No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Beatrice di Tenda, Opera de la Bastille
Newsletter 03.10.2024
Bienvenue and welcome back to Musée Musings, your idiosyncratic guide to Paris and art. I was gratified to receive so many nice Comments on last week’s post. About my gallivanting about town, mostly with my friend, Bobby. Next time, maybe it will be us! Please let me know when you’ll be in Paris. As I mentioned last week, in January I received an email from the Operas de Paris inviting me to purchase reduced price tickets for their spring offerings at the Opera de la Bastille. My first opera was last Friday night. I had a fifth row center seat for ‘Beatrice di Tenda’ by Vincenzo Bellini. I didn’t chose this opera because of Bellini, nor because of the opera itself, about which I knew nothing. I chose it because I wanted to experience an opera directed by Peter Sellars, (Fig 1) the master of quirky, irreverent and avant-garde stagings of classical and contemporary operas and plays. At UCLA, he teaches courses in 'Art as Social Action’ and ‘Art as Moral Action’. Picasso would have approved. “Paintings,” Picasso said, are “instrument(s) of war against the enemy. And which should not be made to decorate apartments.”
Figure 1. Peter Sellars in a library
Sellers frequently collaborates with the composer John Adams. He was the first to direct Adams ‘Nixon in China,’ (Fig 2) which I saw last year at the Opera de la Bastille. In fact, it was Sellars who suggested Nixon’s visit to China as a subject for an opera. They have worked together on other Adams’ operas, including Death of Klinghoffer (a terrorist attack) and Doctor Atomic (about Robert Oppenheimer)
Figure 2. Nixon in China, famous Ping Pong Diplomacy Match
Not surprisingly, Adams is a fan of Sellars, calling him an “…artist with the moral zeal of an abolitionist.” Edward Said, the Palestinian-American academic, critic and political activist, reviewing three Mozart operas that Sellars staged in the 1990s, wrote that the "turns that Sellars rings on Mozart's courtly operas make you wonder why wooden delicacy and affectations of authenticity have satisfied us for so long. We learn through Sellars that… their silly conventions leave Mozart untouched (and) … they protect the laziness and incompetence of most opera companies."
Needless to say, Sellars has his detractors, too - lots of them actually. What the German soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (who btw has been denounced for belonging to the Nazi Party - a lot worse than staging 18th century operas in 20th century settings) said of Sellars in 1990 is pretty standard, "I have seen what he has done, and it is criminal….(S)o far no one has dared go into the Louvre Museum to spray graffiti on the Mona Lisa, but some opera directors are spraying graffiti over masterpieces.” That’s not true anymore, but thankfully the museum paintings that people throw tomato sauce at are all under protective glass.
Period costumes and settings are fun, I love them! And I have seen (and hated) costumes and stage sets so minimalist that I don’t know why they even bothered. On the other hand, it is interesting to see how setting an opera or play in a time period different from the one during which it was created or for which it was originally intended, can shed new light on familiar things, can show us that our own time and theirs are more similar than different.
Beatrice di Tenda is one of Bellini’s least performed operas. It debuted in Venice in 1833, but ran for only three performances. It was performed infrequently in Italy and elsewhere until the 1870s, then virtually disappeared. Revived in honor of its centenary, it disappeared again until the 1960s. There were a scattering of performances in that century and then, in 2001, the Zurich Opera performed it. Now, in 2024, it has entered the repertoire of the Paris Opera, thanks to Peter Sellars.
The story, briefly (can the story of any opera ever be brief?) is this, Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan is married to Beatrice of Lascari, Countess of Tenda, a woman 20 years his senior. (Fig 3) She is the widow of the condottiere (mercenary), Facino Cane. When Facino died, all of what he owned - cities, treasure, soldiers - became hers. And they formed the dowry she brought with her to her marriage to Filippo Visconti. He apparently started out a nice guy, but over time, became a thug, an insensitive despot. Beatrice remained compassionate, sensitive to the needs of their subjects. Filippo had a mistress, Agnese, who, according to Bellini, was in love with a guy named Orombello who was secretly in love with Beatrice. (Fig 4) Whatever their real relationship, Filippo used Orombello as a way to get rid of his wife, maybe with the help of Agnese. In Bellini’s opera it is Agnese, in love with Orombello, who takes revenge against him by telling Filippo that Beatrice has betrayed him with Orombello.
Figure 3. Beatrice di Tenda and Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan
Figure 4. Agnese and Orombello
Somehow, Filippo and Agnese manage to surprise Beatrice and Orombello together. In Bellini’s opera, it is in a garden, where she is sitting and he is kneeling at her feet. (Fig 5) That’s all the proof Filippo needs to confirm Beatrice’s betrayal and her complicity in Orombello’s scheme to overthrow him with men still loyal to the memory of Beatrice’s first husband, Facio. The actual Orombello was a troubadour who befriended Beatrice, not the young, progressive reformer championed by Beatrice as Bellini portrays him That’s Act 1.
Figure 5. Beatrice & Orombello in Garden, Beatrice di Tenda, Pelagio Palagi, 1845
Act 2 is the torture and trial of Orombello, followed by the torture and trial of Beatrice. Thank goodness we don’t see any of the torturing but we do see the bloody aftermath. Orombello and Beatrice wander the stage, blind, broken and bloody from the torture they have endured. Both have blood soaked towels wrapped around their heads, their eyes have been gouged out. (Figs 6, 7) Orombello apparently confessed during torture, presumably so they would stop torturing him. He doesn’t avoid the death sentence however. When Beatrice says to him, did you think they would spare you if you confessed, Orombello recants his confession. Beatrice did not confess. Her steadfastness gives Filippo pause. Maybe he shouldn’t kill her for a crime she has sworn under torture that she did not commit. But then the men still loyal to her husband’s memory call out for her. That’s all Filippo needs, both Orombello and Beatrice are sentenced to death.
Figure 6. Orombello after being tortured
Figure 6a. Close-up of Orombello after torture
Figure 7. Beatrice after being tortured
Filippo and Beatrice and Agnese and Orombello are historical figures. That Filippo wanted to get rid of Beatrice is historically accurate. That he manufactured evidence against her and Orombello is also true. That he had the two of them tortured and beheaded, again, true.
Men finding ways to get rid of rich and powerful women has been a thing for a very long time. Being accused of infidelity or of being a witch was enough to get a noble woman beheaded. Beheading was usually saved for the nobility, since only they wore crowns. Other women were burned, hanged or drowned. I just came across this quote, do you know it? “Who knows why we were taught to fear the witches, and not those who burned them alive. Or those who stood by watching.”
Sellars’ staging of this opera had its detractors. The conductor and singers of were criticized by some reviewers, but the comments were mostly just snarky jabs. The vitriol was directed at Sellars. His choice of stage set, costumes and lighting (there were set, costume and lighting designers, of course). The accessories held and the actions performed by the main characters and the large choruses of men and women were also criticized. Let me tell you a bit about them. Like Sellars himself, they were quirky and (for me) they suited the story the way Sellars wanted to tell it.
There was one stage set. The action took place in and in front of, (and occasionally on a balcony to the side of) a floor to ceiling wrought-iron labyrinth populated with hedges and topiaries, benches and tables.Some of the action was probably more visible from higher up, in the less expensive seats! The labyrinth was mostly green but sometimes it turned black and diaphanous and one time, bright and blood red. (Figs 8, 9) The lighting was subtle but in tune with the tale as it unfolded.
Figure 8. Stage set with balcony
Figure 9. Stage set, red lighting
Everyone, except Beatrice and Agnese, was dressed in black. The men wore black leather suits. The women wore either black leather pantsuits or very low cut short black cocktail dresses. (Figs 10, 11) Members of the male chorus were always doing something. At the beginning of the opera, for example, some of them repaired surveillance cameras. At various times, some walked around holding machine guns (uzis) (see above Fig 10) and some clipped the hedges with garden shears. Before the sentences were announced, some busily dug Beatrice’s and Orombello’s graves. After the torture scenes, some washed down the walls. One critic suggested that they were dusting, but it looked to me as if they were getting rid of all the splattered blood. Since Sellars set the opera in some indeterminate present or future, the fact that Filippo is often carrying or looking at his laptop, is not incongruous. When Beatrice waits for Orombello in the garden, she scrolls through her cell phone (which was widely panned). For me, it’s ironic that she does something so mundane right before something so cataclysmic is about to happen.
Figure 10. Male chorus members in black ‘leather’ suit
Figure 11. Female chorus members in black ‘leather’ pantsuits and short black cocktail dresses
Some critics did approve of Sellars’ decisions. One wrote, “the story favors political reflection over romantic rivalries…drawing a female character (Beatrice) who does not escape into madness but faces her destiny to the point of martyrdom,…” Another critic, speaking about Sellars’ staging writes, “…with great economy of means (Sellers) …evokes at the same time resistance to authoritarianism, solidarity, justice, forgiveness….” And a third writes that Sellars “gives depth to all the roles,” like the chorus and the nurses (Fig 12) (two women in green scrubs) “invented by Sellars, who support and show empathy, first for Orombello and then for Beatrice,” when they stagger onstage after they have been tortured.
Figure 12. Women in Scrubs
In an interview, Sellars, echoing Picasso, asserts that art is political, contending that Bellini’s opera shows us a dictatorship, the atrocities it commits, and poses this question: ‘Why do humans submit to oppressive forms of government?’ But the opera also offers us hope in the person of Beatrice. Her challenge to the brutal force of dictatorships is a celebration of the most tender aspects of the human spirit. Bellini’s Beatrice is both “feminine and a feminist, with a big heart, lots of courage and much determination.” Who, alas is murdered for her decency.
This opera is the first Italian opera that Sellars has ever directed. He has always loved Italian opera, but felt that it was too different from what he knows, from what he does. With this particular opera though, he saw an opening. References to our contemporary world were inevitable, in this interview, in the staging of this opera. Sellars notes that since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the great burst of democracy that it was supposed to herald, more dictatorships have appeared than ever before.
Although the art critic of Le Figaro asked how an immensely talented artist like Peter Sellars “…whose name, thirty years ago, was synonymous with an abundance of invention and a kaleidoscope of emotions, (could) today deliver such a banal, conventional and static production, a lazy succession of clichés in a kitsch setting?”
I think the Figaro critic missed the point. Sellars wasn’t settling for clichés. He is revealing the banality of evil, which is central to Bellini’s conceit. It is that evil, not Sellars’ lack of imagination, which is riddled with clichés. All you have to do is read descriptions of how so many historical and current dictators lived, like Putin, like Trump, who is currently hawking gold sneakers called “Never Surrender High-Top Sneaker! (Fig 13) So ordinary and so oppressive.
Figure 13. ‘Make America Great Again’ gold tennis shoes. $399 for both!
Thanks to everyone who sent Comments about my adventures with Bobby. Gros bisous, Dr. ‘B.’
Copyright © 2024 Beverly Held, Ph.D. All rights reserved
Dear Reader, I hope you enjoyed reading this article. Please sign up below to receive more articles plus other original content from me, Dr. B. Merci!
And, if you enjoyed reading this review, please consider writing a comment. Thank you!