Stiffelio in cinemascope at the Dijon Opera

Successfully revived last season at the Opéra du Rhin, the unknown Stiffelio by Verdi in Bruno Ravella’s staging imposes itself in large widths on the immense stage of the Dijon Auditorium.

Stiffelio filling almost as muchhelp ! Certainly an observation we would never have imagined making a few decades ago. StiffelioVerdi’s sixteenth opera, it is the way out of the “difficult years” of a composer who already has the masterpiece Macbeth to his credit and is preparing to offer the world his popular Trilogy (Rigoletto / Trovatore / Traviata). Annoyed by the stupid censorship, Verdi had destroyed it Stiffelio from 1850 before bringing it back to life in 1857: harold, his new and more consensual avatar, transformed the play’s hero, a shepherd, into a knight. The scherzo was perhaps played but the music, rich in the experience of five intermediate operas, was no longer the same. Stiffelio it is a gloomy optimistic drama, which already resembles its uniform anthracite color, its rejection of easy airs Simon Boccanegra, work composed shortly before haroldand that he will present a positive politician, that one Stiffelio foreshadows with his resolutely anti-Oscurantist ecclesiastical.

A pastor discovers his wife’s infidelity and forgives her: it’s a plot that will make censors of all ages tremble, ours is no less than its elders on the thorny plane of religion in the face of sensuality. Bruno Ravella, whose superb Weatherinstalls the corseted world of the libretto of Piave, a community located in Salzburg in the nineteenth century, (inspired by the Ahasverians of the original novel Shepherd or The Gospel and the home) in a community still alive in the 21st century (Anabaptist, Mennonite, Amish, etc.) with a manly bearded patriarch and colorfast robes. Even in the sky, under which Hannah Clark has planted her superb decorum, roll gray clouds which, at the end of the second act, will also release a black rain. The society in search of the actions and gestures of a hero who prefers forgiveness to anathema is present from the beginning, mute, placed on the sides of the immense plateau of Dijon. It is a company careful to separate men (in the garden) and women (in the courtyard), whose eyes are already focused, under a vault of spotlights, on the symbolic place of the action: a church of light wood pierced by an omnipresent cross presented from multiple angles, from its austere interior to its immediate surroundings, including a large cemetery under the Moon. This monastic asceticism is a godsend for Malcolm Rippeth’s magnificent lights, free to project on the walls of the place, in more than one key moment, the silhouettes of characters with tormented souls while Ravella sails, animated by a constant aesthetic concern, between The Lord’s Supper (collective tables), Noah’s Ark (its church lined with props, ready for boarding), and of course The flood.

From the stage to the audience, everything contributes to the revelation of a masterpiece. Debora Waldman, recently appointed associate conductor, obtains from the Dijon Bourgogne Orchestra the appropriate colors for this breathless and meditative work, which she interprets as a “long prayer”, specifying that Stiffelio is partly a reconstruction of conductors and fragments found between 1963 and 1992, more than a century later Stiffelio it was destroyed by its author. The Dijon Opera Chorus, whose crowd is choreographed with strings, is grand. Around Önay Köse’s imposing Jorg and Dario Solari’s intense Stankar (although a little tired on the piece from III), the vocal ensemble is substantially renewed. Erika Beretti embodies the “sinner” Lina, a role which, from bass to treble, hardly spares the Italian singer’s emeritus soprano. It is on this character drawn with great nuance by the composer (Lina is a woman whose speech is gradually released) that falls the most salient aria of the score: with cor anglais accompaniedthe confession” He proposes a meadow », at the center of the moving duet of the III act, prefigures that of Gilda to her father at the center of the II act of the following Rigoletto. The almost episodic role of Lina’s lover is firmly played by Raffaele Abete. Italianity, projection, legacy: Stefano Secco, focused on introspection is, from start to finish, a splendid Stiffelio.

In the very short finale, the church recedes and then we realize he had his feet in the water. A water on which he advances and walks, like a new messiah, Stiffelio: his last sermon invoking the adulteress of the Bible encourages the whole town to do the same. The last bars then show myriads of clasped hands launching themselves into the air, on Lina’s high notes that dart skyward on Good God!, the water of a sprinkling that is both liberating and a harbinger of a new world. One of those fabulous theatrical moments you rarely see except at the opera.

Photo credits: © Mirco Magliocca

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