The Dream of Valentino

Composed and premiered in 1994, Dominick Argento’s “The Dream of Valentino” was originally condemned as too long. For this Minnesota Opera Company revival, Argento, who is now 86, cut forty minutes from his score and there are some obvious elisions in the libretto -- Valentino’s first marriage (to an ambitious lesbian) dissolves as soon as it has happened and, in the very next scene, he is married again to another ambitious lesbian, although one that is older, and a bit warmer, than the first. Nonetheless, at less than two hours in length, the show still seems too long. Charles Nolte’s libretto is wholly lacking in dramatic conflict, I think, by design: the story is about a completely passive man, the beautiful Valentino, an Italian immigrant with “bedroom eyes,” who is said to be “catnip to women” and who is completely at the mercy of others throughout the opera. Some inadequately developed backstory establishes that Valentino is a momma’s boy, enamoured with his fierce “stage mother” who has groomed him to be a “lion of the Roman stage.” After his mother dies and he ships out to New York, he falls prey to his first wife, a lesbian in the fading Nazimova’s “knitting society,” apparently a coterie of homosexual women. At the same time, a film mogul schemes to make money off the handsome young actor, and, also, perhaps, seeks to ruin him motivated by resentment and jealousy -- the mogul’s wife has confessed to the film producer that she prefers the image of the beautiful young man to her flesh-and-blood husband. A Broadway playwright, another woman avid to exploit Valentino, and secretly in love with him, tries to guide his career and clashes with the Mogul -- the only real drama in the play and a conflict that is curiously undeveloped. The opera chronicles Valentino’s marital problems (he keeps marrying lesbians) -- the film hints that he is gay himself -- and, then, the hero dies of appendicitis. Along the way, the Mogul sings of contract litigation (he intends to hold Valentino to his agreement) and we get an entire aria built around the word “injunction.” In the final scene, the Broadway playwright and the Mogul argue over the significance of Valentino’s career -- a pointless argument since it is pretty apparent that Valentino was a hollow man, a mere receptacle for the fantasies of others and that his career had no real significance of any kind. As Bertolucci, a great artist, demonstrated inadvertently in “The Last Emperor”, it is impossible, or, at least, supremely difficult to make an engaging film about a completely passive character -- in Bertolucci’s film, the last emperor of China is a plaything of historical forces and, although the picture has a satisfying Marxist resonance (history after all is the supreme dramaturge), the movie is static, overly pretty, and, ultimately tedious. “The Dream of Valentino” succumbs to the same problems. Argento can’t decide if Valentino is “the last gentleman,” a noble figure trapped in the tawdry spectacle and publicity of Hollywood -- this was H. L. Mencken’s famous interpretation of the movie star -- or whether he is merely a conflicted homosexual, ensnared by the closet in which he is immured and destroyed by his own sexual incapacity and cowardice. The opera suggests both interpretations and this should could be construed as reflecting Argento and Nolte’s subtlety and sophistication -- in fact, I think the ambivalence was probably carefully designed into the libretto -- but it’s not executed as a profound or interesting ambiguity, but rather as indecisive confusion. Two scenes, at the beginning and end of the opera respectively, demonstrate what’s wrong with the enterprise. Early in the opera, the doyenne of Broadway sings an aria about Valentino forsaking New York for the bright lights and fame of Hollywood -- the woman sings intensely and she gestures histrionically but during the entire scene, Valentino is asleep in a chair. She sings the aria over him as he slumbers. At the end of the opera, the Broadway writer and the mogul sing competing arias about Valentino’s life and the meaning of his death -- during this scene, climactic to the opera, Valentino is dead, lying in his casket. Accordingly, the hero of the opera is missing in action in each of the show’s major scenes. Argento writes effective parodies -- there’s a good orchestral tango in the opening scene and some Mozart-like minuets scoring a scene involving a misguided attempt to star Valentino is a period drama set just before the French Revolution. But the vocal lines are ugly and needlessly complicated -- Argento is fond of unmotivated and screeching octave jumps in the middle of his declamatory passages and there is nothing approaching a fine or lyrical “number” in the opera. The subject matter is probably intractable. In one of the central scenes, Valentino agonizes over whether his role as rococo fop reflects his true (gay) self or is merely another part that he must play at the behest of predatory Hollywood. The opera’s treatment of homosexuality seems oddly conservative and retrograde today and Valentino’s anguish at being required to play the part of an effete dandy seems to be much ado about nothing. I saw the opera at the Ordway on March 9, 2014. The show was handsomely designed, had nice costumes, and there was one immensely effective moment -- it had nothing to do with singing -- when a mob bursts through a plate-glass window to adore the dead Valentino. Professor Argento, looking fit and spry, was present in the audience and took a bow at the curtain call.