Roberto il diavolo (review)

Roberto: Giorgio Merighi	Lady-in-waiting: Marisa Sansoni
Isabella: Renata Scotto	Master of ceremonies: Dino Formichini
Bertramo: Boris Christoff	Orchestra and Chorus of the Maggio Musicale
Alberto: Giovanni Antonini	Fiorentino
Rambaldo: Gianfranco Manganotti	Nino Sanzogno, conductor
Alice: Stefania Malagù	Myto Records (distributed by Qualiton) 3mcd
Herald: Ottavio Taddei	992.206 (3 CDs)

This recording was taken "live" from the 1968 Maggio Musicale Fiorentino: very live, as it happens, with distracting offstage and onstage noise and a prompter so stentorian that he merits a line in the credits. One also needs to bear in mind that this is not Robert le diable, the French opera with which, in 1831, Meyerbeer consolidated his Parisian reputation, and which, with a handful of other works, launched the genre we now call grand opéra. No, it's Roberto il diavolo, a much altered piece that reflects what the Italian operatic tradition (always quite taken with the work) made of Meyerbeer's score. The alterations have nothing to do with Meyerbeer, but that didn't stop Roberto from being influential on a whole generation of Italian composers, not least on Giuseppe Verdi, whose Giovanna d'Arco and Macbeth show powerful traces of Meyerbeer's supernatural idiom, and some of whose later operas (perhaps most of all La traviata, Les vêpres siciliennes, and Simon Boccanegra) arguably display even more substantial debts.

By the time this Italian Roberto reached the Maggio in 1968, the score was in a much reduced state. Clearly revived chiefly to serve as a "vehicle" for two star singers, Boris Christoff and Renata Scotto, Meyerbeer's lengthy, somewhat sprawling opera was ruthlessly cut, particularly in scenes in which the stars did not figure. Large-scale repetitions of music are almost always dispensed with (and this in a score that Meyerbeer had packed with strophic inspirations, both solo and choral). More important still, large swathes of the florid and high-lying tenor lead are dispensed with: the part was originally written for the famous French tenor Adolphe Nourrit, and much of it was grossly unsuited to the voice of Giorgio Merighi, a fine artist, but one whose technique was—quite understandably for the times—attuned to the later Verdi and Puccini repertoire. The famous ballet of sexually alluring nun-zombies also disappears.

Even with all the machete work, this Roberto still clocks in at nearly three hours' playing time. More than a quarter of the opera is lost, and much of what remains is performed in a way that willfully ignores the composer's intentions. It's of course fashionable among musicologists immediately, automatically, to condemn such so-called desecrations: many consider it their duty to frown on any kind of creative license taken by performers. I can't join in. Meyerbeer has, after all, long been dead; gone, too, are the theatrical conditions and social institutions for which he wrote. To launch any version of Roberto in 1968 was adventurous, and people who work to put operas on stage have a greater responsibility to (living) audiences than they do to (dead) composers. In this particular case, and given the forces available, three hours was sufficient.

What is more, enough of the score is left to remind us repeatedly of the opera's reputation for innovation and dramatic effect. Possibly as much through force of circumstance as by deliberate design, Meyerbeer's Robert offers the listener an astonishing range of musical styles. First conceived as a comic opera with spoken dialogue, it only gradually assumed its five-act, grandiose format; and the mixed parentage shows. Buffo duets that are close to Rossinian pastiche rub shoulders with scenes of Parisian "local color" and with others (the supernatural ones) reminiscent of Weber and the German "Romantics," not least in a taste for almost fanatically detailed orchestration. A duet such as that between Alice and Bertram in act 3 has aspects of all these styles, but also manages to construct an enormously convincing "dissimilar" musical dynamic, one again startlingly reminiscent of the later Verdi in...