Perhaps nowhere else in Europe has climate change been more starkly apparent than in northern Italy. Stretches of the great River Po became unnavigable in the fierce summer of 2022, with fears that serious drought would follow, but then a total of six months’ rain fell in May this year, causing major floods that brought death and destruction throughout the region. So when the Donizetti Festival in Bergamo came to consider how to bring their native son’s opera Il diluvio universale (The Great Flood) to modern audiences, the climate emergency was already powerfully present.
Bergamo and adjacent Brescia combine to be this year’s Italian City of Culture, a title bestowed in a gesture of cultural and financial solidarity in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. Who can forget the early TV footage of overwhelmed Bergamo hospitals as the world woke up to the reality of the coronavirus? But today, mass vaccination has allowed the even greater menaces of climate change and environmental damage to demand our attention once again.
In this production, the action begins even before the audience enters Bergamo’s elegant, newly-restored Teatro Donizetti. Young “protesters” follow the example of Greta Thunberg and call for action, handing out leaflets and showing videos of plastics choking coral reefs and polluting the ocean. They reappear on stage at the start and form a resilient, silent chorus – a junior challenge to the senior world to change its ways.
Donizetti’s 1830 “azione tragico sacre” is a curious pick-and-mix of sacred and profane, with Old Testament characters plunged into an all-too-human psychodrama of jealousy and betrayal, put together by librettist Domenico Gilardoni from such diverse sources as Francesco Ringhieri, Thomas More and Lord Byron. God-fearing Noè has built his ark ready for the Flood that he warns will punish the pagan people of Sennàar. They live a life of joyless excess and dismiss Noè as a deluded scaremonger. Their leader Cadmo is married to Sela who, to her husband’s wrath, has become a follower of Noè and his god. Her friend Ada harbours secret desires for Cadmo and plants the false rumour that Sela is in love with one of Noè’s sons. Despite her protestations, innocent Sela is sentenced to death by Cadmo, who refuses to acknowledge that his own death and that of all those around him is imminent.
Devised, directed and designed by the artistic duo MASBEDO, the production takes the climate emergency as its laudable premise, but then drowns the performers in a tidal wave of imagery. The stage is dominated by a cinema-scale screen onto which is projected video material so potent and unrelenting that it often overwhelms the performers and at times demotes the music to mere soundtrack. We see hurricanes devastate whole towns, floods tossing houses about like toy boats, icebergs cracking and splintering and wildfires racing through forests. When the mindless hedonists of Sennàar start a non-stop party, images spring up showing animals being prepared for the table. Fish are gutted, piglets eviscerated, their entrails consisting of red, green and blue children’s party jelly.
In what should be a moving scene, poor Sela, delightfully sung by soprano Giuliana Gianfaldoni, pleads her innocence and yearns for her son, yet her entire aria is dominated by huge images of partygoers letting jelly ooze through their fat fingers as they stuff it into their mouths.
Despite these many distractions, most of the principals managed to make an impression, chief among them the outstanding Argentinian bass Nahuel Di Pierro, whose fine, upstanding Noè was a perfect foil to the wily, treacherous Cadmo, sung convincingly with ringing power by seasoned tenor Enea Scala. And the beauty of Maria Elena Pepi’s beguiling mezzo-soprano as Ada ensured that she fought her corner against the big screen.
It’s astonishing to think that Il diluvio came in the same year as the far superior Anna Bolena. Donizetti revised it later, but Bergamo has chosen to stage the original, with conductor Riccardo Frizza, the Orchestra of the Donizetti Opera and the Coro dell’Accademia Teatro alla Scala doing what they could to make it interesting. Unfortunately, they got little help from the directors and designers, who appear to have decided that this opera was a mere vehicle for one big video splurge – a concept greeted with loud boos and jeers when the creatives – but not the singers – took their bows.
Stephen’s travel to Bergamo was provided by the Donizetti Foundation
