Don Carlo/s (rainy day fun)

I’ve always thought there are two types of food, the ones that need chocolate and the ones that need garlic. Yesterday, under the influence of spending a rainy Saturday making soup stock and watching back-to-back versions of the same (or same-ish) opera, Don Carlo/s, I started to wonder if rich versus pungent might be a universal method of classification. First was a Don Carlo in Italian from the Met, sumptuous, sensuous, and luxuriant throughout, and next up was Don Carlos in French from the Chatelet in Paris, vibrant, invigorating, and austerely beautiful. My theory broke down on closer examination, since much chocolate also has a bitter bite and garlic can mellow into roasted sweetness, so perhaps my theory is all about the oneness of all things, or the folly of pursuing theories too far.

The differences in the productions might be due to changing tastes in staging, since the Met production is from 1983 and the Chatelet from 1996; both dates are longer ago than I like to think they are. They might also be due to local preference. There’s clearly a lot of money and historical research tastefully lavished on the New York stage (no overdone Zeffirelli vulgarity here), though of course I didn’t have to sit there waiting while they shifted those elaborate sets around. But the simpler sets in Paris, with broad blocks of subtly varied single colors and the cast mostly in black, white, or crimson, struck me as more beautiful, like a painting in which you could stare at a patch of color for hours. I could be happy with either version. The Paris cast tends in the current way to move (and push and wrestle and clasp) a lot more, but that’s not quite the same thing as being better actors. I have mixed feelings about all the movement – these people are aristocrats, and that’s not how aristocrats moved. This is not the same thing as saying that I need to have elaborately embroidered pillows and whatnot in every scene in order to believe; it’s a way of saying that their movement should convey their restricted lives. It reminds me of Branagh’s film of Much Ado About Nothing, which, despite some virtues (Keanu is Don John), completely misses the distinction between court life and village life, opening as it does with a scene of the court lounging in golden fields wearing open-necked shirts, kind of like peasants only cleaner. That’s very much a contemporary view of privilege and ease. Perhaps it’s just the consistency of their internal logic that makes each of these productions work.

Despite recent panic that fashion model looks will supplant the glorious history of waddling middle-aged sopranos pretending to be consumptive girls, both these casts are pretty evenly matched when it comes to acting and physical verisimilitude. I preferred New York’s Nicolai Ghiaurov, carefully costumed to look like portraits of Philip II, to Paris’s Jose van Dam; great as he is, his more authoritarian portrayal seemed more one-dimensional. You could understand how Ghiaurov’s more conflicted king is both the burner of heretics and the defender of the liberal Posa, which made his “she never loved me” aria more heart-breaking than van Dam’s more sombre and bitter rendition, which was in any case marred by some strange staging: he sings the aria while the Queen (in case we didn’t realize she was the one he was singing about) lies fully clothed but presumably asleep in what is apparently their shared bedroom; halfway through she stands and walks (sleepwalks?) out of the room to allow him to finish up his lamentations before his meeting with the Grand Inquisitor, which also takes place in the King’s personal bedroom, thereby conflating the distinctions among the King’s personal anguish, his secret statecraft, and his public persona. The Inquisitor himself hobbles in to weird and absurd flashes of flame, eventually throwing back his cowl to look as green and amphibious as any Alberich. Even without his threatening music it’s pretty clear we’re not going to be rooting for the Grand Inquisitor, but his music is also dignified and somber, and that’s the quality that needs to be presented in order to keep him from being a cartoon villain. To complete the bizarre staging of the scene, he is almost knocked over as he leaves by the Queen, who apparently woke up in some other room and then rushed back in to the bedroom to complain to the King about her stolen jewel box. It seems unlikely that anyone, let alone an aristocratic French woman in the very Catholic Spanish court, would barrel into an elderly crippled priest without an apology or even a glance in his direction.

The Chatelet’s queen, Karita Mattila, gives another finely detailed performance, full of moving little touches – burying her face in Carlos’s portrait in the Fontainebleu scene, touching a lock of his hair when she realizes she has been given to his father instead. The New York Elizabeth, Mirella Freni, is gentler and more melancholy. Both are excellent but my personal preference was for Mattila. Though, without bothering my pretty head about the opera’s complicated history or deconstructionist theories about the instability of text, I wish the Paris production had kept the opening New York used: the peasants gather in the forest, searching for food and firewood, complaining about the sufferings caused by the war. When Elizabeth arrives, she listens to them and dispenses charity, and her compassionate concern explains why she agrees to marry Philip rather than Carlo when she is offered the chance to refuse. Without this scene, it’s puzzling that Mattila’s much more vivacious Elizabeth agrees to the switch, especially since the cajoling crowds are not suffering peasants but elegantly dressed aristocrats. Instead of a tragedy of people caught in historical events they mistakenly think they’re controlling, we end up with the tragic consequences of being a girl who can’t say no.

Eboli is Grace Bumbry for the Met and Waltraud Meier for the Chatelet. With her eager assumption that Carlos loves her and her obvious attempts to eavesdrop and her rendition of the Veil Song, so pointedly about a King who doesn’t love his Queen, while oblivious to the uncomfortable shifting of the other women, Meier is oddly comic up until the end, which adds an interesting perspective to the self-involved turmoil that always surrounds her. Somewhere between 1983 and 1996 Eboli loses her eyepatch. I’m guessing the historical woman wore one, since otherwise it’s an odd detail but it shows up pretty consistently in productions. It actually would have helped in the Paris version, since the court is full of angular women with frizzy reddish hair in shoulder-baring long black dresses and the eyepatch would have singled out Eboli.

Thomas Hampson, the Chatelet’s Posa, had it all over the Met’s forgettable Louis Quilico in looks and style. Like Mattila, he gives a finely detailed performance, deepening his bromance with Carlos with every line. Much directorial ingenuity is expended in making it less obvious that Alagna as Carlos barely comes up to Hampson’s shoulder. Alagna himself is fine, but I have to give full honors to Placido Domingo, the Met’s haggard and unhinged Carlo. Here’s a singer who shows that the musical and the dramatic are not mutually exclusive.