Have you ever wished for something for as long as you can remember? Not with an intense, burning desire, but more with a relaxed, unconscious, and unexpectant vigilance—as if an alarm would reliably alert you when a really cool experience that you always knew you’d enjoy came your way? An experience that you’re nonetheless not so desperate for that you’re motivated to conduct research. You’re just prepared to seize the day if that day ever arrives and you recognize your golden opportunity.
I have. There might be more than one thing on my list, but one sure item is seeing an historically staged opera with no deletions (as is often the case) and one that also includes the ballet originally incorporated into the performance, as occurred with particular frequency in French operas. A true Gesamtkunstwerk. I’ve never understood why opera companies, much less conservatories that train dancers and musicians and that put on fully staged operas (like Indiana University Bloomington), don’t regularly mount such historical stagings, certainly as pedagogically enriching and pleasurable for audiences as for performers. I am not the only person alive who would seize such an opportunity should it arise.
The sold-out performances of La Gioconda at Berlin’s Deutsche Oper attest to this. When my Berlin opera friend suggested attending, I, the operatically ignorant, assumed the narrative centered on the Mona Lisa, often referred to as La Gioconda, after the sitter, Lisa del Giocondo. Curious about the story (by Arrigo Boito), I looked it up on the Deutsche Oper’s website and discovered my error. Nothing at all to do with art or the Renaissance. Instead, it’s a predictably tragic narrative based on a play by Victor Hugo (Angelo, Tyrant of Padua, 1835) about an empathic, Venetian street singer devoted to her blind mother and in love with the exiled noblemen, Enzo, disguised as a sea captain, whose beloved was forced to marry an Inquisitor but plans to elope with her love. Your basic operatic comedy of tragic errors, rash decisions, deception, misunderstandings, and superfluous suicide.
Reading further, I discovered, happily, that the opera would be performed in its entirety, including the ballet interludes and the famous Dance of the Hours in Act 3. I could hardly contain myself. I didn’t even care who was singing (although Joseph Calleja was supposed to); I was going to see an entire opera with dance just as the composer, Amilcare Ponchielli, intended! I could hardly believe my luck. I kept reading and discovered another thrilling tidbit: the Deutsche Oper owned the original stage sets from the 1876 La Scala performances in Milan (purchased after their near miraculous reappearance in Rome in the 1970s) and would use them in the performance! In the ten days between booking tickets and attending the opera, my mind wandered, imagining magnificent, hand-painted designs and a stage crowded with festively dressed singers, and dancers jetéing across the stage. I was not disappointed.
My only other such experience was long ago, in the 1980s, at Sweden’s historic Drottningholm Theater, the one belonging to the ‘outside town’ royal palace – like Windsor in England, Versailles in France, or Sanssouci in Germany. Constructed in 1766 during the reign of culture maven Queen Lovisa Ulrika, Drottningholm Theater has an unelectrified interior made of wood and is one of the world’s oldest and best-preserved theaters. With its wooden walls and hand-painted paper sets becoming increasingly dry and brittle with time, it’s a fire hazard living on borrowed time. Drottningholm seats only a few hundred, operates exclusively during Sweden’s short summer, and becomes uncomfortably warm lit (and heated!) only by candles. I remember hearing the wooden gears grind and the coulisses slide in and out as scenery changed and I felt myself transported to an earlier time. The performance season, which begins in late June, was usually sold out by the end of March. Sadly, by the time my opera-loving daughter was old enough to attend (late 1990s) theater management had decided that preservation trumped viewer and performer experience, with the result that the opera we saw (Mozart) was performed concert-style with singers standing on stage like uncomfortable attendees at a cocktail party. One never went to Drottningholm for the singers, and with that now the primary attraction, it’s hard to understand why anyone goes at all. Nowadays, I recommend visitors take the informative theater tour rather than ponying up dough to attend a mediocre recital.
La Gioconda, in contrast, was spellbinding from start to finish. It was an opera of Wagnerian duration (more than three hours of singing), the orchestra was superb, the singers in all categories robust and with well-matched voices. The choir of around fifty frequently bustled about, generating a sometimes urban, sometimes village atmosphere, and the magnificently detailed historical sets—Piazza San Marco, a ballroom, a sailing ship—created an immersive sense of depth and height that transported me with conviction to seventeenth-century Venice. Everything about this performance, including the appreciative and well-behaved audience, contributed to a thoroughly harmonious and what to me seemed an optimal realization of La Gioconda. I left the hall and stepped into the humid, chilly, cloudy night brimming with gratitude for this opportunity that presented itself at a moment when I could take advantage of it.
