destino. If you’re a lover of Giuseppe Verdi’s operas as he might have recognized them, you may want to bring a blindfold along, to block out the many distracting peculiarities of Mariusz Treliński’s aggressively modern production.

Davidsen gives a performance of power and pathos, despite being garbed at the beginning as a Long Island prom queen and at the end as a bag lady bearing a striking resemblance to Ted Danson in drag. The Norwegian soprano manages to maintain her dignity throughout, filling the cavernous house with ringing, glowing, often penetrating tone. Even her pianissimos make the rafters ring in a way that is rarely heard and not to be missed. The voice itself is the eighth wonder of the world — huge, beautiful and silvery, with a paradoxical aura of both coolness and warmth. Wagnerians have been clamoring for her Isolde practically from the moment she appeared on the scene, but in Forza, Davidsen proves definitively that she belongs in the Verdi pantheon as well, letting the bel canto sweep of the vocal line carry her through soaring phrases, employing legato, rubato, messa di voce and subtle dynamics to convey the full range of Leonora’s emotions, from romantic passion to paternal devotion, from tenuous hope to abject despair, from physical and psychological terror to the final moment of spiritual reconciliation and peace. All of this can be heard in the glorious and ravishingly modulated sounds she sends bouncing off the gilded ceiling to the farthest corners of the house. I hope Davidsen will sing as much of the meat-and-potatoes Italian repertoire as she likes before letting the Wagnerites suck her into the Brünnhilde–Isolde vortex.

Her colleagues, while not matching her astronomical achievement, uphold the Met’s vocal standards reasonably well. Brian Jagde, as Alvaro, started the evening on opening night with some blustery singing, and his Italian prosody seemed rudimentary in the lead-up to his big Act III aria, but he warmed up as the performance progressed and offered some impressively resonant high notes at full throttle, though more dynamic variety would have been welcome. The same could be said for Soloman Howard’s dual turn as the Marquis and the Padre Guardiano: the default mode seemed to be fortissimo, but his rich bass blended nicely with Davidsen’s shining soprano in their scenes together, and he managed to muster admirable dramatic conviction in all of his rather schizophrenic guises. Igor Golovatenko made a highly favorable impression, wielding his resonant, well-projected voice in long, idiomatic and mostly seamless phrases, giving his burnished baritone an edge of snarl where appropriate and using Verdi’s propulsive rhythms to whip up the dramatic intensity in all of Don Carlo’s big moments. The Met Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin covered itself with glory but also more than occasionally covered the singers (Davidsen not included), and the Met Chorus matched up to its own stellar reputation in the massive crowd scenes.

Treliński’s staging goes from one source of perplexity to another. Why what looks like a military dictator’s hotel rally for Act I, meant to be set in the privacy of the Marquis’s drawing room? Why the high-kicking, platform-shoed dancers in bunny ears for the inn scene? (I know it’s the wrong opera and the wrong composer, but Elmer Fudd’s “Kill the Wabbit!” was all I could think whenever they came onstage.) Why the need for a car crash, complete with gigantic video projections of Leonora driving in the rain and a real, live car on the stage, rather absurdly tipped on its side? Aren’t the accidental death of her bullying father at the hands of her beau and her brother’s murderous quest for vengeance trouble enough for one heroine without that? Above all, why the bombed-out subway station for the monastery-cum-hermit’s cave in the last act, particularly when that same location was represented entirely differently earlier in the show?

Never mind that the sets are ugly and cluttered and there don’t seem to be any actual ideas in play—just a series of modern clichés. The real problem is that the visuals are terribly distracting and unmusical. The constant rotations of the turntable are repetitive and sometimes noisy; having the singers stand still while the set comes and goes around them puts the focus on the furniture rather than the performer. The costumes seem designed to make an attractive cast look oafish and silly, with long, narrow coats and tunics impeding natural movement. I suppose with some hard thought I might have able to figure out what Trelinski is trying to say with his perverse and superfluous choices, but I’d have missed the whole opera in the attempt. It’s hard, for example, to be carried away by the resistless surges of the destiny theme in the overture while drunken partygoers stumble about the ballroom and Leonora escapes into a back office to tear off her confining gown. (I’ve heard of a bodice-ripper, but really.) After watching supersize video of a soldier stomping and smoking his way around the encampment, the actual scenery and its inhabitants look puny and insignificant, like a set model peopled by paper cutouts, rather than the vast expanse of the Met stage with its flesh-and-blood artists standing there live, giving their all. Worst of all, perhaps, is the strange treatment of the Marquis di Calatrava and the Padre Guardiano, here played by the same performer but costumed differently for each of his scenes. He begins as a white-uniformed general, drunkenly pawing his daughter, when he is meant to be a wrongheaded but loving father figure whom Leonora is reluctant to leave behind. Next he is apparently an abusive clergyman, slapping the bedraggled Leonora, already bloody from her car crash, and “welcoming” her to sanctuary in the monastery by having the brotherhood beat her with sticks. (Perhaps this is an obscure reference to Verdi’s having been kicked by a priest when he was an altar boy, but it adds nothing to La Forza del Destino.) In the first subway scene, the poor Padre is finally dressed as the monk he is supposed to be (the only character allowed that privilege) and allowed to behave in a mostly beneficent manner, but he is also suddenly blind. In between the scenes the character is supposed to be in, he stalks the stage in his bloodstained uniform, representing … what? Destiny? Vengeance? In his final appearance, again in the subway station, for the opera’s magnificent concluding trio, he is the general again, though his lines, urging penitence and reconciliation, make no sense for that character, or even his ghost.

I know, I know — I am an old fuddy-duddy, and logic is out in theater these days, or at least in the opera house, in favor of “relevance,” whatever that means. But with a plot as sprawling as Forza’s, which takes us from an intimate secret elopement through war, famine and vendetta to ultimate spiritual redemption, there should have been plenty for a director to chew on. Certainly, an opportunity was missed to emphasize the racist aspects of a plot in which an Incan nobleman is rejected and reviled because of his heritage.

Ah well. Notwithstanding the persistent predilection for director’s opera (also known — gee, I wonder why? — as Eurotrash), to me, opera is still all about great voices deployed in the expression of human emotion, and the Met’s new Forza offers one for the ages in Davidsen. Go ye and seek a ticket!