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Philharmonic Probes Zemlinsky & Wilde's Vengeful Merchant of Florence in Strauss-style "Tragedy" |
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by Bruce-Michael Gelbert | >> see bio |
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James Conlon
photo by - Chester Higgins Jr.
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Hearing Alexander Zemlinsky's opera "Eine florentinische Tragödie," as explored by the New York Philharmonic, under Zemlinsky champion James Conlon, on October 18, 19 and 20, at Avery Fisher Hall, was something like coming upon and reveling in an unknown Richard Strauss opera. In his short, violent 1917 opera, based on Oscar Wilde's play fragment "A Florentine Tragedy," composer and conductor Zemlinsky-part Sephardic Jewish teacher of Berg, Schoenberg, Webern and Korngold, whose music was banned by the Nazis, and who fled Vienna for New York after the Anschluss--was influenced by Strauss' operas "Salome" (1905), also after Wilde--who was, of course, incarcerated in Reading Gaol, in Victorian England, for retaliating against the charge of "posing as a sodomite"-and "Elektra" (1909). Zemlinsky employed a huge orchestra, with a large battery of percussion, like that of Strauss, and his opera's orchestral prelude lets listeners know immediately that they are in store for a rich, highly colorful work.
In the opera, set in the Middle Ages, the merchant Simone (bass-baritone James Johnson) interrupts an assignation between his younger wife, Bianca (Russian soprano Tatiana Pavlovska) and Prince Guido Bardi (tenor Anthony Dean Griffey) and feigns thinking the prince is there just to buy his goods. Bardi waxes rhapsodic about Bianca's beauty, like Narraboth about Salome's, as Simone does about his fine fabrics, rare robes, and the jeweled designs that embellish them, like Herod about the treasures he offers Salome if she will dance for him. Simone's sales pitch is laced with irony and, having been caught in a compromising position, the prince quickly offers to buy the entire stock for more than twice its value. Bardi queries boldly, "What if I asked/For white Bianca here?" and Simone's rebuke is that she is not worthy of him.
To sorrowful strains, Simone bids Bianca weave robes for mourning, but she brusquely rebels and charges him with boring their guest. Simone gets stirred up, the music insists, at the thought of war with France, but the prince refuses to engage him in his dark preoccupations. As the text speaks of death and "polluted and dishonoured sheets," Zemlinsky makes the malaise in the room as palpable as Strauss does the fetid atmosphere prevailing in his one-act operas mentioned above.
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Anthony Dean Griffey
photo by - Henry Heliotis |
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Simone's heart seems to leap, the music dancing as wildly as when Elektra savors her bloody victory, as revenge looms. He asks the prince to play his lute, which he declines to do, and then to propose a toast, ominously observing that a wine stain looks like "spilt blood" and "a wound upon Christ's side." Bardi proposes an extravagant toast to Bianca and Simone, jealousy poisoning his heart, prepares to strike.
Bianca and Bardi seize a moment for a brief tender exchange.
With his weighty threat-that he slit the throat of a robber who would have stolen his horse-Simone more or less challenges the prince to a duel, with Bianca urging her swain to finish off her spouse, but Simone receives no more than a superficial wound from Bardi's sword. At the fiery climax of the opera, Simone overpowers and strangles his rival. In a perversely 'happy,' 'romantic' ending, Bianca, whom Simone would have killed next, is impressed with her mate's strength and he with her beauty anew.
Solid-sounding Johnson made a fierce, towering Simone. Eagerly anticipated as the troubled protagonist in the Metropolitan Opera's forthcoming new production of "Peter Grimes," Griffey made lyrical interjections into the merchant's toxic monologues here. Pavlovska sang the better part of her low role as tersely as demanded and made the most of her lyric outpouring near the end. Conlon deserves gratitude for bringing "Florentine Tragedy" into the Philharmonic's repertory, presenting it lovingly, and shaping it expertly and resoundingly.
Ludwig van Beethoven's early Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, almost Mozartian, but with a breadth and force that place it squarely in the nascent Romantic Era, preceded the opera. Twenty-seven-year-old piano virtuoso Jonathan Bliss was the soloist.
Tickets for Philharmonic concerts are available at the Fisher Hall box office in Lincoln Center, by calling 212/875-5656, or on line at www.nyphil.org.
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