Search - Verdi - Giovanna d'Arco / Susan Dunn, Vincenzo La Scola, Renato Bruson, Pietro Spagnoli, Riccardo Chailly, Bologna Opera on DVD

Great music, bad libretto, oft-adequate production...

Scott Andrew Hutchins | Bronx, NY, USA | 07/31/2008

(4 out of 5 stars)

"As far as the opera, which was new to me, goes, I loved the music, as I
typically do with Verdi, as it's very much in his distinctive
alternately bouncy and dark style, but it's the epitome of bad libretti
(Temistocle Solfera) to the extent that Giacomo D'Arco does the
play-by-play of his daughter's battles, which we never see (which
doesn't work for exactly the same reason Violetta telling us about
Alfredo and Douphol's duel does), and rather than being burned (which
one especially expects, since she wears the underwear-looking garb that
Brunnhilde wears after the armor comes off to the finale of the Ring
cycle where she burns) she is killed in action, but of course, she
wakes up long enough to sing a final aria. It's pretty static, but it
gets better as it goes along. The story is not what we would really
expect it to be, although we have Giovanna and her voices, and we have
her father Giacomo who is convinced that he voices are evil, much of
what appears on stage is Charles V trying to romance Giovanna, and when
that fails, still singing her praises as a warrior and the greatest
hero of France.

It kind of surprises me that the quote on the box credits Werner Herzog
for the "success" of this production. It's only a couple of steps above
Jonathan Miller's Clemenza di Tito for being static and uneventful, and
for all Werner Herzog's criticisms about "inadequate images" in our
society (of which an Egg McMuffin advertisement seems to be his
favorite example), strong images are few and far between, though the
very last one is indeed amazing. Herzog comes out for the curtain call,
but evidently he didn't really want people to see him, since it cuts
away to a long shot as soon as he emerges, but I know well what he
looks like and recognized him instantly.

I think it's actually Susan Dunn as Giovanna who carries the
production,--she always seems to be in her situation, while Vincenzo de
Scola as Charles V is all about his glorious voice and isn't much of an
actor.

The costuming has the chorus in tall and colorful masks full of
pageantry but looking rather druidic, except for a whole mass of
choristers in yellow masks and green who look like homages to Iron
Fist, a lesser-known Marvel superhero. Although the removal of armor is
an important image in the opera, we never see Giovanna put on or take
off any armor, and she wears the nightgown-like costume and socks
throughout, and the armor involves other characters.

Herzog first involved opera in his films with _Fitzcarraldo_ (which is
about a guy who goes into the rubber business to build an opera house
in the Amazon and try to attract Caruso to it), and there he hired a
supposed expert to stage the opera at the beginning, and it is more
over the top than any opera I've ever seen either live or on video
(maybe because that's how they performed them in 1906, but he cast a
man in drag as Sarah Bernhardt and has characters complaining that she
is an actor not a singer cast in the opera for commercial reasons, even
though according to the credits, we're hearing actual recordings of her
singing, which sounds fine to me). I've been told that the Met wrote a
speaking part for Bea Arthur in _Daughter of the Regiment_ for
commercial reasons, by the way. I wouldn't think she would be that big
a draw, but whatever. Perhaps this paragraph is too much of a
digression, but Herzog fans may well be disappointed. While it doesn't
look ridiculous the way the operas at the beginning and end of
_Fitzcarraldo_ look, aside from a few frissons, particularly at the
end, and the stage littered with corpses even in romantic moments (one
blinks, while some look sculptural), there is little here that Herzog
fans will find particularly interesting. Indeed, _Invincible_ is more
characteristically Herzog than this.

The worst part of all is that I was constantly taken out of it by the
LPCM stereo, which is not in sync with the visuals--a Hollywood musical
with a canned soundtrack has better lip sync than this stage production
(and I watched Brigadoon last week, so I have a recent comparison--I
also saw the TV version of Gypsy 2 weeks ago and it looked and sounded
like the singing was done live on set). This is also a problem on the
Met's Ring Cycle DVD (particularly ludicrous at the beginning of
Siegfried when Mime hits the anvil and the sound is completely
dissociated), but that gives you a Dolby alternative that is in sync
with the visuals. With this one, you're stuck with it. I'm going to
post on my film lists to see if that's an equipment issue.

Despite the interest of Herzog as director, I think I'm going to go
with an audio-only recording next time I want to experience this opera.
While it seems to have potential for exciting staging (though given
Giacomo's big aria in Act III it might be somewhat redundant based on
the text), Herzog was probably just too new to opera (indeed, he
co-directed both the stage production and the video) to really
contribute as much to it as he may have liked, or at least as much as
his fans would have liked."