I wonder if Arrigo Boito was a fan of Schopenhauer? Yes, I hear you say, “I’ve often wondered that, too… but who the hell is Arrigo Boito? And is Schopenhauer that chap who played for Bayern Munich in the 60’s?”
This idle musing is prompted by someone – me – who had never heard of Arrigo Boito either, until Monday last, and who fell asleep over Schopenhauer in a philosophy lecture at the University of Glasgow in 1972.
I passed the degree exam, because, you see, falling asleep was but my conscious choice of the many options involuntarily presented to my subconscious mind – I could, if you think about it, simply have walked out – and Schopenhauer would have approved.
Schopenhauer’s great insight was that fate gives us choices on a plate. We pick from the plate, but can’t choose the menu. Bravo! My degree exam paper was even shorter than that – yet I still passed. Piffle is not the exclusive prerogative of the early 21st Century.
Arrigo Boito (1842 -1918) was an Italian composer and librettist, a one opera wonder as a composer, but a many-opera-veteran of writing librettos, collaborating with Giuseppe Verdi, most notably and successfully on the later “Otello” and “Falstaff”. His only opera “Mefistofele” (1868) has been revived again by the Metropolitan Opera at New York’s Lincoln Center, where it first debuted in 1883.
In 1868 at La Scala, Milan, Boito got handed his ass on a plate. (Sorry, that’s an expression an American friend, of otherwise impeccable literary credentials, introduced me to a coupe of weeks ago and I’m damned if I’m not going to use it). It reappeared – opera, not the ass – in a shorter form in Bologna in 1875, cut from five hours to three, to a better reception. It’s interesting that the Met, formed in 1880, picked it up as early in 1883. Maybe it was cheap.
In Boito’s version of the Faust/Mephistopheles tale the insatiable Dr. Faust regains his youth and the ability to pick a life cameo of his choice, so he may experience a sublime moment and eventually redeem himself – hence the link with Schopenhauer’s “choosing what we wish”. In most other versions the original Faust – Johann Georg Faust (1480 -1540) – sells his soul to the devil to gain unlimited knowledge and goes to hell. Inevitable. Very un-Schopenhauer.
Over the centuries the story was reworked by Christopher Marlow, Goethe and playwright Michel Carré, whose version “Faust et Marguerite” was used by Gounod in his opera, “Faust,” in 1859. Boito follows that version. In the final scene Faust experiences a moment of redemption through his “choice” – and so the ever so slowly trundling Circle Line of eclectic influences ends up back at Schopenhauer station – where we started. Whew!
Was “Mefistofele” worth reviving? This production is about spectacle and when the Met really puts its mind to spectacle the company is in a class of its own. Producer, Robert Carson, and Set and Costume Designer, Michael Levine, have confected a breathtaking backdrop and constant flow of action that would have blown Boito’s mind.
They have plenty of material to work with. The Prologue is in heaven – and at curtain up they show us an “opera house heaven” reflecting ourselves in the auditorium. “We’re all in this together”. Look hard as I might I couldn’t spot David Cameron amid the rosy-cheeked cherubim.
In the “boxes” was the heavenly host, the entire female chorus, Venetian-style white masked, golden crowned and clad in glittering, diaphanous blue, silver and white flowing robes, each holding a candle. There is a dialogue with a sinisterly elegant, red satin-suited Mefistofele, complaining about humans not being worth tempting anymore because mankind has become so degenerate and the Creator is losing the plot. “Not so, what about the scholarly Faust?” “Good point, I’ll sort him out”, says Mefistofele. Pardon me for foreshortening the story, but the full synopsis can be found online. Highlights only, here.
Act 1 finds the elderly Faust joining the holiday crowd’s celebration of Easter in Frankfurt with his student, Wagner. The inclusion of Wagner is totally gratuitous – but Boito was cocking a snook at his Italian audience at the premiere. Italian music lovers despised “Wagnerism”.
Boito’s score was dismissed as “Wagneristic” and the inclusion of the German giant in Act 1 was an inflammatory two fingers. Herr Wagner wanders off after a brief discourse and has no relevance to the plot at all, other than to provoke “trouble in stalls”. Well, it worked. Back then the audience booed – the reviews were scathing.
All this took place at a time of fervent Italian nationalism – Risorgimento, the Seven Weeks War allied to Prussia against Austria, which regained Venice, but carelessly lost the Italian fleet. In 1866 Boito – then part of an artistic movement known as the Scapagliatura (The Dishevelled Ones) – served under Garibaldi in the war.
He was an internationalist, keen to move on from what he and his Scapagliatura collaborators saw as conventional, sclerotic Italian musical form and looked to Wagner’s German nationalistic musical style for reinvigoration. He fell out with Verdi on the point and was reconciled only decades later.
In an aside: Wagner was not performed at all in Italy until 1871 in Bologna – Lohengrin – six months after it had been first performed in New York.
Back to the plot. The Act I holiday scene, backdrop to this adroit Wagnerian insult, is a spectacle of exotic processional floats, unlikely animals, a Chinese dragon, blinding colour and troupes of dancing ladies, seemingly clad only in sparely applied layers of body paint. It may not have been 19th century Frankfurt, but, boy, was it eye-popping. Think Busby Barclay meets Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and you’re halfway there.
The libretto cries out for this over the top spectacle. Heaven; Easter Parade; Witches Sabbath; Helen of Troy’s Greece (no kidding) and a Heavenly vision finale – again. As I clapped and hallooed the end of Act I, the previously inscrutable gentleman on my right grabbed my arm, chirping, “That’s nothing. Wait ‘til you see the Epilogue”. He’d been to all three previous performances and was, himself, in heaven.
Musically, the opera is enjoyable, but not particularly memorable. Boito could never approach Verdi’s level of musical skill – and, to be fair to him, he was the first to acknowledge it. He destroyed the score of his other completed opera, “Ero et Leandro” and left only sketches for a third, “Nerone”, which was completed by Arturo Toscanini – a fan, who conducted a memorial concert for Boito at La Scala in 1948.
Many rubbish opera productions – I’m thinking here of a goofy Don Giovanni in a public convenience – can be tolerated by closing the eyes and listening to the music. A badly produced “Mefistofele” would just be a bore – but the patchy score, punctuated by moments of soaring brilliance, wasn’t central to the total experience on Monday.
Amidst the excellent voices of Christopher Van Horn (Mefistofele); Michael Fabiano (Faust); Jennifer Check (Ellen of Greece) and Angela Meade (Margherita – the woman Faust falls in love with in his first, earthly vision) – it was soprano, Miss Meade, who was the standout; partly because Signor Boito gave her the best aria to sing.
In Act III she is imprisoned and has lost her reason – thinking she has murdered both her mother and her child (fathered by Faust). So, there weren’t many cheery bits. Her encounter with Faust when they relive the happiness of their previous life and as she constantly reaches out to the empty rag she mistakenly thinks swaddles her dead child, were grippingly beautiful. There are few moments in any opera when the stillness in the audience can be cut with a knife. This was one of them.
The production is full of detailed asides, often sharp-eyed visual jokes, to delight. Wagner’s gratuitous walk on/stroll off part; Mefistofele observing the heavenly scene in Act IV from one of the opera boxes, having chased some angels away and being served champagne by a red gloved devil while looking at the angelic choir and audience disdainfully through opera glasses – again, who was watching whom here?; the corrupted world represented by a large blue balloon which Mefistofele dismissively pops. I probably missed another dozen or so.
The totality is a highly satisfying production, well received by an enthusiastic Met crowd. And Schopenhauer would have loved it – or not. At least, as he reminds us, we are free to choose which.
(Image via Met Opera)