The trouble with Verdi’s ‘Don Carlo’

So was Philip “happy as a king,” as the saying goes? Of course not. As a devout Catholic in the age of Luther, he spent his waking hours conquering enemies, burning heretics, and suppressing Protestant revolts, which sprang up with even greater fervor wherever he tried to stamp them out.

In Verdi’s 1867 opera Don Carlo as well as in the 1787 Friedrich Schiller play on which it’s based, Philip is a perpetually troubled soul, frustrated because his awesome power to command fails to win his subjects’ (or even his wife’s) love and loyalty. “My days pass slowly by,” he laments. “I never sleep,” because nobody — not even the Grand Inquisitor — understands “the torment that lies beneath the crown.”

A short, bitter life

But of course the self-pitying Philip is not the protagonist of Don Carlo. For reasons that baffle me, Verdi conferred that honor upon Philip’s wimpy, immature, and emotionally unbalanced son, Carlos, prince of Asturias.

Prince Carlos — the real one, not the fictionalized Schiller/Verdi character — spent his brief embittered life in his father’s shadow, and who can blame him for his resentments? At age 14, his promising engagement to Elisabeth of Valois, daughter of the king of France, was broken when, for political reasons, his father decided to marry Elisabeth himself. At 17, Carlos suffered serious head injuries when he fell down a flight of stairs, after which he was described as wild and unpredictable. And there's another likely cause of Carlos’s instability — his family’s deliberate inbreeding practices, thanks to which Carlos had only four great-grandparents (most of us have eight), and only six great-great-grandparents (most of us have 16).

Here lies the essential problem with Verdi’s Don Carlo: For all the beauty of its score, it lacks a dynamic and empathetic figure at its center. Verdi’s Carlo isn’t so much a tragic hero as an unfortunate dunce; even the best arias seem to have been snatched away from him by the more forceful characters around him, like King Philip (bass-baritone Eric Owens in Opera Philadelphia’s current production), Queen Elisabeth (soprano Leah Crocetto), Carlo’s friend and defender Rodrigo (baritone Troy Cook), the jealous Princess Eboli (more about her casting in a minute) — even the blind, 90-year-old Grand Inquisitor (bass Morris Robinson). When Dimitri Pittas as Don Carlo took his final bow on Sunday, I found myself thinking, “Who’s he?”

Unrelieved grimness

I write as a Verdi aficionado who has listened to — and treasured — Don Carlo in the privacy of my home for more than 20 years. Rodrigo’s heartrending farewell to Carlo (“Per me giunto”) surely belongs on the short list of any opera lover’s baritone repertoire. (To hear it, click here.) But I never actually attended a performance of Don Carlo until Sunday at the Academy of Music. That experience confirmed my suspicion that Don Carlo is an opera better heard than seen. Because the unevenness of its dramatic line tends to undercut the beauty of the music, Don Carlo is worth attending live only for the chance to hear vibrant voices — which, happily in this case, were mostly magnificent.

But in its effort to convey the oppressive nature of King Philip’s regime — an apparently joyless land of dark convents, dungeons, and autos-da-fé where the sun never shines — the Opera Company production offers precious little for the viewer’s eye. Andrew Lieberman’s spare set design, Constance Hoffman’s dark costumes, and director Tim Albery’s mostly static human tableaus (which come across more as a succession of oil paintings than dramatic scenes) leave the viewer with a vision of unrelieved grimness — an accurate reflection of its subject, to be sure. But for three hours?

For the sake of dramatic contrast, Verdi’s original version actually did contain a joyful moment: an opening scene in the Forest of Fontainebleau, where Carlo falls in love with his betrothed, Elisabeth. That scene is excised from this production (and indeed from most productions nowadays), leaving Carlo and Elisabeth to bemoan the brief happiness that they knew, but the audience never experienced. Of course the full Verdi original runs more than four hours; even this truncated version exceeds three. As the Grand Inquisitor would remind you, sacrifices must be made for the greater good.

Lip-synch solution

As it happens, Sunday’s performance delivered more drama backstage than out front. Mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung, who sang Princess Eboli at Friday’s opening, developed throat problems over the weekend, so an ingenious solution was devised: On Sunday, DeYoung walked through her role and mouthed her words while the Russian mezzo Ekaterina Gubanova sang DeYoung’s part from the apron at stage left. This lip-synch exercise went off without a hitch, and since Gubanova has sung the role of Eboli at the Met and DeYoung hasn’t, the Sunday audience probably got the better of the deal.

If that wasn’t sufficient drama, at Sunday’s intermission the audience was informed that Eric Owens too was “unwell”; he would sing the King Philip role in the second act, “but not at full voice.” For an audience starving for drama, this announcement injected a welcome element of suspense: Would Owens keel over onstage, like Leonard Warren in La Forza del Destino at the Met in 1960 or Mario Lanza in The Great Caruso (click here)? As things turned out, Owens’s voice seemed none the worse for wear in the second act, and I was left to wonder how much stronger he could have sounded were he really singing.

The dramatic issues raised in Don Carlo — the conflict between the institutional needs of church and state on the one hand and personal freedom and human brotherhood on the other — are of course favorite Verdi themes. But other stories, like those in Verdi’s La Traviata, A Masked Ball, Aida, and Otello, provide more effective and humanly nuanced vehicles for these ideas. Don Carlo’s sole original virtue lies in the conflict between the authoritarian King Philip and the equally authoritarian Grand Inquisitor. Here the opera gives each side its respectful due, which seems especially timely in the light of a similar conflict today between Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani and its supreme leader, Ali Khamenei (neither of whom seems very happy either).

Meanwhile, in England . . .

And perhaps inadvertently, Don Carlos does remind us how oppression plants the seeds of liberation. Having been belittled and robbed of love by his father the king, Don Carlo develops an instinctive empathy for the king’s oppressed subjects; had he lived to succeed his father, this opera suggests, Carlo might have ended the Spanish Inquisition and ushered in a true golden age.

But we need not look to fiction for such an example: This very process was occurring at the very same time — not in Spain, but in England. Much like Carlo, Elizabeth I was belittled by her father, Henry VIII; she experienced the execution of her mother, Anne Boleyn; and she narrowly escaped execution herself during the 11 years between her father’s death and her own ascent to the English throne. From these experiences, Elizabeth concluded (uniquely for her time and even for much of the world today) that her security as queen depended on the happiness of her subjects. The result was a golden age that produced Shakespeare, Marlowe, Francis Bacon, and a flowering of music, poetry, and literature, while Elizabeth’s rival Philip II is remembered mostly for the Inquisition, the Escorial, and the Armada disaster. (OK, OK — El Greco, too. But during Philip’s reign, El Greco spent nine of his most productive years in Italy.)

At her funeral in 1603, Elizabeth I was eulogized, rightly, as the wisest and most beneficent sovereign since Pericles in ancient Athens. But of course Elizabeth and Pericles were pragmatic managers who achieved most of their goals, experienced minimal personal tragedy, and died in bed. Not much operatic material there.

For a review by Steve Cohen, click here.