Sunday Classics special: Remembering Margaret Price, Part 7 -- as Verdi's Desdemona

The opening of Verdi's Otello: Sir Georg Solti conducts at Covent Garden, 1992, with Plácido Domingo as Otello.

by Ken

Formally this is still part of our "Remembering Margaret Price" series, but it's not quite like the earlier installments (see list below). As we move into her Verdi roles, which came to play an increasingly important part in her repertory as her career progressed, the results don't seem to me to show her off as well as, say the earlier Mozart roles -- as a result, it seems to me, of some combination of vocal and temperamental incongruities. It's not that the voice wasn't "big enough" for Verdi, because as we're going to hear, voices as light as or lighter than hers have managed in particular roles like Desdemona perfectly well. Yet somehow the voice doesn't seem to me ever to have been quite reconfigured to make Verdi's lines "sound." And somehow the Verdi performances of hers I've heard all have an impersonal, matter-of-fact quality I didn't associate with her Mozart performances, like the Fiordiligi in Otto Klemperer's Così fan tutte recording.

By which I don't mean to suggest that she didn't sing these roles well. Some of the singing is quite beautiful, subject to the above-noted qualifications. It seemed natural, then, to switch the focus from Price to the music, which will repay all the attention we can give it. We're going to focus on just two of Desdemona's excerpts, but they're the Big Ones: the sublime Act I Love Duet (see last night's preview) and the great Act IV scene including the Willow Song and "Ave Maria." And for these we're going to diversify, hearing not just multiple Price performances but some other people's, some of which involve overlap with some of Price's collaborators. The issue isn't so much which performances are "better," although among those I've chosen there are definitely some I don't like so much as others. I'm trying to illustrate some markedly different ways in which this music can be made to sound.

I just said we would be hearing two of Desdemona's excerpts, but in fact we're going to hear three excerpts. This is simply an application of my standing principle of liking to hear how an opera we're dealing with opens. Usually that means an overture or prelude, but as we've had a number of occasions to note, Verdi dispensed with formal orchestral introductory pieces in his last two operas, Otello and Falstaff. But that doesn't mean that for our purposes the way the opera opens is any less important. On the contrary, in both Otello and Falstaff the composer -- in collaboration with his great librettist for both operas, Arrigo Boito, crafted a dramatically even more precise opening. And since, although Otello has come up a number of times in these posts, this is the first time we've really focused on it, I thought it was especially important that we hear how Verdi plunges us into the action, as the assembled Cypriot population, gathered on the beach during a violent thunderstorm awaiting the return of the island's governor from combat against the Turks, watch in horror as the general's ship, even as it comes within view of the shore of Cyprus, appears on the verge of being demolished by the raging sea.

VERDI: Otello: Act I opening: Chorus, "Una vela!" . . . "Dio, fulgor della bufera" . . . Otello, "Esultate" . . . Chorus, "Vittoria! Vittoria!"

Outside the castle, with the sea wall and sea in the background. An inn with a pergola. It is evening. A thunderstorm is raging.

THE CROWD: A sail! A sail!
A standard! A standard!
MONTANO: It’s the Winged Lion!
CASSIO: We can see it when the lightning flashes.
THE CROWD: A trumpet call!
A cannon shot!
CASSIO: It’s Otello’s ship.
MONTANO: The violent waves
make it rise and fall.
CASSIO: They lift the bow skyward!
THE CROWD: The clouds and sea conceal it.
And lightning now reveals it.
Lightning. Thunder. Vortex.
All the tempest’s fury.
The waves tremble. The sky trembles.
The world itself trembles to its core.
With blind rage the waves make the heavens spin.
The gods shake the callous sky
like a bleak, billowing veil.
All is smoke. All is fire.
An inferno that enflames and engulfs all.
The universe itself shakes.
The north wind soars like a phantom.
The titans strike the anvil, and the heavens roar.
God, in the midst of the storm smile upon us.
Save the banner of Venetian glory!
Thou, who reigns over the geavens and the earth.
Calm the gale.
Place the anchor true in the midst of the sea.
JAGO: The mast is breaking.
RODERIGO: The ship will crash on the rocks.
JAGO: (May the sea be Otello’s grave.)
THE CROWD: They are saved!
They’re manning the rowboats.
They’re approaching shore!
They’re at the docks. Evviva!
OTELLO: Rejoice!
The pride of the Ottomans
rests at the bottom of the sea.
Our glory is from heaven.
For the storm
has destroyed our enemy.
THE CROWD: Evviva, Otello! Evviva!
Victory!
The enemy is destroyed, buried in the deep sea.
For a requiem they have the crash of the waves.
The abyss of the sea. Victory!
Our enemy is buried at sea.
The storm is calmed at last.

Alan Opie (b), Montano; Antony Rolfe Johnson (t), Cassio; Leo Nucci (b), Jago; John Keyes (t), Roderigo; Luciano Pavarotti (t), Otello; Chicago Symphony Chorus and Orchestra, Sir Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded live at concert performances in Chicago and New York, April 1991


TO HEAR MARGARET PRICE AND SELECTED
OTHER SINGERS AS DESDEMONA, CLICK HERE

REMEMBERING MARGARET PRICE: the series so far

Career beginnings (plus the Act I Love Duet from Verdi's Otello)

Part 1: From Handel's Messiah to Wagner's Tristan, emerging in Mozart

Part 2: The Countess in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro (plus "Or sai chi l'onore" from Don Giovanni)

Part 3: Fiordiligi in Mozart's Così fan tutte
[Plus postscript: more of "Soave sia il vento" in the later post Sunday, Bloody Sunday and the depths of Mozart's humanity]

Part 4: Pamina in Mozart's Magic Flute

Part 5: Agathe in Weber's Der Freischütz

Part 6: Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos

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