I due Foscari

Placido Domingo as the Doge in I due Foscari
in the 2014 production of the Royal Opera House.

“It’s sad that if a man wants to project authority, he wears a dress,” – once said Robbert Dijkgraaf, a prominent mathematical physicist, science communicator and the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study, referring to judges, priests, and academics, – “[But] wearing your full robes is not that convincing anymore…” – he added and went on to describe how his three children fell off of the couch laughing when they first saw him in full academic regalia.

In the Royal Opera House (ROH) production of Verdi’s I due Foscari, which is currently shown on film in movie theaters, men of power do wear dresses, and although their scarlet robes with sculptured sleeves are only partially convincing, nobody is laughing. I due Foscari (based on Byron’s play The Two Foscari) is a dark story of grief, loss, and despair, from which nothing provides respite. The red-robed men are the Council of Ten, i Dieci, the rulers of Venice, who are locked in uneasy truce with the Doge, Francesco Foscari. The Ten try the Doge’s son, Jacopo, for murder and sentence him to exile, which would force him to leave behind his wife, Lucrezia, and three children. Lucrezia pleads with the Doge to save her husband, who is innocent, but the Doge chooses duty and political convenience over familial ties and does nothing, which results in an obligatory pile of bodies in the finale. And that is the whole story.

A script in which all action is over before the curtain rises for the first time is a shaky foundation for an opera, but it did not seem to daunt Verdi. In 1844, when he composed I due Foscari, Verdi was thirty one years old and already the author of five operas, among them hugely popular Nabucco and Ernani, – but also a widower and a father who had lost two young children. That year Verdi started collaborating with Francesco Maria Piave, who wrote the librettos for Ernani and I due Foscari and over the following two decades provided librettos for eight more Verdi's operas. But in the early days, both Verdi and Piave were still honing their skills and negotiating the balance of power between them, and the results of these experiments were at times unwieldy.

The music of I due Foscari is dark, too: despite being easily recognizable, it is dotted with unusual in Verdi's later creations moments when the music is throttled. It fails, stumbles, falls apart, disappears, fades. The overture begins with a boastful march, which abruptly crashes against a mournful clarinet solo, briefly revives as a cavalry attack – and dies again. The chorus first creeps in with ominous sotto voce “Silenzio… mistero…” and proceeds in the same furtive and menacing tones. The melancholy clarinet again announces the doomed Jacopo and his aria. [Great was my surprise when I heard Pavarotti sing a couple of falsetto notes in an old recording of Jacopo’s cabaletta.] The Doge appears preceded by a handful of hopping and limping notes that make several timid attempts to gain a steady footing – and give up. Nervous strings usher in the stormy Lucrezia who bursts into the Doge’s chamber to plead on behalf of her husband.

Verdi rarely used character themes in his later operas, but a duet of baritone and soprano became one of his trademark numbers. In Foscari, there is a powerful scene of the Doge and Lucrezia, which plays out like a case of Stockholm syndrome, in which the two characters take turns being the captor and the captive. If in Simon Boccanegra (1857), a story also written by Piave about another Doge – of Genoa, it is the men who are duking it out among themselves, in Foscari, the main conflict is between the father and the daughter-in-law. Even in the guts-on-the-floor terzetto in Act 2, another high drama ensemble, the fire is fed by the Doge and Lucrezia, and Jacopo seems to be thrown into the mix almost by accident, so we may be tempted to think that the titular two Foscari are not the Doge and his son, but the Doge and "l'illustre dama Foscari".

The ROH production has a split personality. The three lead singers deliver excellent vocals and Antonio Pappano's conducting is clever and tactful. Placido Domingo sings the Doge: at 73 he is hedging his bets against the unkindness of age to the tenor voice and goes back to where he started – as a baritone. His voice is too light and bright for the part of the octogenarian Doge, his vocal production appears to be strained, and his singing sensibilities are those of a dashing leading man, not of an old crook, but his musicianship, commitment to the role, and stage presence are formidable. Maria Agresta as Lucrezia and Francesco Meli as Jacopo almost convinced me that Verdi should be left exclusively to the Italian signers. The rest of the cast melded into a faceless wall of menace and hostility, but sounded convincing.

Regrettably, an unappealing production by American director Thaddeus Strassberger does this fragile story no favors. The director tries to show Venice as a place that is rotten to the core, but lacks Jodorowsky’s aesthetic shrewdness required to create a disturbing world about which the viewer would still care. The sets are dark and shambolic, awkward and restrictive, and resemble a dungeon or a collapsed mine. The visuals are overloaded with the latest scenographic clichés, including images and text projected on scrims. Physical direction is abysmal, too (of the "park-and-bark" variety, as one reviewer wittily described it): while the principals go through a set of stock operatic gestures not seen on stage for thirty years, the rest of the cast stands motionlessly and glares at them. Jacopo sings his aria from a cage suspended above the stage, on which people are beaten, tortured, and mutilated for most of Act 1 (w h y???). The costumes – designed according to the principle of “Women are from Mars and men are from The Game of Thrones”– offset this misery with color and inventiveness, but the production visually never comes together. But if the staging does not please the eye, vintage Verdi still delights the ear.