As a result, opening night audiences encountered one peculiarity: hearing Italian names sung as they saw Swedish equivalents on the supertitle screen.ĭirector Jose Maria Condemi embraces a production he did not design (owned by the SFO but created for Washington National Opera), maneuvering his protagonists around the period scenery with wit and flair, and wherever possible also emphasizing lighthearted gestures, as if to foil too much dwelling on tragedy. As is now customary, the SFO staging honors the creators’ original intentions by returning the action to 18th-century Sweden. The story, based on the actual assassination in 1792 of King Gustavus of Sweden, was moved by Verdi and his librettist Antonio Somma to colonial Boston, as partially determined by an agreement with the censors at the time of the work’s premiere. With moods switching on a dime, Masked Ball foreshadows Verdi’s last two Shakespeare operas. The action has a king’s misplaced love for the wife of his best friend leading to expected tragedy, but it is the manner of the story’s treatment that explores new shadings of human understanding with a dose of Shakespearean jest (left over from Lear?), keeping the tone on a lighter plane than the story’s ill-fated conclusion might suggest. If the production seemed deja vu, the work remains fresh and unhackneyed, a tragedy unique in the Verdi canon, with human frailties but no real evildoers. John Conklin’s costumes, worthy of a Zeffirelli extravaganza, go back to the 1977 era of Kurt Herbert Adler. Verdi’s masterpiece of misplaced intentions, A Masked Ball ( Un ballo in maschera) opened at the San Francisco Opera on Saturday night in a lavish, if dated, period production, last mounted here in 2006. It was the closest Giuseppe Verdi’s ambitions would ever take him to an operatic King Lear, but he had to drop that project for a more feasible one.
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