#Don carlos met opera review plus#

The piece had circulated largely in Italian, and was done in New York exclusively in that language. The Met has more or less done the 1884 version since a landmark production there in 1950 reintroduced the opera to the standard repertory after decades of neglect.

Yoncheva, center left, hand in hand with Etienne Dupuis as Rodrigue in the spectacular auto-da-fé scene that places “Don Carlos” in the French grand opera tradition. The second is the recomposed score premiered in Milan in 1884, with or without restoration of the 1867 Act I - set in France and introducing the vexed love of Don Carlos and Elisabeth of Valois.”

#Don carlos met opera review plus#

(And since this was a time when librettos were commonly translated into the language of the audience, it was performed in Italian, as “Don Carlo.”) The eventual result was a smorgasbord of versions, from which opera companies can now freely take elements.īut as Will Crutchfield recently wrote in The New York Times, those versions boil down to essentially two: “The first is the one premiered in Paris, plus or minus some pieces added or cut before and after. For this adaptation of Schiller’s freely ahistorical play, set at the 16th-century Spanish court of Philip II, he painted the sprawling canvas of French grand opera in his own brooding colors.Īlas, “Don Carlos” was a mixed success in France, and Verdi continued to revise it over the next two decades, as it premiered and was revived in Italy. Verdi worked with inspired diligence to shape his musical lines to metrical rhythms subtly different from Italian. The geopolitical battles fueling the plot’s private agonies seemed more vivid than usual as David McVicar’s new production was unveiled.Ī new production, sure, but a Met premiere? That’s dubious, since almost all of the music will be familiar to anyone who’s heard “Don Carlo” there over the past four decades.īut it is nevertheless a milestone for the company to be finally performing the work in the language in which it premiered, at the Paris Opera in 1867. This is, after all, an opera that opens with the characters longing for an end to fierce hostilities between two neighboring nations, their civilians suffering the privations caused by the territorial delusions of a tiny few at the top.

Center stage was Vladyslav Buialskyi, a young Ukrainian bass-baritone making his company debut in a tiny role, his hand on his heart. In either language, it is Verdi’s largest, shadowiest masterpiece - and particularly somber on Monday, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine continued and the evening opened with the audience rising in silence for a performance of the Ukrainian national anthem by the Met’s chorus and orchestra. The performance on Monday, though, was being given in the work’s original French. Rarely has a single letter been as significant as that final “s.” The opera that audiences here have seen - the one that has been staged at the Met more than 200 times - is “Don Carlo,” its libretto in Italian. It’s the one with the prince in love with his stepmother, right? And his jerk of a father, and that big duet with his friend, and the Spanish Inquisition?īut there it was, in black and white: “The Metropolitan Opera premiere of Giuseppe Verdi’s ‘Don Carlos.’” Wait, I know I’ve seen this opera before, you may have been thinking as you opened your program at Lincoln Center on Monday evening. Yannick Nézet-Séguin led the sprawling masterpiece, which is being presented by the company for the first time in its original language.

Review: ‘Don Carlos’ Finally Brings French Verdi to the Met