Page 31 - Classical Singer magazine Spring Issue 2020

conductor, and producer of the whole performance. The scenery was bordered onstage by loges on several levels from which angels and devils watched the unfolding of the plot as spectators in an opera house.
Me stofele directs the painting of scenery, he conducts the chorus, he hooks Faust to a chord to make him y.
He acts as the driving force of the entire production. He creates. It is easy to envision this Me stofele as Boito’s avatar, fully engaged in all aspects of his opera from music and libretto to stage directions and scenery design.
Disappointed by Gounod’s Faust, Boito intended to remedy what he believed to be a one-dimensional approach to Goethe’s play that, like Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust, ended in Faust’s damnation. Neither the Berlioz nor the Gounod opera had delved into the complexities of Goethe’s epic, reducing the plot to a love story with a moral at the end. Wagner and Debussy criticized Gounod’s oeuvre for its depiction of Faust as the stereotypical operatic lover rather than a thinker, an explorer, a seeker, and a human being who grapples with the meaning and limits of his existence.
The preference for the moral ending in Gounod’s Faust can be attributed to the censorship-regulated artistic climate of the Second Empire in France and its in uences on audience expectations of moral and religious justice. While the Faust character was regarded as a model of human complexity, his salvation could never be condoned. Such fear of provocative content, though, did not deter Boito. With M e stofele, he became the rst Italian composer to write both music and libretto for an opera.
M e stofele’s premiere at La Scala in 1868 was a spectacular failure replete with ghts between a public divided into Boito’s supporters and traditionalists hostile to the composer’s claim that Italian opera needed to be rejuvenated. This rst M e stofele—literally very close to Goethe’s play, excessively long, and very abstract in certain sections—proved overwhelming for the audience. After deletions and additions of more pieces in the traditional grand opera style, Boito’s second M e stofele premiered successfully in 1875 and—with a few more revisions for Venice in 1876, it became a part of the repertoire.
While conceding to the need to respect tradition, this revised version contains enough innovative material— the “Prologue in Heaven” in particular—to indicate a venture beyond the boundaries of the operatic art form. Progressions of tonalities and chords, shaping of musical phrases, a certain drive and ow in the orchestral music, complexities of dissonance/consonance tensions, and resolutions—or lack thereof—anticipate later operatic works of the verismo period such as Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, Leoncavallo’s I pagliacci, Giordano’s Andrea Chénier, and Cilea’s Adriana L ecouvreur.
Boito’s originality of the music alternates with sections reminiscent of the melodious, vibrant, occasionally playful music of Donizetti—the initial duet between Faust and
Margherita evokes the light lyricism of L’elisir d’amore—and of Verdi, especially from works like Macbeth, Il trovatore, and Un ballo in maschera. Whether Boito’s emulation of crowd-pleasing musical hallmarks was conscious or not, his creation is an unusual, sometimes dueling, at other times conciliatory alternation between tradition and novelty.
In M e stofele, operatic tradition encounters a new world. Like Goethe, Boito understood this encounter not only as
a prerequisite for artistic evolution, but also as the personal striving of the artist to surpass creative limitations. Forward thinking, he reached across time, cultures, and art forms
to partner with the German poet and to translate that partnership—and its revolutionary spirit—into music.
Boito lived Goethe’s S treben.
Maria-Cristina N ecula is a N ew York-based writer whose published work includes the book Life in Opera: Truth, Tempo, and Soul and articles in Das Opernglas, Studies in European Cinema, and Opera News. A classically trained singer, she
gives presentations on opera for colleges and has presented at Baruch College, the Graduate Center, the City College of N ew York, UCLA, and others. She has recently obtained her PhD in comparative literature from the Graduate Center. Get in touch at www.mariacristinanecula.com.
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