Verdi’s ‘Don Carlo’ at Grange Park

In the mid-nineteenth century Paris had immense operatic vitality, with its 5-act performances including an obligatory ballet. So great was its influence that even a relatively youthful Wagner with his new opera Tannhäuser had to accede to its demands. By the time Verdi came to write Don Carlo for the Parisian stage in 1869, based on Schiller’s 1787 play Don Carlos, he already had two French successes to his name (Jérusalem, a remake of the Italian I Lombardi, and Les Vêpres siciliennes). Performances of Don Carlo in Italian translation, with cuts to the lengthy French original, proved unsatisfactory and in 1882-83 Verdi decided to fashion a thoroughgoing revision of the score, reducing the opera to more manageable proportions and replacing pieces he now found unsatisfactory. For example he discarded the Act 3 ballet and preceding scene, an Inquisitors chorus in Act 5, and made the drastic step of omitting the whole of the French Act 1 where Carlo and Elisabeth de Valois meet.

This revised version is what Grange Park Opera have produced. It has the advantage of plunging the audience straight into the conflict between Church and State at the heart of this opera, if also the disadvantage of not seeing the evident youthful attraction between Don Carlos, heir to the Spanish throne held by his father Philip II, and his stepmother, the young Elizabeth de Valois, married to King Philip but the same age (14 in reality) as his son Don Carlos. When the great opera director Franco Zeffirelli visited their tombs in El Escorial he found them to be lying side by side. The conflict between love, family duty and international intrigue was red meat to Verdi whose opera holds a powerful place in his oeuvre. It is a huge undertaking to put it on stage, but GPO have managed it extremely well.

The main roles were superbly sung: Matthew Rose exhibited a firm bass and stage presence as Philip II, Elin Pritchard exhibited beautiful high notes and lovely vocal purity as his Queen Elizabeth de Valois, and Georgian tenor Otar Jorjikia gave us a very strongly voiced Don Carlo. The three main secondary roles: Rodrigo, Marquis of Posa and confidant of Don Carlo; Princess Eboli, the king’s lover; and the ruthless Grand Inquisitor, under whose orders Rodrigo is shot, to the despair of Philip II (Chi rende a me quell’uom? “Who will give me back this man?”) were all superbly sung with great feeling by Michel de Souza, Ruxandra Donose and Julian Close.

On a relatively confined stage for such a huge work, Grange Park Opera have worked wonders. This production by Jo Davies manages to give us everything we need to appreciate the appalling conflicts exhibited by one of Verdi’s great operas. My only regret was that the audience on this second night did not seem as moved as the performance deserved. Brilliant singing, well-crafted sets and production, and an excellent ENO orchestra reduced in size, but under the baton of Gianluca Marciano they conveyed the immense power of Verdi’s music.

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