In a Man’s World, Poison Is Her Best Revenge
在人类的世界，毒药乃伊人最好的复仇。
WASHINGTON — This incident has entered operatic lore（歌剧的学统）: Ten years ago the soprano Renée Fleming was lustily（精力充沛地，强壮地） booed（发出嘘声） by an audience at La Scala in Milan for her performance in the title role of Donizetti’s “Lucrezia Borgia.” It’s a juicy（有趣的，富于刺激性的） story. But it’s not quite true.
That night vociferous（吵吵嚷嚷的，大声叫喊的） audience members indeed booed Ms. Fleming, according to eyewitnesses（目击者）. Others cheered her. But it’s hardly unusual for finicky（过分注意的，过分讲究的，过分周到的） La Scala patrons（资助人，赞助人，老主顾） to break into warring factions（敌对派系）. Frustration had built up because the conductor that night had passed out on the podium（表演台，乐队指挥台） and had to take a 30-minute break. Ms. Fleming’s remaining performances during the run passed without incident.
In 2000 she proved she could sing this daunting role（使人畏缩的角色） impressively（令人难忘地） in a concert performance with the Opera Orchestra（歌剧管弦乐队） of New York at Carnegie Hall（卡内基歌厅）. And on Saturday night Ms. Fleming, who continually reassesses her repertory choices（重估她的剧目精选）, returned to this touchstone（试金石，检验标准） bel canto（美声唱法） role at the Washington National Opera when a new production, directed and designed by John Pascoe and conducted by（有...担任指挥） Plácido Domingo, was introduced at the Kennedy Center（肯尼迪中心）. This was Ms. Fleming’s debut with the company.
Though her performance was vocally（用声音，用口头） uneven（不平坦，不一致，不规则的）, whole stretches were sumptuous（豪华的，奢侈的）. Making pretty sounds was clearly not her goal. She threw herself into the daunting role, taking enormous（巨大的，极大的） vocal risks, singing with raw（天然的，未加工过的，未经过训练的） intensity and earthy（泥土气息的） richness, utterly inhabiting（完全把握了） the character of this beautiful, murderous noblewoman（漂亮可人的、蓄意谋杀的贵妇人） in Renaissance Italy（文艺复兴时期的意大利）.
“Lucrezia Borgia,” which had its premiere（初次公演，初演主角） at La Scala in 1833, is considered a major Donizetti work. Yet it has been produced with surprising infrequency（罕见，少有发生） in America. The only Metropolitan（正宗的，大都市的，中心城区的） Opera production was in 1904, and this was the work’s premiere with the Washington company. The score is melodically（口风琴地） opulent（富裕的，富足的，繁茂的） and dramatically（戏剧地，引人注目地） urgent. Verdi’s “Macbeth” would have been impossible without Donizetti’s example here.
No doubt some opera companies are put off by the story, loosely based on the historical Lucrezia Borgia, the daughter of a ruthless Machiavellian nobleman who connived his way into power and, eventually, the papacy. In the opera Lucrezia is a femme fatale, married to Duke Alfonso of Ferrara. When the opera begins, Lucrezia has tracked down Gennaro, a young warrior（年轻武士） and her illegitimate son（私生子）, though only she knows this. Gennaro falls for Lucrezia instantly, as things often happen in opera, until he discovers that she is the reviled（受过辱骂的，受批斥的） Lucrezia Borgia, who willfully（任性固执地，蓄意地） poisons rivals（竞争对手） in love and in politics.
In researching the veiled history of the Borgias and examining the Victor Hugo tragedy from which the opera is adapted, Mr. Pascoe has come to see Lucrezia as a determined woman, probably a victim of abuse as a girl, trying to survive in a ferociously masculine world in which revenge and murder become “the wages of love,” as he put it in a program note.
This doesn’t seems a revelatory take on the opera. After all, Donizetti gives his monstrous heroine some anguished and elegant music. Even her fiery calls for vengeance are expressed through eerie outbursts of coloratura roulades that make Lucrezia seem tragically unhinged.
Mr. Pascoe’s grandly old-fashioned production is spiked with contemporary psychological twists. Towering brick walls frame the set. With sunken dungeons always spewing smoke (for some reason), decadent party scenes in which drunken young men and women entwine in twos and threes, a menacing prison guard cracking a whip and more, Mr. Pascoe certainly evokes the story’s sordidness.
But the garishly ornate, cartoonish costumes baffled me. Mr. Pascoe’s aim was to depict the period, applying a modern-day sensibility to evoke that aggressively masculine Renaissnance society. Gennaro, sung by the young Italian tenor Vittorio Grigolo, has punkish blond hair and a tight-fitting, gold-tinged outfit with sci-fi shoulder pads that give him the look of Flash Gordon. When Ms. Fleming appears in a dress with a similarly gold-tinged stiff top, she seems like Flash Gordon’s space princess.
Mr. Grigolo, who has a thriving side career as a pop star in Italy, is a charismatic performer with undeniable audience appeal. His voice has ping and plaintive colorings. Handsome, energetic, able to leap a wall in a single bound, he is a natural onstage. And there is a comparably athletic quality to his crisp, robust singing. Still, some shakiness and grainy legato suggested that he may be forcing his voice.
Singing Lucrezia’s manipulative husband, Duke Alfonso, is the veteran Italian bass Ruggero Raimondi, a great Verdi stylist who still sounded vocally imposing, if a little woolly at times. In a way, the only genuinely romantic relationship is the friendship between Gennaro and his warrior sidekick Maffio Orsini, a trouser role, here sung by Kate Aldrich, a rich-voiced and dynamic mezzo-soprano.
Mr. Pascoe essentially presents these friends as lovers, and in fairness, Donizetti’s duets for them, when they swear to remain together until death, are the opera’s most tenderly beguiling moments. But Mr. Pascoe makes the homoerotic subtext too overt and jarringly hip, by having Gennaro and Maffio fondle and kiss like hormonal adolescents.
Mr. Domingo conducted ably, though he sometimes tried so hard to accommodate the singers that the orchestra’s execution faltered. Still, this is rightly Ms. Fleming’s show. (Sondra Radvanovsky will sing three of the remaining six performances.) Ms. Fleming may not be everyone’s ideal of a refined bel canto soprano, but her performance is smart and honest.
Sometimes, as she executes an expressive turn or vocal gesture, her voice will become breathy in the middle range or hard-edged on climactic high notes. But she never compromises her intentions. For the most part her coloratura passagework is accurate and supple, though she seemed to tire during her fitful and vocally ornate final scene, when Lucrezia is mad with grief that her son has been the inadvertent victim of her latest poisoning plot.
The audience gave Ms. Fleming a tremendous ovation, with one lone boo, from what I could tell, amid the hearty bravos. You can’t please everybody.
Additional performances of “Lucrezia Borgia” are on Nov. 5, 7, 9, 11, 15 and 17 at the Kennedy Center; (202) 295-2400, dc-opera.org.
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