# Masked balls and vendettas in domino



## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

*For God's sake, let's sit upon the ground, and tell sad stories of the death of kings.​*
Gustav III, King of Sweden (r. 1771-1792), was an enlightened despot and lover of the arts, murdered in 1792 by a conspiracy of nobles.










In many ways, Gustav was an attractive figure. He was an enthusiast for Enlightenment ideals, particularly French writers like Voltaire. He promoted free trade; encouraged religious tolerance; improved health care; restricted the death penalty; and abolished torture to extract confessions.

He was the first head of state to recognise the States, when the Americans were fighting their War of Independence.

He also founded the Swedish Academy, built the Royal Swedish Opera and Ballet, and wrote historical dramas and opera libretti.

The nobles, though, had good reason to hate the king. He had curtailed their power, ended traditional privileges, allowed ordinary citizens to enter government, and waged an unpopular and unsuccessful war with Russia.

And so, on the night of 16 March 1792, Captain Jacob Johan Anckarström, a military officer, shot Gustav at a masked ball at the Royal Opera House on 16 March 1792.










The king survived, but the wound became infected. Gustav died of scepticaemia a fortnight later.

According to operatic lore, though, Gustav's murder was personal.

Anckarström was Gustav's best friend, and Gustav was in love with Anckarström's wife Amelia.

That's why Anckarström shot him.

We are, of course, talking about…

*GUSTAVE III, OU LE BAL MASQUÉ
*
*Opéra historique in 5 acts

Composer: Daniel-François-Esprit Auber

Libretto: Eugène Scribe

First performed: Théâtre de l'Opéra (salle Le Peletier), 27 February 1833, conducted by F.A. Habeneck*

(Right! Hands up! Who thought we were going to talk about Verdi's _Ballo in maschera_?)

Auber (1782-1871) is little known today, but was once one of the most popular composers in Europe. Tom Kaufman, for one, considered him one of the three giants of French opera in the mid-19th century, alongside Meyerbeer and Halévy.

While I wouldn't put Auber quite in the top rank, his operas are delightful entertainment. The music is "light", but it's always clear, tuneful, charming, and never less than pleasing.

Perhaps that's why Rossini called the diminutive composer Piccolo musico, ma grande musicista ("a small musician, but a great maker of music").

Wagner, no less, was a big fan.



> His music - at once elegant and popular, effortless and precise, graceful and robust, and letting its whimsy take it where it would - had all the necessary qualities to capture and dominate the public's taste. He seized song with a witty vivacity, multiplied rhythms to infinity, and gave ensembles a characteristic zest and freshness almost unknown before him.


And the young Richard raved about _La muette de Portici_ (1828), a historical epic about the Neapolitan fisherman Masaniello's revolt against Habsburg Spain in 1647:



> It is a national work of the sort that each nation has only one of at the most… This tempestuous energy, this ocean of emotions and passion, depicted most vividly and shot through with the most individual melodies, compounded of grace and power, charm and heroism - is not all this the true incarnation of the French nation's recent history? Could this astonishing work of art have been created by any composer other than a Frenchman? - It cannot be put any other way - with this work the modern French school reached its highest point, winning with it mastery over the whole civilised world.
> 
> Such a vivid operatic subject was a complete novelty - the first real drama in five acts with all the attributes of a genuine tragedy, down to the actual tragic ending… Each of these five acts presented a drastic picture of the greatest vivacity, in which arias and duets in the conventional operatic sense were scarcely to be detected any more, or at least - with the exception of the prima donna's aria in the first act - no longer had this effect. Now it was the entire act, as a larger ensemble, that gripped one and carried one away.


That opera was revolutionary in more ways than one. It inspired Wagner's music dramas - and was, legend says, the spark for the creation of Belgium.






Auber's opéras comiques - many written in collaboration with top librettist Eugène Scribe - influenced Gilbert & Sullivan, Offenbach, and Viennese opera.

They include:


_Fra Diavolo_ (1830), about a romantic Italian bandit
_Le cheval de bronze_ (1835), a fantastical tale set in ancient China and on the planet Venus (before scientists discovered the planet is 462 °C, and has an atmosphere of poisonous carbon dioxide gas and sulphuric acid)
_Le domino noir_ (1837), in which a young Spaniard falls in love with a nun

Only nine of his nearly 50 operas have been performed in recent decades. _Les diamants de la couronne _(1841), _Haydée _(1847), and _Manon Lescaut _(1856) have also been produced at Compiègne. _La sirène _(1844) was performed in early 2018, but is not yet available on CD. After the warmly received _Domino noir _in Paris this year, hopefully more will follow.

And the overtures are exhilarating:






The best book in English on the composer is Robert Letellier's _Daniel-François-Esprit Auber: The Man and His Music_ (2010).


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## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

II

GUSTAVE III - SYNOPSIS

SETTING: Stockholm, 15 and 16 March 1792






*ACT I
The King's palace in Stockholm - A vast, rich waiting room
*While Gustave III rehearses his opera Gustaf Wasa, conspirators led by Count Adolph Ribbing and Claes Fredrik Dehorn plot to murder him. The king has worries of his own; he loves Amélie, married to Ankaström - an offence to honour and friendship.




Gustave organises war with the Russians, and a masked ball which the most beautiful women in court (including Amélie Ankaström) will attend.

Ankaström tells Gustave that he knows why he is unhappy - but the king is relieved when it's only a warning of a conspiracy, not love for his friend's wife.

Gustave learns that the fortuneteller Mme Arvedson is under threat of exile - and decides to investigate for himself, in disguise.


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## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

III

*ACT II
The fortune-teller's house*
Gustave, disguised as a sailor, arrives first at Mme Arvedson's. He's amused to watch the fortuneteller wow the crowd by conjuring up Beelzebub.

Amélie arrives; she confesses she loves an important person at court, and struggles not to love him. Mme Arvedson tells her to go at midnight, and pluck a herb from the executioner's field. Gustave will secretly follow her there.






The courtiers arrive. The king, still incognito, asks Mme Arvedson to tell the sailor's fortune.





It's not a happy fortune: he will die, murdered by the person who first shakes his hand - Ankaström, arriving late. When the king reveals himself, all make fun of Mme Arvedson, who warns them that the dark powers will not be lightly mocked. The conspirators plan to kill the king, but are prevented by the arrival of the people.


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## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

IV

*ACT III
The executioner's field on the outskirts of Stockholm
*
Midnight. Amélie arrives, frightened but determined, to get the magic herb. The vision of the king rises up before her, though.





So does the real king. He declares his love. She begs for mercy, but is tempted by her feelings. She struggles to regain her senses…






and hears at that moment someone approaching: her husband Ankaström! He has come to warn the king that the conspirators have followed Gustave here, and plan to murder him. Gustave entrusts the veiled woman to Ankaström's care; he will guide her to the outskirts of Stockholm, without speaking to her. The king escapes.






The murderers arrive, and confront Ankaström. Seeing armed men threaten her husband, Amélie forgets everything. She cries out to them to spare his life, and throws herself between them. The veil falls from her face - and everyone recognises her. Ankaström, thinking he understands all, arranges to meet Ribbing and De Horn the next morning - and plot Gustave's assassination.






(Someone's also done the Act III finale with emoticons, which is cute!)


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## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

V

*ACT IV
Ankaström's house
*
Ankaström threatens to kill Amélie to punish her adultery. She pleads her innocence, and Ankaström spares her life; he will kill Gustave instead. De Horn and Ribbing arrive, and Ankaström joins their conspiracy. He is chosen by lot to kill the king. Oscar comes to invite the Ankaströms to a masked ball at the Opera that evening - for the conspirators, a perfect opportunity for murder.






*ACT V
First tableau: A gallery in the palace, connected to the Opera*

Alone, Gustave resolves to send Amélie away. He will name Ankaström governor of Finland, and the couple will leave the next day.






*Second tableau: The ballroom of the Opera
*








The ball scene was one of the highlights of the Paris production, with 300 people onstage, 100 taking part in the galop alone.






Jules Janin described the scene thus:


> I believe that never, even at the Opéra, was seen a spectacle more grand, more rich, more curious, more magnificent, that the fifth act of Gustave. It is a fairlyland of beautiful women, of gauze, of velvet, of grotesqueness, of elegance, of good taste and of bad taste, of details, of learned researches, of esprit, of madness and of whimsicality - of every thing in a word, which is suggestive of the eighteenth century. When the beautiful curtain is raised, you find yourself in an immense ballroom.
> The stage of the Grand Opéra, the largest in Paris, is admirably adapted for masked balls, and the side-scenes being removed, the stage was surrounded a salon, the decorations of which corresponded with those of the boxes.
> This salle de bal is overlooked by boxes, these boxes are filled with masks, who play the part of spectators. At their feet, constantly moving, is the circling crowd, disguised in every imaginable costume, and dominoes of every conceivable hue. Harlequins of all fashions, clowns, peddlers, what shall I say? One presents the appearance of a tub, another of a guitar; his neighbor is disguised en botte d'asperges; that one is a mirror, this a fish; there is a bird, here is a time-piece - you can hardly imagine the infinite confusion. Peasants, marquises, princes, monks, I know not what, mingle in one rainbow-hued crowd. It is impossible to describe this endless madness, this whirl, this bizarrerie, on which the rays of two thousand wax tapers, in their crustal lustres, pour an inundation of mellow light. I, who am so well accustomed to spectacles like this - I, who am, unfortunately, not easily disposed to be surprised - I am yet dazzled with this radiant scene.


At the height of the festivities, tragedy strikes. Amélie warns Gustave that his life is in danger - and Ankaström shoots him. The dying king pardons them all.


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## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

VI

*COMMENTARY*

_Gustave III_ has one of Scribe's cleverest, tightest plots, full of surprises and reversals, and one of Auber's richest scores.

_Gustave _was Auber's second grand opera, five years after the sensational success of _La muette de Portici_ (1828).

The first opera codified the genre: a serious, spectacular historical work in five acts, often making a (liberal) social or political point.

_Gustave _is an advance on _La muette_, Meyerbeer's _Robert le diable _(1831),or Rossini's _Guillaume Tell _(1829). It's a more intimate, naturalistic drama, where the protagonists' private lives matter more than politics. The gifted, capricious Gustave; Amélie, torn between love and duty; and the jealous, betrayed Ankarström feel like individuals in a way that, say, the princesses Elvire, Mathilde, and Isabelle, or the tenor roles Arnold and Alphonse don't.

Scribe's next major libretti, _La juive _(1835, for Halévy) and _Les Huguenots _(1836, for Meyerbeer), would boast more complex, conflicted characters, while later grand operas (e.g. _Guido et Ginevra_, 1838, for Halévy; _La favorite_, for Donizetti, 1840; or _La reine de Chypre_, for Halévy, 1841 - the latter two are not by Scribe) are ancestors of Gounod's drame lyrique.

The opera is a tragedy set to the tune of a dance. The theme of the brilliant Act V galop whirls through the five acts, a leitmotiv that symbolises the gaiety, hedonism, and irresponsibility of the king, and the masked ball where he will die.

Gustave has three excellent arias: two show his feelings for Amélie (Acts I and V), while the couplets "Vieille sybille" is a great tune, a definite earworm! Amélie's Act III aria calls for stratospheric high notes (high E). The couple's Act III love duet has a beautiful phrase "O tourment…" in the andantino.

The finales and ensembles are ingenious. The Act II finale is great fun; and the Act III finale has a chorus of mocking laughter (an effect used by Verdi). There are two excellent trios (II and III), while the quintet (IV) is one of Auber's masterstrokes. Five different emotions treated simultaneously with great skill and elegance: three men conspire to murder the King, Amélie worries about her husband and her lover, and the page Oscar looks forward to the pleasures of the ball.

The dance music is exhilarating - and members of the public took to the stage to join in the festivities. The preludes to Act II and III (with its tolling bell) show an unexpected ability to create a menacing, almost Beethovenian, atmosphere.

Performed 168 times in Paris, with lavish stage sets and costumes, _Gustave III _was well received, but seldom produced after 1840. [1] Act V, with its famous ballet, was, like Act II of Rossini's _Guillaume Tell_, often staged on its own. The work fared better internationally, and was a regular part of the repertoire in German-speaking countries, staged as late as the 1870s.

[1] Auber, always modest, thought the blame lay with him. He wrote the score between December 1832 and February 1833, while the opera was being rehearsed.​
The Italians admired it, and ransacked it for their own operas. "Magnificent, spectacular, historical!" enthused Bellini, who saw it in Paris. "The situations are fine, really fine and new." Had he lived, it would have been his next project after I puritani.

One Vincenzo Gabussi wrote _Clemenza di Valois_ (1841); both he and his opera are completely forgotten.

Later, an Italian operatic genius would use _Gustave III _as the basis for his work.

Since, however, Mercadante's _Reggente _costs hundreds of dollars on CD, and there's no English or French translation, we'll have to make do with this…






…and talk about Verdi.


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## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

VII

For modern audiences, the elephant in the room is _Un ballo in maschera_, whose libretto is essentially a translation of Scribe's into Italian.

_Ballo _is probably Verdi's most brilliant opera, dancing nimbly between tragedy and comedy, with a giddily inventive score.

Opera, in this case, works on Darwinian lines; there seems to have been only room for one treatment of the story of Gustav III, and, in an instance of natural selection, _Ballo_ has made Auber's opera extinct.

Critics don't help. While Vincent Giroud (_French Opera: A Short History_, 2010) considers the work "one of Scribe and Auber's finest achievements", and Herbert Schneider (in _The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera_, 2003) writes largely positively about the work, others are less kind.

Ardent Verdians like Julian Budden and Charles Osborne - writing when Italian opera was still considered slightly unrespectable - run down Auber's opera (and French opera, as a whole).

Osborne (_The Complete Operas of Verdi_, 1969) calls Gustave "a neat, well-constructed melodrama which bore absolutely no relation to the life and times of Gustavus III". The king becomes a "cardboard cut-out". He says little about Auber's music.

Budden (_The Operas of Verdi_, Vol. 2, rev. 1992) dismisses _Gustave _as "a rather uninteresting museum piece, though one from which Verdi did not scorn to learn". The libretto - "a cleverly constructed plot in which irony follows irony" - is "ideal work for a theatre that put more value on sensation than on truthful portrayal of character" - but Auber's "music is mostly trivial, even-paced and dull, with just a progression here or a melodic turn there to remind us that Auber's is a genuine personality".

No, _Gustave _isn't _Ballo_, but it's still a wonderful opera in its own right.

As for Verdi...


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## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

VIII

*UN BALLO IN MASCHERA
Opera in 3 acts

Composer: Giuseppe Verdi

Libretto: Antonio Somma, after Eugène Scribe's libretto for Auber's Gustave III (1833)

First performed: Teatro Apollo, Rome, 17 February 1859*

Problems with censors forced Verdi to move the setting to that hotbed of courtly vice and dancing: 17th-century Boston. (Mainly known for burning harmless women at the stake, after the townsfolk of Salem went crazy for rye.)

These days, productions of Verdi's opera are usually set in Sweden.

(When they're not set on bombed-out post-industrial wastelands full of courtiers on the loo, and naked homeless people in Mickey Mouse masks, as a post-modern comment on capitalist malaise.)

But nobody's calling it _Una vendetta in domino_, which may be the coolest title for an opera ever.










"I'm scaling down a French drama, _Gustavo III di Svezia_, libretto by Scribe, performed at the Opéra twenty years ago," Verdi wrote in 1857. "It's vast and grandiose; it's beautiful; but it too has conventional things in it like all operas - something I've always disliked and now find intolerable."

Verdi settled on the project, intended for the Teatro San Carlo, Naples, after another failed attempt to write _Il re Lear_, the King Charles' head of an opera that pursued him throughout his career.

It was, he and librettist Antonio Somma thought, a straightforward choice. The plot was a known quantity. And Verdi liked the situation of the drawing of the lots, and the mixture of tragedy and comedy that had made _Rigoletto _and _Traviata_ so successful.

"That quality of brilliance and chivalry, that aura of gaiety that pervaded the whole action and which made a fine contrast, was like a light in the darkness surrounding the tragic moments."

But the censors didn't like it. What, kill a king? Make him a Duke, they demanded; set it in a pre-Christian time when people believed in witchcraft; and don't set it in Sweden or Norway.

So Verdi and Somma planned to move it to 17th-century Pomerania. After the Italian revolutionary Felice Orsini tried to kill Napoleon III in January 1858, the Chief of Police ordered the libretto be completely rewritten.



> I'm in a sea of troubles! It's almost certain that the Censorship won't allow our libretto. Why? I don't know! How right I was to tell you that you would need to avoid any phrase or word that could be suspect. They began by taking exception to certain expressions, certain words, then from words they've gone on to scenes, and from scenes to the subject itself. They've suggested to me - out of the kindness of their hearts - the following modifications:
> 
> Change the protagonist into a lord, taking away any idea of sovereignty.
> Change the wife into a sister.
> ...


The San Carlo management hit on a solution: hire a new poet to rewrite the libretto as _Adelia degli Adimari_, and set it in 14th-century Florence, in the time of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. Verdi refused…



> The _Vendetta in Domino _is composed of 884 lines; of these 297 have been changed; in Amelia's part many have been added, many removed. Moreover I would ask whether the management's drama has in common with mine:
> 
> The title? - No
> 
> ...


…so the management sued him for breach of contract. Verdi responded by counter-suing them.

The matter was settled out of court; Verdi would revive _Simon Boccanegra _for Naples, and produce _Ballo _for Rome's Teatro Apollo, with changes to satisfy the censors.

(For more information, see Julian Budden's _The Operas of Verdi_, Vol. 2, 1978, rev. 1992.)

It's astonishing, given the turmoil of its creation, that _Ballo _is so good. It's one of Verdi's five best, up there with _Don Carlos_, _Aida_, _Otello_, and _Rigoletto_.

The opera is one of Verdi's cleverest, tightest-plotted works. He had the advantage of a libretto by Scribe, master of the well-made play.

Scribe's scripts are carefully constructed; the situation is clear from the start; the first act establishes the characters and their relationships; and the action moves with inevitable logic through a series of dramatic twists to a surprising but inevitable end that ties all the threads together. The audience is given information whose significance they don't realise until the cunning author reveals the secret. What a writer of detective stories Scribe would have made!

Somma's libretto amounts to an Italian translation of Scribe's, its five acts compressed to three, with modifications. He omits the politics of the French opera - understandably, given the problems with the censors forced the story to be transplanted to New England.

Verdi, though, like other Italian composers, was more interested in the characters' emotions and relationships than in the historical background. He wanted a taut, swiftly moving drama, with divertissements kept to a minimum. Thus, the ballet becomes a background to the murder, rather than a 25-minute ballet, a spectacular end in itself.

_Ballo _is in some ways a spiritual successor to _Rigoletto_. Both are about a capricious tenor nobleman (originally a king), who disguises himself as a commoner, and holds masked balls. He tries to seduce his baritone crony's woman; the baritone then tries to kill him.

Both are tragedies of errors, with plot twists like a comedy. The death of Gilda in the sack is a bitterly ironic punchline, while _Ballo _turns upon husband escorting his veiled wife.

"It's a joke, or madness," Gustavo says when he hears Ulrica's prophecy - an ambiguous line that can be read as insouciance / scepticism, or a shaken man trying to pass it off as a joke. The conspirators tell Renato he's joking when he wants to join the conspiracy. The assassins sing that the tragedy has turned into comedy when Amelia is revaeled to her husband - but it's no laughing matter for them. And, of course, Renato himself is (partly) mistaken when he believes that the two met at the hangman's field for a midnight tryst; Amelia only went there to get the herb to cure her love.

The score reveals an unexpected comic side to Verdi. The humour in _Rigoletto _is black and sardonic; "gaiety", as Charles Osborne (_The Operas of Verdi_, 1969) writes, "did not come easily to him". (Jean-Pierre Ponnelle is right, though, to stage Rigoletto as a parody of Rossini's comic opera _The Barber of Seville_.)

_Ballo _has a wit and effervescence unusual for Verdi; it sparkles. The score is full of scampering rhythms and triplets, and the delicate instrumentation is astonishing in the composer of _Attila_. It sounds, often, rather French.

"Ogni cura" has all the high-kicking gusto of an Offenbach galop. The score is Verdi at his most inventive: the staccato, almost whispered Act II trio; the same act's quartetto finale, with its chorus of mocking laughter; and the dazzling Act III quintet. They are structurally, but not melodically, similar to Auber's.

The love duet - one of Verdi's best - shows the influence of the great, epoch-defining one in _Les Huguenots_. (Listen from "Ebben, si, t'amo!") Oscar, descendant of Urbain (_Huguenots_) as much as Auber's Oscar, straddles the two worlds of opéra-comique and grand opera, as his prototype does in Meyerbeer.

Verdi remains, however, his own man; he assimilates, but is not absorbed. His experience in Paris - _Jérusalem_ (1847), _Les vêpres siciliennes _(1855) - gave him a new vocabulary, a refinement of orchestration and palette which will flourish in his two great grand operas _Don Carlos _and _Aida_, if not _Otello_.


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