Lagging economy or not, some of the Bay Area’s local opera companies are taking risks. West Bay Opera is taking the lead and going for its whiskers with an upcoming production of Verdi’s La forza del destino at its small home base, the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto. General Director José Luis Moscovich said of the undertaking, “This is not an opera for the faint of heart, but I think it’s very important for smaller opera companies to dare tackle more challenging repertoire, especially these late Verdi works which are such musical gems.”
Forza is not nearly as popular as some of its other Verdian siblings, and most of us opera fans would argue that that’s unfortunate, because the music is magnificent. The reasons for its being passed over mostly have to do with the libretto, which is based on a Spanish play and is long on incident and shorter on coherence. The opera is set in motion when Donna Leonora and Don Alvaro’s planned elopement goes awry and her father is accidentally killed. The brother, Don Carlo, swears vengeance and pursues them both throughout the opera. The action takes place over years and through many locales, unlikely coincidences pile up, and we lose track of a couple of the principal characters for some time.
Listen to the Music
Leontyne Price performs "Pace, pace
mio Dio" with the New York Philharmonic
under the direction of Zubin Mehta
So, aside from a large chorus, good orchestra, and strong soloists, a production of Forza needs a really fine director. Moscovich has put this production in the hands of David Ostwald, an experienced man of the theater who has directed frequently at WBO.
The first question you have to put to a director of this piece is what he thinks it’s about, as this is not at all obvious at first glance. Ostwald’s reply brings a lot of things under one umbrella:
It’s a piece about obsession and the release of obsession by giving oneself over to a higher power or spirituality. Alvaro and Leonora ultimately find release by being guided to Padre Guardiano, who is the still center at the middle of the piece. And one of the other characters in the piece, Friar Melitone [Guardiano’s subordinate], is struggling to find the Guardiano within himself. This guy is committed — he goes off to the battlefield to preach. But, while he understands the ideas, he hasn’t yet found [their power] within himself.
I particularly wanted to know how Ostwald is planning to capture the epic nature of this opera on the intimate Lucie Stern stage. But the director is an old hand at that trick:
This is my ninth production with WBO, and I’ve often directed big pieces here. What’s important about the sweep is not that it be big, but that it have the necessary variety and that the points be made. So in the army camp scene, for example, what is it that we want to see? For me, what’s extremely interesting is the entrance of the peasants and the boys. The peasants say, “Help us, we’ve been thrown off our farms, we have nothing to eat.” And then come these, presumably, 10- to 12-year-old kids who are impressed into the army. Not only that, but they are inaugurated into sex by prostitutes in the same scene. So we’re talking here about child soldiers. And that’s set against ideas of military glory, both legitimate — Verdi was very excited by the wars of Italian unification, and there’s a parallel here — and the camp follower Preziosilla, who extols the glory of war because that’s how she’s going to make money. So there’s an irony here, and a deep observation of what war means on a personal level. The scope of the scene is not about numbers, it’s about points of view. And that we can do on a small stage.
With Ostwald at the helm, operagoers may get to discover why Verdi called Forza an “opera of ideas.” And with the music in the hands of the equally experienced conductor Michel Singher, plus a capable and talented cast of singing actors, this might be a production to change this opera’s destiny, at least locally.