Favorites of 2021: Live performance
Messalina (1679). Libretto by Francesco Maria Piccioli, music composed by Carlo Pallovicino. Produced by Ars Minerva, Céline Ricci, stage and artistic director. ODC Theater, San Francisco.
Aura Veruni as Messalina. Photo: Valentina Sadioul
On November 21 my partner and I attended a live performance for the first time since February 2020. It had been 91 weeks since our last experience of in-person music-making.
That seems like a long time, but after Carlo Pallovicino's Messalina had its first performances during the 1679-80 opera season in Venice, it had to wait 340 plus one years to be restaged by Céline Ricci's Ars Minerva. Initially scheduled for the fall of 2020 and postponed a year due to the pandemic, Messalina was a triumphant return to the stage for both the opera and the company.
Our knowledge of the historical Roman Empress Messalina is filtered through the accounts of her enemies. In the year 38 CE Messalina, then a teenager, was married to Claudius, then in his late 40s. She has been accused by later chroniclers of infidelity and promiscuity in an attempt to delegitimize the imperial claims of her descendants. Juvenal alleged that she would go to brothels and solicit customers under a false name while wearing a blonde wig. Pliny the Elder asserted that she had engaged in a competition with a prostitute to see who could accommodate the most partners over the course of a single night; Messalina supposedly "won."
Ricci notes that Messalina was a teenager forced to marry a much older man. She sees the stories of Pliny, Tacitus, Suetonius, Juvenal, and other writers as misogynistic attempts to enforce a double standard under which powerful men are free to have as many sexual partners as they can entice, bribe or coerce, while women who assume this male prerogative are condemned.
Aura Veruni as Messalina and Deborah Rosengaus as Claudio; costumes by Marina Polakoff, projections by Entropy. Photo: Valentina Sadioul
It's curious that Pallavicino and Piccioli chose such a scandalous subject for their opera. Pallavicino's day job was as maestro di coro at the Ospedale degli Incurabili, one of Venice's four charitable hospices. Each hospice had its own resident all-female instrumental and vocal ensemble, or coro, which primarily performed sacred music for liturgical services. That the man entrusted with the musical training of the sequestered women of the Ospedale should compose an opera about the notorious Messalina—prominently featuring scenes of lust, sexual deceit, abduction and attempted rape—might have raised a few eyebrows.
In Pallavicino and Piccioli's opera, Messalina (Aura Veruni) is portrayed as boldly libidinous; the opera opens with an interrupted scene in which she is intimately entertaining her would-be lover Caio (Patrick Hagen). Claudio (Deborah Rosengaus) is a jealous (and comically credulous) husband, but he is also revealed as a sexual predator willing to kidnap and hold captive Floralba (Shawnette Sulker), the repudiated wife of his lieutenant Tullio (Kevin Gino). Tullio has rejected Floralba because he found her embracing a young man named Alindo (Kindra Scharich). But "Alindo" is actually Erginda, Floralba's sister in male drag, who, jilted by her fiancé Tergisto (Zachary Gordin), has followed him to court. Aiding Messalina in her intrigues and offering knowing commentary on the action is her page and confidant Lismeno (Marcus Paige).
Aura Veruni as Messalina and Marcus Paige as Lismeno. Photo: Valentina Sadioul
Pallovicino's musical setting is filled with dozens of short, tuneful arias; such a profusion of musical material must have been fiendishly difficult for the singers to memorize. As always in Ars Minerva productions, though, the singing in every role was of an exceptionally high standard. Special praise must go to Aura Veruni for her commanding performance as Messalina. In gorgeous voice throughout, she performed her music while wearing revealing costumes and executing Ricci's at times athletically-demanding comic business. (At one point she sings an aria while being pleasured in turn by two lovers; one escapes from beneath her voluminous skirts just as the other crawls under them.)
Kindra Scharich as "Alindo" and Aura Veruni as Messalina. Photo: Valentina Sadioul
Messalina starts off as a sex farce, and Ricci's direction and the clever and amusing costumes by Marina Polakoff (Messalina emerges from some of them as if from out of a blossoming flower) lead us to think that we're in the familiar comic territory of young lovers (Messalina and Caio) foiling the designs of a jealous and lecherous old man (Claudio). But as the opera unfolds, Ricci highlights the ways in which men wield power over women and deploy the sexual double standard to their own benefit. The comic atmosphere is darkened and disrupted by reminders that male power is asserted and maintained through violence against women. And although the opera ends "happily," with the couples reunited and Messalina (ironically?) urging men to follow women's example of faithfulness, in the last scenes Ricci also hints at Messalina's historical fate: she was not yet 30 when she was executed by Claudius' personal bodyguards, and all public traces of her were systematically destroyed.
Piccioli's libretto is jam-packed with incident; the multiple locations (including Messalina's bedroom, a public square, a temple, the baths, an amphitheater, and the desolate countryside) are beautifully suggested by Entropy's striking projections and Thomas Bowersox's evocative lighting.
Deborah Rosengaus as Claudio and Shawnette Sulker as Floralba. Photo: Valentina Sadioul
Conductor and harpsichordist Jory Vinokur led the accompanying chamber orchestra of five skilled and alertly responsive string players: Cynthia Keiko Black and Laura Jeannin on violins, Aaron Westman on viola, Gretchen Claassen on cello, and Adam Cockerham on theorbo. This ensemble is close to the size of the orchestra that played for the original staging of this opera in Venice, providing an authentic sense of Pallavicino's sound-world.
Messalina is Ars Minerva's sixth production of an unjustly neglected Baroque opera, all of which have centered on maligned, misunderstood, or mistreated women. For more information on Céline Ricci's adventurous and innovative productions please see my posts on Pallavicino's The Amazons in the Fortunate Isles, Ziani's La Circe, Porta's Ifigenia in Aulide, and Freschi's Ermelinda (I inexplicably missed Ars Minerva's first production, Castrovillari's La Cleopatra). Ars Minerva's return to live performance is a hugely welcome development, and I'm keenly anticipating Ricci's future projects.
Update 27 December 2021: A video of Messalina is now available to stream on demand; access can be purchased on the ODC website.
Other Favorites of 2021:
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