Well, I've just a little problem with the first act, which is really boring and which involves really boring music, but the rest is really OK. Wonderful. I want to talk about a character of this opera today, Jean de Procida but first I think we should say something about the opera we're talking about.
1. What are Les Vêpres siciliennes?
It is a Grand Opéra. Which, in French, means "Big Opera". The Grand Opéra is the name we give to the operas which were made in France from the 1830s up to the 1860s: in fact, all those operas had lot in common.
Like what? Well, you know that French world... la grandeur. Well, la grandeur is in everything, in the Grand Opéra. Common operas have a choir, the Grand Opéras had a big choir. Common operas have some walking-on parts, Grand Opéras have plenty of them, a huge number and the more they are, the more Grand Opératic is the Grand Opéra. Common operas may sometimes have some little ballets, Grand Opéras have very long ballets with dozens of dancers and which last for a very long time. For instance, in Les Vêpres siciliennes we have in the second act a very long ballet which lasts thirty minutes and which has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the Opera. There is a dancing party, people dance for half an hour and that's it. No apparent relation with the rest of the Opera.
Great, isn't it?
Well, I think that right now you should know what a Grand Opéra is. We need to add something: in fact, Grand Opéras talk always about history. And Les Vêpres siciliennes talk about history: they talk about a revolt which took place in the city of Palermo in the late Thirteenth Century against the French, who had the power in Sicily at the time.
2. What do they talk about?
Have you ever seen the I-am-your-father-Luke scene of "Star wars"?
Well, Les Vêpres siciliennes are a long version of that scene. We have a young rebel, Arrigo, who fights for the freedom of his beloved Sicily and for the love of the noblewoman Elena, who is herself a rebel against the French invaders after the French killed her brother, and his arch-enemy, the French Governor of Sicily Guy de Montfort. In the first act, everything goes as we can imagine: Arrigo plains with his friend Jean de Procida to throw the French out of Sicily, Guy de Montfort plays his "arch-enemy" part and everybody's happy.
But in the second act... here's the problem. In fact, we discover that Arrigo is the son of Guy de Montfort (woops...) and so he cannot be anymore an enemy of his. And so, what will Arrigo do now? What happens next?
We have to wait to know that. In fact, here comes the great ballet I was talking in the beginning of this post. In the palace of the Governor, a dancing party takes place and we have to wait until a forty-minutes ballets ends to know the rest of the story. If you want to feel the thrill of not being able to know what will happen in Arrigo's story for forty minutes, I put here below the full music of the ballet so that you can listen to it... and wait.
Now, after the party Arrigo meets his old friends Procida and Elena and discovers they're planning to kill Guy de Montfort. But now he knows that Guy is his father and he cannot allow his father to be killed! So he betrays his friends and they're arrested and sentenced to death.
But Arrigo doesn't want his friends to die. Well, probably he's not so interested in Procida's fate, but he loves Elena and so he doesn't want her to die. So he goes to her, explains her the little thing he discovered about his father (something like this: "Sorry, my dear, I didn't want you to be killed, but I had suddenly discovered that the father I'd never knew was the bloody tyrant you were going to kill!") and asks Guy de Montfort to set her and Procida free or kill him with them. Guy shows to be a good man, after all, sets them free and decides to celebrate the marriage of Arrigo and Elena in order to promote peace between French and Sicilians.
Well, that's a happy ending!
3. Sind Sie Florestan, Herr Procida?
There's only a problem: this is not the end. In fact, during the marriage, Procida, who hasn't forgot his desire of freedom and vengeance against the French despite the brand new peace Guy is trying to promote, enters the Church with his men and kills a lot of French and Guy de Montfort himself.
And this makes us think...
Well, the end of Les Vêpres siciliennes is pretty much the same as the end of Fidelio: the hero kills the tyrant and set everyone free. But is Procida a hero as Fidelio/Leonora and her husband Florestan were in Fidelio?
I think he is: he has the same strong desire for freedom, the same strong desire for freedom Fidelio and Florestan have in the Beethoven Opera. Despite that, we can't be on Procida's side when he kills Guy de Montfort - we would prefer Guy to live and be a father for Arrigo - while at the end of Fidelio we're all happy when Don Pizarro is defeated.
Why?
I think that this difference between the feeling we have at the end of Fidelio (relief for the defeat of the tyrant) and the one we have at the end of Les Vêpres siciliennes (sadness for the death of Guy) is due simply to the different way in which Beethoven and Verdi tell the story.
While listening and watching Fidelio, in fact, we don't feel as if we were watching real people on the scene: Florestan and Leonora are symbols, Don Pizarro is a symbol too, the two lovers are symbols of the ideal of freedom, Don Pizarro is the symbol of the tyrant, so Don Pizarro has to be defeated and Leonora and Florestan have to win. Very simple, indeed.
In Les Vêpres siciliennes things are a little bit more difficult. Guy de Montfort is not only the tyrant: we see him on the scene trying to be a caring father, he seems more interested in being a father to that son he lost a long time before than in killing Sicilians or being a tyrant. So, when Procida kills him, we don't like this because Verdi showed us the human side of Guy de Montfort, his desire for peace, while Procida's constant desire for death and for killing French makes of him a sort of Dostoevskian Demon, constantly struggling to make his plans and his ideals come true without caring how much pain and blood this could cost.
Guy, in the opera, changes his point of view, from repression to a sincere desire for peace. Procida does not. Procida keeps on desiring the defeat and the death of the French even when Guy saves his life, even when he knows the identity of Arrigo's father, even when Elena says him he loves Arrigo. He has only his idea of freedom in mind and no human being can stop him from achieving it.
Procida is a little bit inhuman, other people's stories can't make him change his plans: he has to kill a symbol (Guy de Monfort, who represents the tyrant) and he does, no matter how much this costs.
He reminds me a little bit of the great dictators of the XX Century: they had great plans too and they applied them without caring about the pain and the death they costed. He reminds me also of modern terrorists - but also of the ancient ones, as we can read in Dostoevskij's Demons: they create a symbol, they then act to destroy it and they don't know or don't care that behind that symbol there's a man or a woman, with his or her dreams, his or her desires (Guy's desires to be a father to Arrigo, for instance). They act and kill, with the same inhumanity Procida shows in killing Guy de Montfort.
Because symbols are simpler to kill than men or women, aren't they?
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento