It’s that magical time of year everyone at the Seattle Opera offices looks forward to…. No, no, not the holidays. It’s time to announce our 2012/13 season!
Next year we’ll present six operas that explore the infinite variety of love, beginning in August with Puccini’s extravagant final masterpiece, Turandot. It’s a grand romance, set in legendary China, and tells the story of a cruel princess softened by love. And, of course, it features one of opera’s most famous arias: the emotional “Nessun dorma.” On opening night, soprano Lori Phillips takes on the role of the icy Turandot, opposite Italian tenor Antonello Palombi as Calaf. (By the way, you can also see Palombi in our upcoming production of Attila, opening in just a couple weeks!) For more info on the production and a more complete cast list (including bios, headshots, and audio clips), visit our Turandot webpage.
In October, Seattle Opera revives its 2003 production of Fidelio, created by the innovative team of director Chris Alexander and designer Robert Dahlstrom, who set the action in a present-day first-world prison. Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio remains a story of hope in the face of oppression and tyranny that is as relevant today as it was in 1814. On opening night, German soprano Christiane Libor makes her U.S. operatic debut as Leonore, a devoted wife determined to find and free her wrongfully imprisoned husband, Florestan. Singing that role is tenor Clifton Forbis, whose recent Seattle Tristan inspired rave reviews. Two Seattle favorites run Fidelio’s prison: bass Arthur Woodley is head-jailer Rocco, and bass-baritone Greer Grimsley is the cruel governor Don Pizarro. For more info, click here.
Rossini’s effervescent take on the Cinderella story returns to Seattle Opera in January 2013. This charming production of La Cenerentola brings the family-friendly fairy tale to life with eye-popping colors, magical conveyances, and a helpful team of giant mice. Italian mezzo Daniela Pini and American tenor René Barbera make their Seattle Opera debuts as Cenerentola and Prince Ramiro on opening night. Also making their company debuts are Karin Mushegain and Edgardo Rocha, who take on those roles for two of the performances.
For more info, click here.
Another Puccini masterpiece comes to Seattle Opera in February and March 2013: La bohème, directed by Tomer Zvulun and conducted by Carlo Montanaro. You may remember Zvulun from his company debut last season, directing a stunning Lucia di Lammermoor. Montanaro also made his company debut during 2010/11 (Don Quichotte) and you can see him in the pit again in a couple weeks when we open Attila. On opening night Francesco Demuro returns as Rodolfo, with Elizabeth Caballero as his ill-fated Mimì. Norah Amsellem and Michael Todd Simpson, who both appeared in Seattle Opera’s recent Carmen, return as Musetta and Marcello. The alternate cast features the debuts of Michael Fabiano as Rodolfo and Nadine Sierra as Mimì. For more info, click here.
The season wraps up in May with a double bill of important twentieth-century one-act operas, both new to Seattle Opera: La voix humaine, by Francis Poulenc, and Puccini’s Suor Angelica. Nuccia Focile returns for this 40-minute monodrama in which a woman desperately tries to stay connected to a former lover on the telephone. In Suor Angelica, a woman is forced by her wealthy family to abandon her illegitimate son and join a convent. Maria Gavrilova makes her company debut as the suffering young mother, with Rosalind Plowright returning as her chilly aunt. For more info, click here.
Single tickets for select performances won't go on sale until May 29, but you can secure your seats now as part of a subscription package. Visit our website, or give the friendly folks at our ticket office a call (206-389-7676) and they'll be happy to help.
Any questions or comments about the season? Leave us a comment!
Giuseppe Verdi (left) loved pushing boundaries. During the decades when he dominated Italian opera, he changed the way operas were written, flaunted social convention, and played an important role in the Risorgimento, the political movement that led to Italian independence and unification. This December, we’re gearing up for Attila and simultaneously looking back on a year which has seen momentous political upheaval, particularly in the Middle East. In Attila and his other early operas, Verdi wrote the theme music for nineteenth-century Italy’s equivalent of what’s currently going on in much of the world.
Research for costume designs for Attila's troops by Melanie Taylor Burgess
There was no such country as Italy when Verdi was born in 1813. The places where Verdi lived and created his operas were a handful of small states and city-states mostly ruled from faraway Vienna. The imperial Austrian government maintained its tenuous hold over the peninsula that was to become Italy by exercising strict control over any means by which large groups of people might communicate, such as newspapers, churches, and the theater. Yet Verdi, who wanted the Italians to break free of foreign domination and create a country of their own, again and again found ways, in his early operas, to get his message across.
His first ball-out-of-the-park hit was the chorus “Va, pensiero” from his third opera, Nabucco (1842). The enslaved Jews are toiling on the banks of the Euphrates during the Babylonian exile, and sing at this point of how they long to return to the Jewish homeland in Israel. Everyone in the audience immediately understood that the Jews symbolized would-be Italians, enslaved by their Austrian overlords and yearning for a country of their own. The Italians quickly adopted “Va, pensiero” as an unofficial anthem, a status the piece enjoys to this day. And because Verdi’s name formed an acronym naming the eventual leader of the united country—Vittorio Emmanuel, Re D’Italia (Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy)—people who screamed “Viva Verdi!”, or whistled the tune of “Va, pensiero” at Austrian soldiers were actually making incendiary political statements.
Coded graffiti: is this man an opera-lover or an anti-government rebel?
Verdi, who came from the most salt-of-the-earth kind of people (today he’d undoubtedly claim membership in “the 99%”), was in no way beholden to the Austro-Hungarian power structure that controlled northern Italy. In the operas he wrote following Nabucco, he seized every chance he could to incite his audiences with patriotic sentiment. Eventually, it became a regular thing for Verdi to run afoul of governmental censors who objected to much of the action he wanted to portray onstage. (In Attila, for instance, they wouldn’t allow Verdi to show the Pope onstage; so Leone, who is based on the historical figure who became Pope Leo the Great, is not yet pope when he appears at the climax of Act One. Regardless, he testifies, with all the power of the Christian church and a mighty bass voice, that “This [Italy] is the land of God.” )
Verdi designed the Attila Act One climax to mimic Raphael's famous painting of Attila's meeting with Leo
Seattle Opera’s upcoming production of Attila is set in today’s war-torn world, and isn’t specific as to location. But again and again in the music and text, you’ll hear the characters wax eloquent about their passionate feelings for their country, which, in 1846, was very specifically Italy.
The patriotism begins with Odabella’s thrilling first line. Verdi asks his soprano to come onstage, open her mouth, and immediately dazzle the audience with a wild coloratura flourish, dashing up and down two octaves, responding to the fearsome Attila the Hun’s question, “What inspires your courage?”
Boundless love for our sacred homeland!
Odabella then goes on to sing her rousing first aria, featuring her proud characterization of Italian women (sung here at Seattle Opera in 2012 by Ana Lucrecia Garcia):
Ma noi, donne italiche,
Cinte di ferro il seno,
Sul fumido terreno
Sempre vedrai pugnar.
But we are women of Italy.
Our bosoms are girt with steel.
You shall always find us
on the reeking field of battle.
Before the opera moves on to its second scene, we get ANOTHER enthusiastic statement of Italian patriotism: in this case the Roman General Ezio, negotiating with Attila in a beautiful duet for baritone and bass. Verdi wrote a pithy motto, almost a campaign slogan, for Ezio:
Avrai tu l’universo,
Resti l’Italia a me!
You will have the universe--
let Italy be mine.
And sure enough, this line got pulled from context, just as Verdi must have hoped, to became another rallying cry in support of Italian unification. (No matter that in the context of the story, Ezio, whose line it is, comes across as untrustworthy!)
The patriotism continues in the opera’s second scene, which depicts a historical pageant of the founding of Venice. It gets the history wrong, but the audience didn’t care—at the theater in Venice where Attila had its premiere in 1846, they got so excited they made the tenor and the chorus repeat the rousing cabaletta that concludes the scene. The tune is so catchy, I imagine many in that original audience were singing along during the encore. The metaphor here, comparing ‘la patria’ to the phoenix, is no accident: the name of the opera house in Venice where Attila premiered is La Fenice, the Phoenix, and over the centuries this theater has in fact burned to the ground and been rebuilt a number of times!
At 11:17 in the video below, you can hear and see Foresto’s patriotic cabaletta as sung by Kaludi Kaludov at La Scala about twenty years ago.
Cara patria, già madre e reina
Di possenti magnanimi figli,
Or macerie, deserto, ruina
Su cui regna silenzio e squallor.
Ma dall’alghe di questi marosi,
Qual risorta fenice novella,
Rivivrai più superba, più bella,
Della terra, dell’onde stupor!
Beloved homeland, queen and mother
of great and glorious sons,
now you are a sad wreck,
a desert of silence and rubble.
But you shall rise up from this lagoon
like the phoenix new-born,
more proud, more beautiful,
the wonder of earth and sea!
Head of Coach-Accompanists David McDade takes us to the piano for a music lesson on Attila. Learn some of the musical themes you’ll hear from each character as well as explore the big role of the chorus in this opera.
Our blog has been a bit quiet for the past few weeks because we’ve been getting ready for a couple of big events: the announcement of our 2012/13 season at the end of this month, and the start of Attila rehearsals tomorrow! You’ll have to wait ‘til December 30th to find out about our next season, but our current season has us pretty excited and it’s in no small part thanks to Attila. This rarely-performed Verdi opera opens at McCaw Hall on January 14 and runs for six performances through January 28—and it’s the first time Seattle Opera has ever mounted it.
“I find Attila the most beautiful of Verdi’s early operas,” says Speight Jenkins. “The arias for all four principals and the great choral pieces were more than a suggestion of things to come; in the area of both solo and choral pieces he had arrived. This is the real Verdi. Attila will surprise a lot of people in its extraordinarily high quality.”
So what’s Attila about? This melodious bel canto opera follows the famous Hun as he and his hordes invade a crumbling empire and come face-to-face with a beautiful warrior woman, a hot-headed refugee leader, and a two-faced general. This two-hour feast of song and drama is set in modern day, and features Canadian bass-baritone John Relyea as Attila. Last season, Relyea starred as Don Quichotte in another Seattle Opera premiere, and we’re looking forward to having him back on our stage. Venezuelan soprano Ana Lucrecia García takes on the role of Odabella, a woman determined to avenge her father’s death; Italian tenor Antonello Palombi is her lover, Foresto; and Italian baritone Marco Vratogna makes his company debut as Ezio, a power-hungry Roman general.
Carlo Montanaro—who conducted Don Quichotte last season—is in the pit for Attila, and Bernard Uzan directs, following his acclaimed Carmen this fall.
For more info on this production and to find a full cast list, visit our http://www.seattleopera.org/attila. And make sure to keep an eye on the blog and our Facebook and Twitter pages, because we'll be bringing you lots of sneak-peeks at the production between now and opening night. Until then, have a look at our Attila Speight's Corner video, where Speight Jenkins talks about why he's so drawn to Attila, and costume designer Melanie Taylor Burgess discuses her vision for this production.
Soprano Lori Phillips (pictured here in Nashville Opera’s 2006 production of Turandot) stars as Turandot on opening night.
Seattle Opera’s 2003 production of Fidelio.
The whimsical sets/costumes come from Houston Grand Opera.
Tenor Francesco Demuro (pictured here as Alfredo in Seattle Opera’s 2009 Traviata) stars as Rodolfo on opening night. 
Soprano Nuccia Focile stars as Elle in La Voix Humaine.
Foreground: John Relyea,
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