The Force of Destiny

by Giuseppe Verdi

seen at the Coliseum on 18 November 2015

Directed by Calixto Bieito, designed by Rebecca Ringst and conducted by Mark Wigglesworth, this new production of Verdi's 1862 opera (with most of the 1869 revisions) features Tamara Wilson as Donna Leonora, Gwyn Hughes Jones as Don Alvaro (her lover) and Anthony Michaels-Moore as Don Carlos (her brother), with Andrew Shore as Friar Melitone, James Creswell as the Father Superior and Rinat Shaham as Preziosilla (a camp follower).

Musically this was a powerful production. The three leads sang and acted extremely well, Tamara Wilson in particular having a beautiful tone but wonderful power when she needed to soar above the chorus or the orchestra. At the same time, she portrayed a deeply insecure heroine whose indecision at the start (which generates the entire catastrophe of the opera) arose believably from a chronic state of nervousness, later expressed in extreme self-mortification. 

Her brother revealed a similar state of insecurity, masked by an inflexible reliance on his aristocratic code of honour; his proud utterances were belied by pathological physical gestures which reduced him from proud soldier to emotional wreck. The constant rubbing of his left temple, where Don Alvaro had touched him after the fervid swearing of blood-brotherhood, showed, as much as his sister's rocking and general self-disgust, the cost of misplaced aristocratic hauteur. In the meantime, Don Alvaro himself, protesting his own nobility (unrecognised by the others because of its Inca background) and attempting to find a way out of the trap of honour, seemed more sympathetic when restrained, but was subject to outbursts of rage which eventually proved his nemesis.

The personal story is not pretty, and this production emphasised its general ugliness by these characterisations. Leonora's appeal to the Father Superior to allow her to become a hermit leads to a sort of consecration, but here the extreme nature of the move was underscored by a rather creepy ritual whereby the Father Superior cut off Leonora's hair and placed a circlet of barbed wire on her head - mortification and self-sacrifice rendered painfully and unattractively visible. Later, Leonora uses this wire as her means of suicide by a particularly grisly self-strangulation; again, the Church appears to be endorsing her sanctity (though generally suicide is sinful) but the cost is high.

There is a constant background of war in the air, which allows for the great choral set pieces, and broadens the pessimism of the personal drama into a more public sphere. Preziosilla, a gypsy-like camp follower vibrantly sung by Rinat Shaham, cries up the glories of war while scorning potential cowards (in the second act) and brutally shooting prisoners (in the third). At the same time scenes from various modern conflicts (most obviously the Spanish Civil War) and images inspired by Picasso's Guernica are projected in slow motion on the eerily white fronts of buildings. One member of the audience called out 'Rubbish!' in exasperation at this manoeuvre, but the message that war is not glory seems quite apt; the havoc caused by the personal vendettas are certainly writ large in military conflict. 

In the opening scene of the final act, Friar Melitone dishes out food to refugees while excoriating their behaviour and general filthiness. The character could be a comic (the musical style veers towards the buffa tradition) except for the vitriol of his sentiments; here this was reflected visually by his merely throwing food on the floor, almot daring someone to pick it up, and eventually forcing a woman to grovel with her face in the muck.

All this, coupled with an almost monochrome design - stark white buildings (or, in one case, a black front), severe lighting, dark costumes or army fatigues - contributes to an extremely dark conception of the world of the opera, where the only splash of colour was literally that - the splash of blood. The story is wildly melodramatic, the sentiments are a mixture of revolting snobbery, racism and bellicosity, and the outcome is disastrous. We began with an intolerably bright light shining int the auditorium, gradually rising and shifting on to the stage to reveal Leonora and her father in stultifying silence; we end with Leonora and her brother dead and her lover disconsolate. In between, there are  misunderstandings, raging jealousies, peculiarly twisted echoes of Brunnhilde's fate - Leonora disowned by her father, 'consecrated' to live in solitude and later cursing a stranger who encroaches on her dwelling place - and an utterly unglamorous look at war.

Yet the music is wonderful, and in this production the pitfalls of improbability and failure of dramatic momentum were adroitly overcome.