Mi scusi, Signore Verdi … but you can be boring, too

Global, live broadcasts are transforming opera.  The give hundreds of thousands a chance to see what only a few thousand can see live.  That's good for the bottom line, and for high culture in general.  For the audience, it allows experimentation.

I'm happy to drive 15 minutes to my local Odeon, spend £16 and sit by myself to see an opera on which I'd never consider making the effort to find a viewing companion, travel to London and shell out £70 at the Royal Opera House.  Which is how I ended up snoozing through large portions of Les Vepres Siciliennes last night.

When marketing material contains the words "rare opportunity" and "seldom performed"… when London's Royal Opera house has never staged it before … there's probably a reason.  In this case, it's a long and convoluted plot with no memorable music.  The Royal Opera House made a magnificent attempt.  I certainly got my money's worth out of stage sets and interesting interpretations.  But I won't make any effort to see this one again.

The plot, in a nutshell:  It's the Middle Ages, and heartless French invaders are oppressing the noble Sicilian people.  (I liked that part.)  There's a Sicilian countess whose brother was executed by the French in a rebellion.  She carries his rotting head around in a bag while working for vengeance, pulling it out occasionally for dramatic effect to rally the cause.  (Very  Sicilian.)  She's in love with a bastard peasant, able to stomach the social difference because he's vowed to kill their mutual enemy, the despicable French governor.  Who, it turns out, raped our hero's mother 20 years before and is thus his father.  (The duet where this is revealed is one of the better parts of the opera.  One wonders if George Lucas an earlier rare performance.  "Luke, I am your father.")  Our hero is then deeply conflicted, there's an aborted revolution, the countess gets thrown in prison, things look grim, there's forgiveness and a wedding, but the celebrations end up triggering a massacre as the Sicilians finally take back their island.  It all ends in blood.

It's a plot with potential.  But abundant side stories and the meandering pace make long sections feel tedious, and the music is dull.  I can sit through Wagner operas for 4+ hours because the boring bits are interspersed with some of the most stirring and exquisite music ever written.  Verdi has written plenty of magnificent stuff, but you'll find none of it in this opera.

Director Stefan Herheim has made the brilliant move of transporting the story to the time in which it was written, the mid-19th century.  It's a more familiar age, and heaving with revolution, so the transposition works.  The sets extend the stalls of the theatre onto the stage, where a white-tie-and-tailcoat crowd watches the scenes unfurl below.  It's a stunning spectacle.  Herheim also takes the ballet that would have been a major, but stand-alone, part of the action and weaves it through the whole plot.  In the prologue we see our hero's violent conception … his mother is a ballet dancer … and the ballerinas literally dance through the whole story, getting more menacing as the action progresses.

Fascinating, beautiful to watch and enlivened by explanation, this was a perfect opera to take in on the big screen.  If you see it coming to a stage near you, however, you might want to think twice.