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he inauguration of the 2018-2019 Season at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, with the programming of Vincenzo Bellini's I puritani, is achieving resounding success. The audience, predisposed by the obligatory remembrance of Montserrat Caballé -a brief speech and the audition of Casta diva, sung on the same stage-, shows enthusiasm for the performance, breaking into applause even before the musical pieces end. The leading couple, formed by Pretty Yende and Javier Camarena, stands out, although it seems inevitable to focus attention on the soprano: the true soul of the show, she breathes some veracity into a plot with few psychological nuances and an occasionally slow pace. She alone illuminates the scene. She, and the actress who accompanies her through thick and thin, exchanging the roles of participant in the action and extemporaneous observer.
DISLOCATION AND SPLITTING
Annilese Miskimmon's staging succeeds in placing the conflict suffered by the protagonist in two moments of Western history (the religious wars of the 17th century and the armed conflicts in Northern Ireland in the 1970s), different in scale but regrettably devastating. This temporal dislocation is complemented by a powerful scenic resource that we already enjoyed in the version of The Abduction from the Seraglio directed by Lothar Zagrosek and -more importantly, in this sense- staged by Hans Neuenfels at the Staatsoper Stuttgart in 1998. In that Mozartian singspiel, the hybrid nature of the genre was used to split the main roles -a singer and an actor for each character- and create a wonderful specular effect.
The dialogue that takes place within the character unfolds through song, the effect of which is experienced, like any other spectator, by the actor playing the same role. As the singer's consciousness is externalized, the character's other self—actor or actress—receives the truth of their emotional state musically. And, also, the inverse phenomenon occurs: in a moment of extreme anguish, for example, it is the actor—in this case, actress—who demands music, to artistically sublimate otherwise unbearable affections ("Sing!", the actress Konstanze will shout to the soprano Konstanze, as if to understand herself). Konstanze finds herself harassed by a powerful pasha, Bassa Selim, who at the end of the plot will prove to be understanding and magnanimous, making possible the love of the protagonist couple. She explains this to him in the aria "Ach Ich liebte, war so glücklich", which begins with an oboe note—an amorous instrument par excellence—held in the air for more than fifteen seconds.
The beginning is slow (adagio) and the character's fragility is manifest, but as happens with so many of Mozart's female characters, Konstanze will progressively grow stronger in that same aria until the final allegro, through the awareness provided by singing -the Countess's second aria ("Dove sono i bei momenti?") in Le Nozze di Figaro is another good example - resulting in a virtuous self-affirmation of her position in the world, in the face of the possibility of a lost love. The degree of psychological realism in Mozart's three most brilliant operas (Nozze, Cosí, and Don Giovanni) is largely due to the ingenuity of the librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, a skill that is lacking in some bel canto dramas, such as -without going any further- I puritani, an opera for which Bellini could not count on the good graces of his usual Felice Romani, "prince of librettists."
IMPOSSIBLE AND TRUE LOVES
If, despite everything, its premiere in Paris in 1835 was a success -as it also was at the Liceu, in our most recent past- it is due to the vocal treatment of the protagonist couple, immersed in a drama with no possible solution of continuity. In fact, Miskimmon skillfully attempts a solution… which is not one, reinforcing the tragic essence of the story. As we said, she splits the plot and the female characters into two different moments: an actress dressed as 17th-century Elvira accompanies the soprano when the character lives in the 20th century and vice versa, the actress dresses in 1970s fashion when she watches over the misfortunes of Elvira affected by the wars between Catholics and Protestants. All this to confirm the amorous trope known since troubadour poetry, especially successful in its modern version during Romanticism: that the reality of true love lies precisely in its unrealizable nature. The horizontal distance from the beloved -physical remoteness- results in the ontological repetition of the clash between clans, in the most genuinely Shakespearean sense, which perpetuates beyond time.
"When they told me it was humanly possible to sing like that, I didn't stop until I became part of that extraordinary art, an art that expresses the power of music through the most exceptional instrument of all: the voice"
But let's listen to Pretty Yende, she better than anyone knows what runs through the veins of an Elvira completely in love and out of her mind, upon being abandoned by her beloved in an incomprehensible way: she is "a young woman determined by what she believes in (…) Bellini wrote her music in a way that shows all the aptitudes and vulnerabilities that lead her to her psychological flight." Indeed, because of the inadequacy of her love, she remains in a kind of no man's land: she loses her mind, unable to be who she was again or happily display what the encounter with Arturo has awakened in her. She cannot return to the ranks that correspond to her nor merge with the other who is desired and who is not, because he is no longer there. On the one hand, this ensures a form of eternal love, beyond any limiting circumstance; on the other hand, this love can only continue to be in the least reasonable and appropriate way, since the fuel that feeds it is absence (absence of response, of real interlocution). Hence, when the reunion with the beloved occurs in the third act, nothing can ever be the same again.
THE GIFT OF SONG
Elvira's passion is completely musical, even confronting the abyss of her disorder. Her numbers capture through musical writing (and not so much the words) that fullness and also its distressing reverse, making good the cliché that says that music manages to convey affections, what the soul enjoys or suffers, in a more intense and truthful way than words. A similar conviction was experienced by a young Pretty Yende, when she fell in love with the musical medium, listening to the Duo des fleurs by Léo Delibes: "I experienced a supernatural sensation, of something that sounded very familiar in my heart" (…). "When they told me it was humanly possible to sing like that, I didn't stop until I became part of that extraordinary art, an art that expresses the power of music through the most exceptional instrument of all: the voice." In this sense, the celebration of her name could not be more eloquent and happy. A self-adequacy - the absolute correspondence between will and feeling - that repairs all division and that she shares with the audience, complicit and a little shy, making us believe in that power of music:
The vital fullness that emanates from singing -recognition of the affection one feels and effectively communicates, in glorious feedback- is unequivocal in the case of Pretty Yende; so evident that no one at the Gran Teatre del Liceu failed to perceive her degree of commitment and faith in the truth of her art, beyond religions and confrontations. The South African soprano, who in I puritani updates the Shakespearean drama par excellence -much remembered this year for the version Bernstein would make, with West Side Story- has said that singing "is a gift to humanity, so universal and yet so personal and intimate." And her visit to the Liceu, at the beginning of this season, moves by the authenticity of her love for musical art. No longer conceived as mere entertainment or aesthetic recreation, but, in the line of what was experienced by Mozartian heroines, vitally assumed as an ideal means to exorcise internal demons and assert oneself against group stigmatization.
A CONSTITUTIVE SPLIT
More than psychological nuances, as we said, Bellini's opera opts to strike infallible chords during Romanticism, which for reasons difficult to specify (in a few words, at least) the general public still tends to embrace. It seems undeniable that ancient tragedy, in any case, has been transformed with the emancipation of subjectivity in the modern era. It is worth highlighting the new function of the chorus, representative of the group, of the supposedly homogeneous faction: more than accompanying the hero from a distance and promoting emotions, empathy or catharsis in the spectator, it now functions as an unstable support, as an unreliable narrator or voice-over -a notorious fact, for example, in several films by Lars von Trier- that more or less subtly spurs the subject with the need to take a stand and act for himself.
Modern drama lies precisely in the constitutive inadequacy of the individual, who knows himself to be unique from an affectively inalienable experience: just as the experience of self assures him that he is, it authoritatively insinuates to him that he really can no longer join the mass.The modern drama lies precisely in the constitutive inadequacy of the individual, who knows himself to be unique from an affectively inalienable experience: in the same way that the experience of self assures the reality of his being, it authoritatively insinuates to him that he can no longer unite with the mass, with the faction, without ceasing to be who he feels himself to be. And, with, all the temptation of the opposite sign, so anthropologically understandable, persists: the desire to become strong in (and with) the group, as an unbreakable and essential entity. A temptation that we suspect is no less mythical and unrealizable than the complete emancipation of nature by the subject. Undoubtedly, heroes are those who artistically confront the schism.