Returning from its month-long winter hiatus the Metropolitan Opera offered audiences a pair of Italian masterpieces in productions that couldn’t have been more different. The premiere of Mariusz Treliński’s bleak, updated La Forza del Destino was followed two days later by the company’s 218th edition of Franco Zeffirelli’s opulently traditional Turandot. Each showed the Met at its best by delighting both the eyes and the ears.
Verdi’s Forza hadn’t been seen at the Met since 2006, a much longer absence than originally planned. A production by controversial Calixto Bieito announced for late 2017 was abruptly canceled for undisclosed reasons. This time the company turned to Treliński, the Polish director responsible for its Iolanta/Bluebeard’s Castle double-bill and Tristan und Isolde that opened the 2016-17 season. Hoping to unify Piave’s sprawling Forza libretto, he conjured an increasingly chaotic world in which his principals tumble helplessly into violence and death.
Staging the overture has become expected of regie productions, and Treliński’s proved unusually helpful in setting up the opera’s action. Before the music begins Leonora, Forza’s heroine, exits her father’s Hotel Calatrava smoking furiously. As she reenters the hotel, the music commences and Boris Kudliċka’s hyper-realistic set begins to spin as we witness preparations both for her birthday party as well as her planned escape that same evening with her secret lover Alvaro. After her father surprises them, Alvaro drops his pistol in deference to the older man accidentally killing him. Calatrava curses the lovers with his dying breath prompting Leonora and Alvaro to flee. Her brother Carlo swears vengeance on them both and spends the remainder of the opera hunting them down.
Treliński brings the action into the present day in an unspecified locale where a war breaks out precipitated by Calatrava’s death. Leonora seeks refuge in a forbidding, unfriendly monastery while Alvaro, believing she is dead, joins the fighting and befriends Carlo on the battlefield as neither initially knows the other’s true identity. In a war-destroyed subway station, the exhausted trio finally meet their fate: Alvaro kills Carlo who with his last breath strikes down Leonora.
Though Bartek Macias’ projections of warring helicopters add little, Kudliċka’s near-continuously revolving stage vividly captures the inexorable downward spiral that entraps Leonora, Alvaro and Carlo. Verdi and Piave attempted to lighten their dark tale by including secondary characters like Preziosilla, Trabuco........