GIUSEPPE VERDI
LUISA MILLER
CONTENTS
P.
4
SYNOPSIS P.
9
LESSONS IN LIFE INTERVIEW WITH MICHELE MARIOTTI P.
14
“A CHICKEN THAT LOOKS WONDERFUL BUT CAN ALSO BE EATEN.” INTERVIEW WITH PHILIPP GRIGORIAN
P.
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AN OPERA IS NOT A PLAY UWE SCHWEIKERT P.
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IMPRINT
GIUSEPPE VERDI
LUISA MILLER MELODRAMMA TRAGICO in three acts Libretto SALVADORE CAMMARANO after FRIEDRICH SCHILLER
ORCHESTRA
2 flutes / piccolo 2 oboes / 2 clarinets / 2 bassoons 4 horns / 2 trumpets / 3 trombones / tuba timpani / bass drum / harp organ / violin I / violin II viola / cello / double bass
STAGE ORCHESTRA
2 horns / 2 bells
AUTOGRAPH
Archivio Storico Ricordi, Milan
WORLD PREMIÈRE 8 DECEMBER 1849 Teatro San Carlo, Naples FIRST PERFORMANCE IN VIENNA Kärntnertortheater
DURATION
3H
20 APRIL 1852
INCL. 1 INTERMISSION
SERGIO MORABITO IN AN INTERVIEW WITH PHILIPP GRIGORIAN (DIRECTOR)
“A CHICKEN THAT LOOKS WONDERFUL BUT CAN ALSO BE EATEN.” sm
Dear Phil, could you briefly tell us your own story? Your theatre work demonstrates a wide range of knowledge and different artistic and technical skills: you are an actor, visual artist, stage designer and director. pg Leaving my parental home was a very important time for me. sm You come from a well-known Russian theatrical family. Your father was a director, and your mother was a famous actress. pg My father was a Soviet director born in 1937. As an artist he did not survive the collapse of the Soviet Union in the Nineties. In his heyday he created avantgarde theatre in Siberia: that’s where I was born, in Tomsk. Niches kept opening up within the Soviet cultural scene. At that time the authority of a director or the head of a theatre was unchallenged, he was a kind of local god. The theatre that my father ran received state subsidy but the committees who were responsible for
it were unaware of some of the things they were paying for. It was a disaster for my father when the TV turned up to record one of his successful productions because that alerted the censorship authorities to him. As a result, he lost his job. My own training, which happened a little later, during the time of perestroika, at the end of the 80s and beginning of the 90s, also took place entirely within the framework of the old Soviet system. I had started learning how to draw when I was a child and by the time I was thirteen or fourteen years old I discovered a kind of abstract expressionism. But nobody could help me or guide me towards what I was looking for – in the whole of Moscow there wasn’t a single teacher of contemporary art. To avoid being drafted into the army it helped to become a student: you had a longer stay of execution if you were studying. I decided to take an acting course at the Shchukin Theatre School. It was founded in 1914 and is affiliated to the prestigious Vakhtan-
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“A C H I C K E N T H A T L O O K S WO N D E R F U L BU T CA N A LSO BE EAT EN.”
gov Theatre. At the time it offered the best acting course, while the MXAT, the Moscow Arts Theatre and the theatre school that belonged to it, was going through a difficult phase. The Shchukin Theatre School was a bit like Hogwarts in the Harry Potter saga. A monastery but with a very creative, constructive atmosphere. The curriculum was like an obstacle course, you were graded right from the start, every exercise and every teaching unit was an exam. As one of the best students on the course I was accepted in the ensemble, a great honour! I spent four seasons with the Vakhtangov Theatre and learnt how to act on a large stage. But then I left, because I realised that preparing and developing a new production was what excited me and I wasn’t sufficiently interested in then reproducing that performance in the repertoire. And there were also experiences like this: it’s spring outside and indoors in the rehearsal room you’re listening to the director explaining his concept and you think you’ve lost all sense of the present and of reality, you suddenly don’t know which year or which world you’re living in, as if it’s totally irrelevant to what you’re doing. Also, there was an incredible club scene developing in Moscow at the beginning of the millennium. We Russians were discovering the world that had been closed to us for so long; contemporary theatre, contemporary music and painting… I started simply “hanging out” which became a really important time and experience for me. Because that was when I found out how to communicate with people. That’s the most important thing for a director: how can you find a connection with people, why do we all need each other and what makes us all depend
on each other? How can we inspire one another? If you work in the theatre, you can’t practise your art alone. I also started teaching acting at GITIS, the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts. I found in this time also my first sponsor. He financed the performance of a piece of my own in Edinburgh, as part of the Fringe festival. In it I rampaged through my own past, I didn’t want a text or any actors on stage. Anna Abalichina, the choreographer, who is a regular collaborator of mine and who is also working on Luisa Miller, saw the production then (before we knew each other) and she remembers it being an awful show… Now I am aware in every rehearsal here in Vienna that I am working with tools that I learned to use in that damned theatre school! I can remember thousands of moments when I grasped something new. That shapes your whole life. At the beginning of the Noughties I also spent some time in Vienna, as part of an artist exchange programme at “brut”. And recently I produced a staged concert here with Klangforum Wien. sm When did you start working in music theatre? pg In 2012 in Perm with Poulenc’s La Voix humaine and there again the same year with Medeamaterial by Pascal Dusapin/Heiner Müller with Teodor Currentzis conducting. I was an associate with the theatre in Perm, directing operas such as Prokofiev’s Love of Three Oranges and plays including Masquerade by Lermontov. Since then, my work has shifted to the German-speaking world. sm When and how did you come to stage an opera for the first time in a German-speaking country?
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UWE SCHWEIKERT
AN OPERA IS NOT A PLAY FORMAL CONVENTIONS AND THE HIERARCHY OF ROLES “An opera is not a play, our art form lives from elements that spoken tragedy lacks… Music is the mightiest of the arts, it has its own logic, which is far quicker and freer than the logic of thinking in words and is much more eloquent.” This is not the lazy excuse of a subaltern lyricist but can be found in a letter from Arrigo Boito to Verdi while they were sharing their thoughts about how to craft a libretto that could be set to music from Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello. Boito still refers somewhat surprisingly in 1880 to the solite convenienze, the formal conventions of Italian melodramma. Salvatore Cammarano had behaved no differently thirty years before in his adaptation of Schiller’s drama Love and Intrigue. He too adhered to the usual conventions of the music theatre of the time, which were practised even more strictly in conservative Naples than in other centres of Italian opera around 1850 but – one must not forget – would govern Verdi’s writing despite all his inclinations towards through-composition from one scene to the next until
Aida and remain effective structural principles even in Otello. In doing so, Cammarano not only had to take account of the censor and therefore quell the rebellious undertone in Schiller’s Sturm und Drang pathos complete with its critique of absolutism, but he also had to respect the hierarchical ranks within the compagnia di canto, the troupe of singers engaged at the opera house, who generally assumed that the narrative would essentially be conveyed by three protagonists. Two prima donna roles would have created problems here that he wanted to avoid, therefore Federica had to be subordinate to Luisa. Her part remains the only example in Verdi’s early work of an alto being cast as the rival to the soprano. The decision was easier in the case of the deeper male roles. Verdi makes the aged Miller the third principal character alongside Luisa and Rodolfo and makes Walter and Wurm, whom Schiller gives equal status, less prominent. This division between parti primarie and parti comprimarie had musical consequences. Only the primarii – Luisa,
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AN OPERA IS NOT A PLAY
Rodolfo and Miller – were entitled to substantial solo numbers in the form of two-part arias (cantabile and cabaletta). The comprimarii – Federica, Walter and Wurm – had to make do with solo parts within duets or ensembles. Only Walter, whose role as a father was given more significance by both Cammarano and Verdi – the music even permits him nuanced feelings – has a single section aria without a cabaletta. Schiller’s play, whose convoluted plot is revealed in the complexity of its dialogue, is turned into an intimate melodrama about the impossibility of the love between the noble Rodolfo and the bourgeois Luisa. Even if the libretto is conventional in form, what matters is what Verdi makes of it. And here, on the cusp of the mastery of his middle period, he is already a long way from simply fulfilling the dictates of the form mechanically, but gives them a new life, stretching and even altering them whenever he feels this to be necessary in the interests of the musical drama.
VILLAGE ATMOSPHERE Cammarano transposes the plot from Schiller’s unnamed princely capital – every one of the writer’s contemporaries immediately identified it with the Stuttgart of Duke Carl Eugen of Württemberg – to a village in the Tyrolean Alps. This, Cammarano explained in a letter to Verdi, was “imperative, because it would otherwise be impossible or at least very difficult to have the chorus enter.” The music paints an idyllic scene. The villagers assemble to celebrate Luisa’s birthday. Luisa is impatiently awaiting her lover. When he arrives, both their voices are united – even here, when emphasising their passion, they
assure each other that they will love one another till death and beyond. Only Father Miller has worrying thoughts. In Schiller’s play, Luisa’s love is never directly presented, it is merely assumed; in the opera the story begins with its “lyrical exposition” (Leo Karl Gerhartz). Verdi writes a textbook introduction that is simultaneously masterfully balanced between scenic rigour and musical coherence which, without using a single bar of recitative, leads us from the opening chorus through Luisa’s carefree and cheery cavatina to the stretta and finally fades out in the pianissimo of the departing voices accompanied by the peal of bells from the nearby church. The music not only mirrors the village atmosphere, but also, as one with them, the feelings of all the participants. As he does here, in the later scenes Verdi again succeeds in integrating the choruses into the narrative in dramaturgically convincing fashion. This is especially true of the hunting chorus that is busy offstage in the first finale, an unaccompanied double chorus that provides an effective and contrasting background to the impending confrontation between Walter and his son Rodolfo. The choruses at the beginning of acts two and three are similarly effective. On both occasions they frame Luisa’s entrance. Through the chorus the music shows Luisa from the outside as well as from the inside, we see her and feel for her at the same time. When the villagers tell her that her father has been arrested, Cammarano uses a line of ten syllables, the decasillabo. Here Verdi again uses the verse form that since Nabucco he has preferred for patriotic and heroic singing for a strong exclamation – it is marked “tutta forza” – the cry for justice: “Havvi un Giusto, un
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