“No one booed after my arias,” retorted a magnificently defiant Anna Netrebko, with an air kiss, when asked about the handful of malcontents who expressed objections to her at the final curtain calls of La Scala’s season-opening new production of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Forza del Destino. Controversy has followed the superstar Russian soprano—certainly the most exciting singer before the public today—since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, but especially since the renewed and much more forceful attack in 2022. Netrebko has repeatedly called for an end to the war and criticized its human toll—to the point that she has become persona non grata in her native Russia. Her position is insufficient for many Western critics, however, who have falsely claimed that she is a strong supporter of Vladimir Putin and that she should not be allowed to sing until she denounces him personally, an action that would have serious criminal consequences for her in Russia today.
Fortunately, the wise and able management of Milan’s Teatro alla Scala is not among these puritanical proscribers. As in most other places in continental Europe, Netrebko is welcome and celebrated here, while North American, British, and a handful of other audiences have been treacherously deprived of her beautiful artistry. For the few complainers in Milan’s opening night audience, there were gathered hundreds of others who cheered loudly throughout the evening, including in final curtain calls that went on for twelve minutes. A cold rain kept outside protests to a minimum, though a few misinformed pro-Ukrainian activists turned up across the square, where nobody really noticed them.
Forza is a difficult opera to stage even without unwarranted casting controversies. Verdi composed the opera after a premature retreat from active musical life, during which he became politically involved in the cause of Italy’s national unification. He settled on the project after receiving an offer of a commission from Russia’s imperial theaters, which had just opened the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. Verdi braved the climate to present his operatic treatment of a sprawling Spanish play of the same name by the Duke of Rivas, a liberal Romantic whose themes of inescapable destiny and ungoverned passions considerably overlapped with Verdi’s sensibilities. Reducing a massive five-act drama for opera was neither easy nor, initially, successful. The Russian critic and composer Alexander Serov denounced it as a “kingdom nonsense on the stage.” Revisions made it more palatable to later audiences, but Netrebko herself remarked that she, too, finds Forza to be a “nonsense story” featuring a heroine with whom she cannot personally identify. Nevertheless, it stubbornly returned to the standard repertoire in the last century, though staging difficulties make it relatively rare. It has not opened La Scala since 1965.
Alvaro, an impetuous noble of Incan descent, tries to elope with Leonora, the daughter of the proud Marquis of Calatrava, whom Alvaro accidentally kills while trying to lay down his firearms. Cursed by her dying father, Leonora removes herself to solitary religious life. Her vengeful brother Carlo seeks her out for punishment, but also pursues Alvaro, who lives a forsaken life in Leonora’s absence. In a coincidence of operatic proportions, Carlo encounters and befriends Alvaro under a false identity while in military service, only uncovering the truth when Alvaro is badly wounded and unwittingly entrusts an implicating portrait of Leonora to his undetected enemy. After a duel, Alvaro also withdraws into a hermit’s life, coincidentally encountering Leonora at just the moment when the indefatigable Carlo again turns up. In the opera’s original version, Alvaro reluctantly forgets his religious vows to renew the duel and fatally wounds Carlo, who in a final act of spite stabs Leonora to death as she tries to comfort him. Alvaro then jumps off a cliff, cursing humanity on the way down. In a revised version that Verdi prepared for La Scala, which also featured some tinkering with the earlier scenes, Carlo stabs Leonora off stage, leaving Alvaro to mourn her with the solace that they will be reunited in heaven. La Scala uses the latter version for this new production by Leo Muscato, in a critical edition of the score prepared by the late American Verdi scholar Philip Gossett.
Muscato’s production dwells heavily on Forza’s preoccupation with the concept of eternity, which serves both its romantic and religious elements. While they are in contention, they also find coherence in the plot’s eventual denouement. Insatiable love engenders an unquenchable desire for vengeance, but the consolation of eternal life tempers the consequences in the mortal realm. In Rivas’s play, as in Verdi’s opera, each act is separated by an increasing increment of time—from months to years. Muscato extends this across eras, making ample and imaginative use of La Scala’s rotating stage to divulge quick transitions and imaginative approaches to space and depth. The first act—which features the failed elopement—unfolds in the standard 18th century milieu of the opera’s original setting, with the plot unfolding during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748). Act II, however, takes place a century later, at approximately the time Verdi composed the opera, during the wars of Italian unification. The effect still has a traditional look, for we live, after all, in an operatic universe where the 19th century is a default everyplace for operas set in earlier times. The scene in which Leonora accepts a hermit’s life turns out rather somberly to fit that milieu, but the scene gorgeously conveys the piety that accompanied the Romantic era.
The surprises start in the third act, which centers around Carlo’s discovery of Alvaro’s true identity in time of war. The war is no longer the opera’s original 18th century dynastic conflict, featuring the battle of Velletri—fought between Italian and Austrian forces in 1744—but rather the First World War, when Italy waged a bloody campaign in its northern mountains. The Austrians were again the villains, but Muscato depicts the gory slaughter here in a brutal depiction of the fighting, a field hospital with severed limbs, and the massacre of the soldiers’ chorus, an ironic comment on the spirited military march led by the camp follower Preziosilla.
Another century passes before the final act, with Italian soldiers of today watching over a crowd of migrants seeking material comfort from the religious authorities who watch over Leonora. Muscato’s concept misfires a bit since Verdi wrote the scene to serve as comic relief. Here, however, it comes off as a moralizing comment on Italy’s current migration policy, which under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has led to a sharp decrease in arrivals and a legally contested attempt to remove migrants who do come to repatriation centers in Albania. Set against the philosophical scenes, the comment seemed intrusive and unnecessary.
To say Netrebko is a star is a marked understatement. Following successes as Leonora in London and Paris—her Metropolitan Opera booking last season was canceled for political reasons—she delivered the role with her customarily incisive insight into the character’s passions, ranging from an almost bratty rejection of her father’s overprotection to the deep insecurity underlying her love for Alvaro to her dejection at the cruel workings of fate. The voice remains in full and luxurious prime, with a rich middle register rising colorfully to soulful yet magnificently sustained high notes. While her sound is unique and all its own, she is a worthy successor to the great Renata Tebaldi, the 20th anniversary of whose death was commemorated with this opening night performance.
Jonas Kaufmann withdrew from the production before opening night and was admirably replaced by the American tenor Brian Jagde, a fine young singer with a blazing ring tempered by baritonal resonances. One could say he put the “forza” in Forza. Ludovic Tézier, a barrel-chested French baritone, conquered the role of Carlo with ardor and defiance. The role of Padre Guardiano, the father superior who receives Leonora into religious life, should ideally go to a star bass. Alexander Vinogradov is not in that league, but gave a convincing performance, with his best singing emerging in the final scene. The funny foil of Fra Melitone, who harangues the crowd in the final act, fell to the promising baritone Marco Filippo Romano. Vasilisa Berzhanskaya, an accomplished Russian mezzo, had the acting skills to take the part of Preziosilla from overdrawn stereotype to a dynamic mover of military action.
La Scala music director Riccardo Chailly led a rousing performance that arrested attention from the very first notes of the opera’s overture.
