By Amanda on May 31st, 2006
I’m back from a trip to DC with my friend R. to see the National Opera’s production of La Clemenza di Tito this past Saturday night. There’s a pretty thorough review of this production over at ionarts, with which I mostly agree. I thought Marina Domashenko, as Sesto, and Cristina Nassif (that night’s Vitellia) were the standouts in the cast; I liked Jossie Perez’s Annio too. Hoo-Ryoung Hwang, as Servilia, had a somewhat buzzy quality to her vibrato that I found kind of distracting, but she and Jossie Perez had so much chemistry in their scenes together that I almost didn’t care. I found Michael Schade’s Tito a bit forgettable, though he seemed to warm up as the evening went on. And I liked Vitellia’s bright red dress of crazed wannabe empress-dom (with matching tiara and staff), the one outrageous element in an otherwise rather sombre-looking production.
It’s an odd opera, to be sure, and not to everyone’s taste, partly because the conventions of opera seria seem contrived to the modern audience, but also because Tito, its supposedly central figure, is so heavily idealized. He corresponds only loosely to the historical Roman emperor Titus, and he resembles probably no real ruler ever, what with his impossible niceness and his penchant for pardoning people who try to bump him off. (In his first scene, presented with a huge haul of tribute, Tito immediately allocates it for disaster relief for the victims of the explosion of Mt. Vesuvius. He also insists that he’d rather have his people obey him out of love than out of fear; he’s the kind of ruler Machiavelli would have found eye-rollingly exasperating.)
In this production, the harder-to-swallow moments were played for laughs. When Vitellia sends Sesto off to assassinate Tito in revenge for Tito’s refusal to marry her, and then finds out seconds later that Tito wants to marry her after all, we all giggled; we giggled some more when, at the end of the scene, she abruptly turned around and dashed off after Sesto. Watching, I wondered if any of these moments would have struck 18th-century audiences as comic, or whether the conventions would have been as unremarkable to them as certain cinematic conventions (e.g. the fruit cart rule, or the way a shaky handheld shot of the back of a character’s head signals their imminent doom) are to us.*
But then there was the scene with the burning of the Capitol, and Sesto’s gorgeous arias, and the scene where Annio and Servilia try to do the selfless thing and renounce each other but can’t, all of which were a bit like wandering into a different opera. All of which made me wish I’d been there to see it on its very first night in 1791.
* Years ago, in a graduate seminar on early modern English literature, a bunch of us had a long discussion about how it’s impossible to read The Revenger’s Tragedy nowadays as anything but over-the-top farce. (Parts of the last scene, in particular, are straight out of Monty Python.) And we all boggled over the difficulty of entering into the minds of the original audience: did they think they were seeing gruesome tragedy, or would they have laughed? And if they didn’t find it funny, what other parts of their inner world were closed off to us?
