AVA's "La fiamma' (1st review)

Ottorino Respighi isn't often mentioned on the roster of 20th-Century opera composers, yet he wrote ten of them, not counting an ill-fated recomposition of Monteverdi. La fiamma (The Flame) is the next to last, and the Academy of Vocal Arts' concert performance on Friday night coincided with the 75th anniversary of its debut performance in Rome on January 23, 1934.

La fiamma isn't a curiosity piece; even stripped of its important choruses (a fact not mentioned in the program) and without the benefit of a full staging, it's a powerful work that one could easily imagine as a repertory staple. The notes to the performance suggested that it fell out of favor after World War II because of Respighi's fascist sympathies. It's true that Mussolini admired Respighi, but not at all clear that the sentiment was mutual, although Respighi accepted state patronage and once signed a letter with other composers of conservative bent opposing "modernist" tendencies in music. (Mussolini, interestingly, rejected it.)

In any event, Richard Strauss's music hasn't suffered because SS connoisseurs once enjoyed it, nor did Herbert von Karajan's far more active association with the Nazis impede his postwar career. Of course, Strauss's operas had been world-famous for decades before Hitler took power, while none of Respighi's ever flourished beyond Italy.

A second hearing for pre-war operas

Pre- and interwar European operas are now receiving a more serious hearing— witness Syzmanowski's King Roger, or Schreker's Der ferne Klang— and perhaps La fiamma's turn will come. It has some of the tints of a darker Puccini score like Il tabarro, but bolder touches and harsher sonorities, too, and the strongly unresolved chord at the end of the climactic Act II love duet puts it in a sonic world not wholly removed from genuine musical Expressionism. You won't confuse it with Lulu, the masterwork Alban Berg was composing at the same time, but you won't be surprised to find these two scores contemporary with one another either.

Lulu and La fiamma also share a plot that revolves around a femme fatale, and a profoundly uncomfortable attitude toward female sexuality in general. Respighi's tale, which is set in Seventh-Century Byzantine Ravenna, involves Silvana, the younger wife of the elderly exarch Basilio. Silvana falls in love with Donello, the long-absent son from Basilio's first marriage, and, discovering that her mother had cast spells on Basilio to compel his love, she tries her luck with the not-unreceptive Donello.

Donello too is bewitched, but fights to regain his soul. When he is conveniently ordered on a campaign against the pope (perhaps an allusion to contemporary Italian politics), he breaks free, but Silvana is accused of witchcraft, and perishes at the stake.

This fatal eroticism sounds familiar

The spells of Silvana and her mother put us in mind of the love potion of Tristan und Isolde, and the fatal eroticism it produces. Donello, like Tristan, is ensnared against his will and his duty. Whereas Tristan finally embraces his fate, however, Donello takes the prudent way out, and leaves Silvana to pay the price of the passion they've shared alone. Despite her wiles, our sympathies are with her, for she's lived a loveless life with Basilio against her will.

The moral, however, is clear, as it is in Lulu and in another score that enjoyed much success in the 1930s, Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Civilization is built, per Freud, on sexual repression, and women who break the bounds (or signify our refusal to accept them) release all the hounds of hell. (Shostakovich considered himself a progressive feminist, but his music told another tale.)

The soprano Jan Cornelius, who sang Silvana in the performance I attended, headed a strong cast in which much talent was evident, and the veteran Christofer Macatsoris led a probing account of the score. Macatsoris had to teasingly beckon the Act III chorus to come forward on the stage, and managing Basilio's death— he is stunned into a fatal heart attack by the revelation of Silvana's hatred— was a little too much for the crowded Perelman stage; but this was in all other respects and within the limits imposed by production constraints a worthy reading of a work whose musical values entitle it to a place on the international stage.



To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.