The Wheel of Fate

After Un ballo in maschera, Verdi had said "farewell to the muses" and declared that he would devote himself only to managing his estate and to politics. But in January 1861, while in Turin, he was commissioned to write a new opera for the Imperial Theatre in St. Petersburg. It was La forza del destino (1862, 1869), with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, inspired by the "drama original in cinco jornadas, y en prosa y verso" Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino (1835) by Ángel de Saavedra, Duke of Rivas, recognized by Verdi in his Italian translation by Faustino Sanseverino (1850), which will open the 2024-2025 season of La Scala under the direction of Leo Muscato, who still likes to consider himself an outsider.

In recent years, opera production seems to be moving in three different directions. On the one hand, there's the rhetoric of fidelity to the opera and the text, which invokes the principle of authenticity, as expressed by Giuseppe Verdi himself. "There is only one interpretation of a work of art". On the other hand, we are increasingly witnessing the deconstruction of texts, treated as puzzles to be reassembled by contemplating even the juxtaposition of extraneous materials. Between these two directions, between Werktreue and interventionism, lies the Regietheater, a great factory of interpretations of the German matrix. Where do you and your work stand?
LEO MUSCATO Look, I am 51 years old, and I have come to terms with the idea that I want to be original at all costs, with the fact that I want to stand out as an author, above the opera and the composer. What interests me, both in opera and in prose, is to remain faithful to the relationships between the characters, so that they speak to today's spectator, who must recognise something that deeply affects them in these dynamics. There is one thing I always say to singers and actors: try to imagine that there are no words. Words are just what the characters have to say in response to something that has happened. What matters is logic, that's the key word for me. The things you do, the things you say, the things that happen must be logical. So, what's the difficulty? Keeping the logic from becoming predictable.

BS How did you first approach La forza del destino?
LM When you approach an opera, there are three dates that you cannot ignore: the first is the date when it was written, as the author wrote it in a specific context for a specific theatre and for specific singers/actors; the second is the date of the first performance of the opera; the third, the most underestimated, is the date when you go on stage. Operas are usually commissioned two or three years in advance, and in the meantime wars or pandemics can break out and change everything. But if you get a commission for an opera, you must concentrate on one of those three dates.

BS Which one have you focused on this time?
LM I have been studying Verdi for some time because I am preparing a play about him. He is the composer I know best; I love Mozart more, but I know Verdi better. When I was researching, I did not know how to choose one of the three dates. Then I realised that the fragmentary nature between one depiction and another – much criticised in the essays of experts – actually allows several representations of a period to emerge. So, I realised that I had to raise the bar in terms of the date and exaggerate the passage of time. In the first act we are in the 18th century, in the second in the 19th, then we come to the 20th century and then to the present. I also took up the thread that runs through the whole opera: the war.

BS Man is always of stone or sling, to quote Quasimodo...
LM That's exactly right. I must admit that a film that influenced me a great deal in this interpretation is All Quiet on the Western Front. In the beginning, it's heartbreaking, you see so many young boys, so handsome, so well-off, with diplomatic careers in front of them, being moulded and spurred on by their headmaster to go off to war. Then they go to enlist and have medical examinations. Their hormones are running wild, but they are little more than children. Here they are given torn uniforms, because they belonged to previous boys who went to war and did not survive. They too will die after three minutes at the front. This is how the film begins, and this is how the second act of the show will be: after the intoxication of excitement, there is the inevitable extermination.

BS You talked about dates, war and the masses. What about the love story between Leonora and Alvaro?
LM We see the love between these two characters blossoming in the 18th century. It's the love of two people who still have to have their elopement, or "fuitina" as we would say in Puglia, but in the second and third acts they don't meet again, they don't even touch each other. When they meet in the fourth act, they are adults who have lived through wars. She has even become a hermit. We see her emerging from the rubble of a bombed-out convent, the same kind of rubble we see every day, fortunately only on the news.

BS But there is also a comic side to the opera, in the character of Fra Melitone...
LM Yes, it's true, he's a funny character, but by recontextualising the things he says in a war situation, in the midst of the rubble that I mentioned earlier, the whole thing takes on a different meaning. Fra Melitone makes you smile "green", in the words of Eduardo, who said from Napoli milionaria! onwards: "We must continue to make people laugh, even if the story is set in wartime; you must laugh green and almost be ashamed of having laughed". What I like most about Fra Melitone is that he gets his hands dirty, he is not a priest who sits in the pews and says: "Death to all gays, women must give birth in pain and abortion is not allowed".

BS Is that a criticism of the Church today?
LM Well, we see it with our own eyes. On the one hand Pope Francis is going through revolutions, but on the other hand you feel like you are standing in front of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. At a certain point, you throw up your hands because you want the Church to be close to people, especially minorities.

BS An article in the Corriere della Sera from March 19, 1935, signed by Panfilo, concludes that "reading Piave's libretto, one has no desire to look for others responsible for a drama that, in taking away the rich music, remains a jumble of forced situations and often incomprehensible verses." Turning from chronicler to expert, Fabrizio Della Seta observes that there is a “disorganicity” in the opera that is not a flaw but a well-calculated feature. Whose side are you on?
LM The disorganization is undeniable. For example, it is not clear how the two lovers get lost. It seems that he fled and left her, and instead, in the text of the Duke of Rivas, it is explained that he was wounded and she thought he was dead, etc. The fragmentary nature, however, I agree, is intentional, because already in de Saavedra we have a series of postcards, of frescoes.

BS So, it is not a point of weakness...
LM Even if it was, I enhanced it by setting the opera in different eras.

BS If you could be part of the cast, which character would you like to play?
LM Fra Melitone, because I love comedic characters. The most fascinating of all is undoubtedly Carlo, the villain. But the enjoyment that Fra Melitone gives you is unequalled.

BS If you could ask Verdi a question, what would you ask him?
LM What does he think of this production?

BS I can't help asking, are you superstitious?
LM Not at all. All the fantasies that surround this opera make me smile.

BS But you will feel it around you...
LM Indeed! Just think of Maestro Galoppini: he doesn't want to hear the title, or he'll go into a frenzy.

BS So you are not even a little bit anxious about the 7th of December?
LM I don't feel anxious, but I do feel excited. There's undoubtedly a different attitude from everyone that gets us excited. The thing that excites me the most is the idea that I can do a show that will reach a huge audience through television. I haven't told you yet that the stage is a wheel that keeps turning, the wheel of fate or fortune, whatever. This ring, which allows me to create an almost cinematic sequence, could only be done in a theatre like La Scala. So, the fact that it can reach everyone at home as well as the audience in the theatre, through an almost cinematic language, is really exciting for me.

BS Speaking of the wheel, yours is turning well, I'd say...
LM Yes, let's keep it turning. After all, if not now, when!

Biagio Scuderi
Translation by Alexa Ahern