Vive la difference

The Sarasota Opera opens its season with Le Trouvere, the rarely performed French version of Verdi's popular Il Trovatore. And as Verdi intended, more than just the language has changed.

By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 3, 2002

[Times photo: Cherie Diez] Victor DeRenzi, artistic director of the Sarasota Opera, directs singer Melanie Vaccari during a rehearsal.

SARASOTA -- Under artistic director Victor DeRenzi, Sarasota Opera has come to be distinguished for two things. One is the revival of neglected or little-known operas, a series that started in 1989 with Catalini's La Wally and has included such rarities as Nielsen's Maskarade, Rimsky-Korsakov's May Night and Bizet's La Jolie Fille de Perth.

DeRenzi's other focus has been Verdi, setting his company on a course to produce all the great Italian composer's operas, from Oberto to Falstaff. The Verdi cycle also got under way in 1989, with Rigoletto, and is due to be completed by 2013.

This weekend, with DeRenzi celebrating 20 years with the company, the Sarasota season opened with both his aims combined in a single production, Le Trouvere, the rarely performed French version of one of Verdi's most popular operas, Il Trovatore.

After its 1853 premiere in Rome, Verdi reworked the opera for a production in Paris.

"One of the reasons Verdi did this French version was that operas were all given in the language of the country where they were performed, for the most part," DeRenzi said. "They had just done his operaLuisa Miller in Paris, and he was upset with the translation. So he made a decision that since Trovatore was probably his most famous opera, if he revised it himself and worked on the translation, he would have a little more artistic control over it."

Il Trovatore has some of Verdi's greatest music, such as the Anvil Chorus, and one of his most preposterous librettos, including a mother who "mistakenly" flings her baby into a fire. Does it make any more sense in French than Italian?

"It makes total sense to me, this plot," DeRenzi said in his office at the opera house. "In a way, I think it makes even more sense now that we have access to all this news about what these people are doing to their children, like this mother in Illinois giving her three kids poison peanut butter and this mother in Houston who killed five of her kids."

The transformation of Il Trovatore into Le Trouvere involved a number of significant changes. For one thing, in the French tradition, a ballet was added to the third act. The orchestration was different.

"Italian opera orchestras had two trumpets in the brass section, and French orchestras had two trumpets and two cornets, and the cornet was a much more melodic instrument," DeRenzi said. "You'll hear the cornet doubling the voice line a lot."

Verdi lengthened the opera's ending, which depicts the execution of Manrico, the "troubadour" of the title.

"I think he did it because people feel that somehow the end of Trovatore is too abrupt," said DeRenzi, who is of two minds about the change. "One, it does make it a little more logical. Two, it's at the end of the night, and people feel, "Let's get this over.' "

An interesting aspect of Le Trouvere will be to hear familiar music sung in translation. Italian is much easier to sing than French, which DeRenzi calls a more "languid" language. And the two opera traditions are much different.

"The way the French look at opera is they want to hear the words," he said. "The words are very important to them. Even if you don't make such a pretty sound, if you communicate the text, that's important. In Italian, they want to hear how well you sing. So if you sacrifice a word for a beautiful sound, nobody's going to jump on you."

DeRenzi was joined by director-choreographer Renaud Doucet, a French-Canadian, to prepare Le Trouvere. Their collaboration helped bridge the differences between Italian and French.

"What you have is the quintessential Italian opera that has become French," DeRenzi said. "So you have things that are Italian, but then Verdi subtly changed the way the words are set, and it has a French feeling. So you have this conductor who loves Italian opera and a French director, and we help balance each other, I think."

DeRenzi, 52, insists on performing operas in as close a style as feasible to their original production. It would be anathema to him to transplant Il Trovatore, say, to a modern setting, the sort of reconceptualization that is popular these days, especially in Europe. In a way, it was his conservative approach that led to the Verdi cycle -- that, plus the intimate dimensions of the 1,033-seat Sarasota Opera House.

"What occurred to me was that although we see Verdi in big houses, Verdi didn't really write his operas for big theaters," he said. "As a matter of fact, when he wrote Falstaff, he felt La Scala, which has 2,300 seats, was too big a theater for it, even if it was premiered there."

In the United States, the leading opera companies -- the Metropolitan Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera -- perform in vast 4,000-seat theaters.

"It makes a difference in your ability to perform the music," DeRenzi said. "In our theater, you can whisper something and everybody hears it. You can be in the last row in our theater, in the cheapest seats, and you're still much closer than expensive seats at bigger opera houses."

In the 1980s, DeRenzi staged the occasional 20th century opera in Sarasota, including Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress and Britten's The Turn of the Screw, but audience response was tepid at best. Now he's thinking about trying again.

"One of the things we're looking at down the line is commissioning a premiere, and I think we could do that now, because Sarasota is a very different community than it was 15 years ago," he said.

DeRenzi, who divides his time between Sarasota and New York, hasn't yet approached a composer to explore the idea of commissioning an opera, which he envisions premiering in 2006. The artistic director leaves little doubt he would be deeply involved in its creation.

"The important thing, if we do a commission, is we need to commission a piece, a composer, I believe in," he said.

And based on his career immersed in Verdi, DeRenzi has a few ideas about what goes into the making of a successful opera.

"The great opera composers struggled with the story and the libretto before they even set the music," he said. "For Puccini, there were four years between Boheme and Tosca, and most of that time was spent finding a story he really believed in. Once he had that, writing the music was not so difficult. It was the same for Verdi. I think musicians make the mistake of not struggling with the libretto, not realizing that if you get the libretto you want, the music will grow from those words.

"If I were an opera composer, I would spend a lot of time reading the correspondence between composers and their librettists, especially Verdi but also Puccini and Mozart."

At a glance

Verdi's Le Trouvere, the French version of Il Trovatore, opened the Sarasota Opera season this weekend. Also in the repertory are Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor (opening Saturday), Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte (opening Feb. 16) and Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos (opening March 2). The season runs through March 23. Single tickets: $17-$72. (941) 366-8450 or toll-free 1-888-673-7212 or see the Web site at www.sarasotaopera.org.

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