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The Two Figaros (I due Figaro) by Saverio Mercadante
Reviewed by Myron Meisel
Opera UCLA at Freud Playhouse, Macgowan Hall, UCLA
Through Feb. 22
A forgotten opera by a nearly forgotten composer, I due Figaro by the estimable transitional “reformer” Saverio Mercadante languished after 1835 until exhumed through the labors of Riccardo Muti for performance (and subsequent recording) in 2011. This belated Los Angeles premiere (and first domestic mounting outside New York) appears for one more weekend as part of the citywide Figaro Unbound celebration occasioned by LA Opera’s current season of Beaumarchais’ immortal character, commencing with John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles (reviewed by Stage Raw’s Vanessa Cate) and continuing with the omnipresent masterpieces, The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro.
(Also this past weekend, LA Theatre Works recorded live for radio broadcast and audio distribution Beaumarchais’ third panel in his Figaro trilogy, The Guilty Mother, which figures only to a small degree in the Corigliano reinvention. It proves to be an historically remarkable comedy, though with melodramatic forays far outside the buffa tradition of its predecessors.)
If you genuinely love opera, and therefore are not merely content to revisit endlessly the impregnably essential Rossini and Mozart, new thrills and pleasures await in this continuously delightful, derivative later work. Its genesis was a bit of a cheat, an “unauthorized” sequel to the genuine original by an opportunistic French playwright, Richaud Martelly, which Mercandate proceeds to animate with a full array of musical stratagems, ranging from exotic Iberianisms, to shameless Rossinian impressions, to reasonable facsimiles of Mozartean multipart byplay.
The story, perhaps the least original element, finds Figaro plotting a hare-brained scheme to manipulate his master, Count Almaviva, to marry off his daughter Ines to an unsuitable suitor and split the purse for the dowry. Meanwhile, Figaro’s craftier wife Susanna invites Cherubino, now a colonel in the Count’s regiment, to show up in disguise as a manservant under the moniker of a second “Figaro”. (The fun is compounded by having Cherubino sung by a contralto doing a pants part.) Of course, this impostor makes a perfect love match.
Mercadante’s music not only remains persistently tuneful and lively, but also innately interesting. I due Figaro is a relatively early work in his career, predating his explorations into “reform” opera that sought a more dramatically realistic mode in reaction to excesses of both artificial bel canto and pretentious grand opera. (Though as an innovator, Mercandante was rapidly eclipsed by the revolutionary reinvention of the form by Verdi.) It is skillfully in thrall to Rossini’s influence, even as it quite evidently struggles to break free of imitation and rebel (if, at this remove, somewhat mildly) against the dominance of his familiar idiom. So in this opera Mercandante presents an intriguing admixture of successful formula and original progression beyond it.
Is he as good as lesser Rossini, or, for that matter, his contemporaries, Donizetti or Bellini? Not quite, but he makes for an accomplished competitor: This is an honestly first-class second-rank opera, and in my book that is high praise. The proof is well-argued by the astonishing freshness and fluidity of the inspiration, persuasively urged by conductor Joseph Colaneri’s brisk insistence on momentum from his capable student orchestra. If the price is a comparative thinness of overall tone, it is more than compensated by glories of breathless pace.
The swift tempi move some of the hoary situations quickly past any lapse into stodgy farce mechanics. The tunes maintain the highest level of dizzy delight — this is honest-to-goodness, toe-tapping, head-bobbing, pelvic-bouncing and restrain oneself from finger-poppin’ popular music that only age has remanded so squarely to the realm of classical music. It may be 1835, but this stuff swings. Eighty years before Jelly Roll Morton, Mercandante, writing Italian opera from French sources, masterfully adapts that sinuously infectious “Spanish tinge.”
And in an even more surprising revelation, the comedy in this collegiate production works. Of the revolving casts, the one I saw had the requisite timing and chops to land the gags without the mugging, indicating or ritualized enactment that comprise the bane of so many professional buffa productions. Given that the students are unlikely to have been exposed to the great traditions of comic acting (certainly not from today’s movie comedies), considerable props are due to director Peter Kazaras, who has obviously schooled them in the precise rhythms of making jokes that were ancient when this was written actually be funny. It requires, above all, following Howard Hawks’ immortal advice to Peter Bogdanovich before filming What’s Up, Doc?, “Just don’t let ‘em be funny.” These relative tyros, in addition to boasting excellent voices, know how to make deadpan reactions and straight-man work carry the burden of effective clowning.
Indeed, this kind of show seems more true to the original core of the operatic experience, more akin to a skilled provincial touring company in Turin or Genoa at a time when the audience was not so delimited to a rarefied social class with pretensions to high culture but had a demanding and discerning appetite for popular entertainment. It’s a pity that opera became so expensive and exclusive that only the finest sets, ballets and international celebrities, endlessly recycling the same menu of warhorses, became the last century’s norm. It really doesn’t speak forthrightly to the actual essence of the art.
UCLA Opera prides itself on using student designers (whereas USC brings in ringers like the indispensible Alan Muraoka to kick up its game). And while there is nothing inventive about Yuki Izumihara’s set, it displays impeccable taste, invoking Moorish mosaics, and its coordination with the color schemes of Adam Alonso’s costumes blend and contrast shades and tones that are reminiscent of the Technicolor Powell-Pressburger movies or George Hoyningen-Huene’s collaborations with film director George Cukor.
I have to confess to a reflexive cringe when I read about the size of the grant money specifically conferred on LA Opera’s The Ghosts of Versailles production, however worthy a project. One cannot help but realize how much could be done with the same sum divvied up into so many smaller pieces bestowed on so many smaller, needy arts organizations. Nevertheless, LA Opera, in this outreach program of creating parallel events around its Figaro Unbound celebration, has performed an extraordinary service for the community that should be applauded and encouraged.
Presented by Opera UCLA, UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, UCLA Department of Theater, UCLA Department of Music and UCLA Philharmonia at Freud Playhouse, Macgowan Hall, UCLA, 225 Charles E. Young Dr., Westwood; Fri., Feb. 20, 8 p.m.; Sun., Feb 22, 2 p.m. (310) 825-2101, arts.ucla.edu/calendar/2015/02/13/opera-the-two-figaros/
