Anna Bolena

Anna Bolena -- The third of a triptych of operas about the Tudors by Gaetano Donizetti, Anna Bolena was premiered in 1835. I saw the show at the Minnesota Opera in St. Paul on November 17, 2012. It is unfortunate that the second half of this bel canto opera is almost unbearably tedious since the libretto is fairly good and the plotting reasonably effective, particularly in the workmanlike and efficient first half.. The fault lies in a convention of pre-Romantic classical opera – that is, the composer’s ambition to elucidate with great detail every possible emotional permutation of a dramatic situation. People in the first half of the 19th century seem to have delighted in seeing exotic and extreme emotional states represented by music and, further, required that the musical depiction of such histrionics be exhaustive. An example is the interminable last scene in Anna Bolena in which the unfortunate queen, facing the chopping block, sings various arias showing her nostalgia, rage, despair, and, ultimately, resignation to fate – with a final defiant fillip of faux-forgiveness designed to heap coals on her enemies’ heads. This is very impressive in small doses but across more than two-and-a-half hours, the effect is ultimately numbing, particularly since bel canto opera melodies have a fairly limited expressive range: homicidal defiance, lust, and regret are all conveyed by tunes of suave lyricism which, almost always, resolve into march-like or dance-like figures that have bird-like twittering effect that seems strangely incongruous (to modern ears) to the violent emotion depicted. Furthermore, the opera is broken into discreet numbers with patches of intervening declamatory singing – nothing is ever repeated and there is no use of Wagnerian motifs to tie the composition together. As a result the opera never achieves anything approaching dramatic momentum: each emotion is neatly depicted within the confines of a number and, then, after audience applause, the score moves onto something closely similar, but never building on, or progressing from the last tune. As a result, the effect of these kinds of operas is weirdly static – nothing seems to really build on anything previously depicted and there is no narrative arc moving toward anything like an effective climax. Felice Romani’s libretto is astonishingly cynical – all of the characters are swine. Anna Bolena, of course, has displaced Catherine of Aragon in Henry’s affections (or dynastic ambitions) and conveniently forgotten to tell the King that she was previously married; it’s pretty hollow for her to claim that Henry’s viciousness is somehow surprising to her. Her brother is essentially a pander using his sister’s charms to ensnare the king and, then, attempting to manipulate the situation by bringing Anna’s exiled husband, Percy, back to London. Percy is a dolt who tries to cuckold the King with the highly receptive Anna (who later denies everything that we have witnessed with our own eyes – claiming she really had no interest in Percy.) Jane Seymour is a slut who commiserates with Anna but, then, warmly kisses the King proud of having used her guile to achieve her royal ambitions. Smeton, a pant’s role, is a cowardly youth who condemns Anna on the basis of his unrequited desire for her (and under the urging of a little unconvincing torture.) No one deserves our sympathy and everyone is pretty much uniformly corrupt – a condition dramatized by the plot but undercut by repeated (and completely) hypocritical protestations of innocence in the musical numbers. The opera was handsomely mounted, using a massive gilded and coffered ceiling that periodically disgorged various items of stage machinery. There was too much of supernumeraries shoving elevated podiums and metal staircases around for my taste, but the blocking made reasonable sense. As in all operas, some things are inexplicably botched. At the end of the show, Anna Bolena is blindfolded with a scarlet band, an act that signifies imminent execution, but, then, suddenly left completely alone on the stage. Notwithstanding the blindfold, Anna heads for backstage inducing in the audience a very real fear that she will get confused and fall down or bang her head into one of the big flats – why exactly the condemned woman has been left along is mysterious. And the enigma is deepened by the sudden appearance of the child Elizabeth on stage – Anna turns to give her a poignant look, or what would be a poignant look if she weren’t blindfolded. This is what I always enjoy about opera: pondering this question: What were they thinking?