{"id":164282,"date":"2023-05-12T12:00:24","date_gmt":"2023-05-12T16:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=164282"},"modified":"2023-05-15T11:05:26","modified_gmt":"2023-05-15T15:05:26","slug":"the-reviews-review-don-carlo-and-the-abuse-of-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/05\/12\/the-reviews-review-don-carlo-and-the-abuse-of-power\/","title":{"rendered":"The Review<\/em>\u2019s Review: Don Carlo<\/em> and the Abuse of Power"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Cardinal Fernando Ni\u00f1o de Guevara, El Greco. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Don Carlo <\/span><\/i>is the kind of opera that has gone out of fashion. I cruised through half-empty rows when I saw it last fall, just days after attending a packed-to-vibrating weeknight production of <\/span>The Hours<\/span><\/i> \u2013 the two-act opera adaptation of a 1998 novel and its 2002 film adaptation. Verdi\u2019s four-hour-long political tragedy, set during the Spanish Inquisition in the sixteenth century, feels more like eating your operatic vegetables. Its place in the canon was actually secured by the Met, whose onetime general manager Rudolf Bing fished it out to open the 1950 season.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Based largely on a historical play by Friedrich Schiller, <\/span>Don Carlo<\/span><\/i> imagines a backstory to some real events in the life of Carlos, Prince of Asturias, who was briefly engaged to Elisabeth of Valois before she instead married his father, King Philip II of Spain. Schiller invented an anachronistic friend for Carlos: Rodrigo, Marquis of Posa, who distracts the heartsick prince with the political cause of Flemish independence. Meanwhile, Philip, bitter and paranoid over his loveless marriage, contemplates getting rid of his son and his treacherous friend with counsel from the blind and ruthless leader of the Inquisition.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Among the work\u2019s Shakespearean qualities\u2014Anglophone audiences might especially recall <\/span>Hamlet<\/span><\/i>\u2014is the fact that there are multiple versions of<\/span> it, in both French and Italian. Verdi revised it several times between 1866 and 1886. The original libretto is in French\u2014<\/span>Don Carlos<\/span><\/i>\u2014but its five-act runtime <\/span>tested even nineteenth-century audiences<\/span><\/a>. Verdi then lopped off the entire first act, which shows Carlos and Elisabeth\u2019s <\/span>coup de foudre<\/span><\/i> in the forest of Fontainebleau. Act 2 of the original, which became Act 1 of the more widely performed Italian translation that I saw, starts soon after Philip\u2019s wedding, when Elisabeth has become the queen of Spain\u2014and Carlos\u2019s stepmother. The Met experimented with the five-act French version last season, but has since backtracked to its repertory standard. Skipping the first act deflates the opera\u2019s romantic plot\u2014turning the love triangle between Carlos, Philip II, and Elisabeth into mere inciting incident\u2014but heightens its political and religious drama.<\/span><\/p>\n

Eponym aside, Don Carlo is more vessel (for Rodrigo\u2019s ideas) and pawn (in his father\u2019s power games) than protagonist. Crucially, in this drama of Enlightenment values, he appears deeply irrational. He loses his composure within the first act and practically faints onto his stepmother, singing, \u201cI love you, Elisabeth! The world is nothing!\u201d Freeing herself from him, she counters, \u201cWell then! So, wound your father! Come, soiled by his murder, drag your mother to the altar!\u201d Into this void enters Rodrigo,<\/span> who radiates s Reason and extols liberty, particularly for the downtrodden people of Flanders. \u201cLend your aid to the oppressed Flanders!\u201d he exclaims. As they pledge their commitment to the cause in a spirited duet, Carlo seems barely conscious that he\u2019s signing on for treachery against his own family.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Both Schiller and Verdi, who was an ardent Italian nationalist, treat Rodrigo, the avatar of their latter-day values, indulgently. Though he ends up being assassinated for his political intrigue, Verdi sends him off with a poignant aria where he sighs, \u201c<\/span>Io morr\u00f2, ma lieto in core<\/span><\/i>\u201d\u2014I die with a happy soul. Rodrigo\u2019s activist zeal must have seemed a little quixotic even in the nineteenth century, after the Revolutions of 1848 were so decisively snuffed out, but he\u2019s newly compelling in our age of liberalism in crisis. At times, Rodrigo seems like the opera\u2019s conscience; at others, like an opportunistic interventionist avant la lettre. When he decries the plight of Flanders, it\u2019s impossible not to think of the contemporary war in Ukraine\u2014whose geopolitical intrigue, soon after my viewing, became linked, strangely enough, to a <\/span>mysterious cyberattack<\/span><\/a> on the Met\u2014or, on the other hand, of our recent wars of so-called liberation in the Middle East.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m getting a little off-topic, but grand opera\u2014the nineteenth-century tradition of historical operas with lavish sets and an epic sweep\u2014is, among other things, a serious invitation to contemplate such matters as state power and history. The cause of Flanders, introduced as randomly to the weak prince as to the audience, doesn\u2019t stay abstract for long. The production unleashes all its powers of spectacle to show the terrifying core of the Inquisition, the auto-da-f\u00e9<\/span>. <\/span><\/i>Amid joyful fanfare\u2014\u201cThis happy day is filled with gaiety!\u201d sings the chorus<\/span>\u2014<\/b>Flemish Protestants in long pointed caps are led to be burned at the stake. The director, David McVicar, stylizes sixteenth century Valladolid as a cement-gray metropolis, with rows of dystopian arches that recall Mussolini\u2019s Rome. Pity the people who live under such a cruel yoke, and pity them again that their fates will be determined by such weak and shiftless men as Carlo and Philip. What grand opera also does, with its scale (even when lightly abridged) and its mix of the dramatic and the marvelous, is prepare us to confront, with heightened sensibilities, a vision of evil\u2014as opposed to workaday badness, weakness, or fallibility.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Philip\u2019s study, dominated by an outsize Christ on the cross, is the site of the climactic exchange between the aging, paranoid king and the awesome, terrible Grand Inquisitor, who wrestle with the crown\u2019s relationship to the altar. The Inquisitor\u2014played by John Relyea, incarnating one of opera\u2019s great villainous basses\u2014introduces himself through an octave, somewhat reminiscent of the stone guest who comes to punish Don Giovanni. When Philip asks if he must sacrifice his son, whom he fears both as a romantic rival and a delusional political liability, the Inquisitor reminds him, without missing a beat, that \u201cGod sacrificed his own son to save us all.\u201dHis impregnable authority puts the royals\u2019 petty maneuvers in context: \u201cEverything bows and is silent when faith speaks!\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

No one can be a hero when the church and state are such a rock and hard place. Tyrannical institutions box off every character\u2019s choices. It\u2019s not even clear what \u201cduty\u201d means, under these circumstances\u2014what is owed, and to whom. The character who seems best adapted to them is Elisabeth, who recognizes \u201cthe emptiness of the vanity of this world.\u201d But her stolid acceptance is not exactly rewarded, because the authority she accommodates and subjects to is rotten, craven, and truly evil. Different people get the last word in different versions of this opera, but in the original, it belongs to the monks of San Yuste, who observe that even a great emperor has become no more than \u201cdust and ashes.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Krithika Varagur\u00a0is the author of\u00a0<\/em>The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project\u00a0and an editor of\u00a0<\/em>The Drift.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cDon Carlo is the kind of opera that has gone out of fashion.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2282,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68386],"tags":[68663,68664,67827,15837,2200],"class_list":["post-164282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-reviews-review","tag-don-carlo","tag-emperor","tag-featured","tag-grand-opera","tag-metropolitan-opera"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Review\u2019s Review: Don Carlo and the Abuse of Power by Krithika Varagur<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"May 12, 2023 \u2013 \u201cDon Carlo is the kind of opera that has gone out of fashion.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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