Il trovatore (review)

Filmed opera for the small screen was alive but not necessarily well during the 1950s in Italy. In many RAI performances, with famous singers dutifully attempting to lip-synch, the production values seem exceedingly old-fashioned today, even primitive. These films are valuable chiefly because they provide the only visual record we have of certain portrayals by such legendary artists as Magda Olivero, Franco Corelli, and Tito Gobbi, not to mention the leading quartet of the Trovatore reviewed here.

RAI's budget must have been limited indeed. The sets for this 1957 production are totally makeshift, appearing to be constructed from nothing more substantial than children's building blocks (the fourth-act castle in particular). The painted drops are no help at all—I've seen many high school productions that have managed better. The men's costumes feature unflattering doublets and disconcertingly sparkly chain mail. Actually, all the costumes look as if the designer had simply grabbed bits and pieces and hoped for the best. Even the hoods for the Count's and Ferrando's horses are unattractive. The whole makes A Night at the Opera's version of this work look like vintage Zeffirelli.

The staging and filming leave everything—and I mean everything—to be desired, with the lack of imagination positively overwhelming. Ferrando simply sits and tells the group his tale; considering this is film, could it not have shown the events as he describes them, with an interesting lighting effect or two? Instead, one stares at an utterly static picture for minutes on end, until the scene's final moment (the director must have instructed, "OK, men, raise your fists as one and swear vengeance on the gypsy!"). For Leonora's first scene, the camera plows through a forest of ugly weeping willows to locate Leonora. She initially has her back to us, so we see nothing but her massive headgear. There is all sorts of light, making it impossible to believe she would not recognize Di Luna, who shields his face only slightly from her gaze. During the opening of the second act, the dancing brings to mind none other than Lucy Ricardo (remember "I am the queen of the gypsies/gyp, gyp, gyp, of the gypsies"?). And so it goes through the whole opera—in other words, not one moment where the visual side truly enhances the work itself, and too many episodes that are simply "line 'em up and let 'em stand and deliver." The director also has no idea how to end a scene, other than having someone strike an inevitably awkward and unnatural pose. Perhaps there were no rehearsals, and the principals were simply left to their own devices.

Still, we can value the film because it presents a mezzo, tenor, and baritone who in this period led the Italian field in dramatic Verdi parts, and a soprano who, while not unrivaled in Trovatore, brought an essential and invaluable bel canto orientation to her role.

The brief biographical notes included with the DVD remind us that Leyla Gencer had been singing in Italy for only four years, and that this performance presented her first Leonora. Seeming much more a strong lyric than a true spinto, she nonetheless has the measure of the role, particularly in long-lined legato singing; "D'amor sull'ali rosee" has seldom been given such a beautifully floated, poetically conceived interpretation, capped with a comfortably interpolated high D-flat. Gencer's famously jarring glottal attacks are not nearly as abundant as they later became. She cannot manage the trills strewn through Leonora's music, but she compensates...