Destiny, Fate, Providence: different ways of describing the sense of an external agency shaping our ends. Verdi’s La Forza del Destino, based on a Spanish play by Angel de Saavedra, Duke of Rivas, is a sprawling tale in which the characters’ lives are irrevocably shaped by a fatal accident. In Tama Matheson’s exciting new production for Opera Australia, “destiny” is not just an abstract entity: instead, it is visually omnipresent. The curtain went up at the first notes to reveal an enormous skull, which potent symbol of mortality was reinforced by the presence of ominous black-clad females with Latin American death masks who pointed portentously at the human actors. The overture was accompanied by a kind of pantomime of the back story, in which Alvaro and Leonora meet and then are parted by her haughty father, the Marquis. This helped to make sense of the notoriously compacted first act, which plunges into the story at an already critical stage. There was more helpful miming during the bridge into Act II: Alvaro gets shot, an event which explains why he and his beloved, who leave together in Act I, never share the stage again until the last ten minutes of the opera.
The most obvious sense of a preternatural guiding hand was provided by the gypsy Preziosilla, played by Rinat Shaham. As written by Francesco Maria Piave, Verdi’s librettist, she is no more than a colourful army hanger-on in Acts II and III, one who encourages recruitment and entertains the troops at camp. In this production, she was an omnipresent demiurge, whose cards have forecast doom from the first notes of the overture, and who appeared as a mime in most of the scenes. This personification powerfully facilitated the storytelling: her hand was on Alvaro’s pistol when he threw it down and accidentally shot the Marquis, and later, when the mortal enemies Carlo and Alvaro unknowingly swear friendship to each other in Act III, her mocking laughter made us aware of the fatal irony of the gesture. In her coloratura vocal scenes, Shaham was the stand-out in a generally excellent cast: she was both dramatically compelling and vocally assured, skiting effortlessly up to a top B a couple of times.
To counterbalance the death focus, Mark Thompson’s stage design also made much of the strong Christian symbolism in the story: there was an enormous statue of the Virgin in Act II and an equally large Crucifix in Act IV. In Verdi’s revised version (first performed at La Scala in 1869), Alvaro is turned from despair by the dying Leonora’s entreaties, and is reconciled with God. By reverting to the more rarely performed original ending (Petersburg, 1862) for the current production, a very different trajectory is given to the story – Alvaro rejects religion and hurls himself to his death. His final blasphemous action had a certain shock value, although on balance I find the less brutal second ending both musically and dramatically more satisfying.