Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848)
Alfredo il Grande – opera in two Acts (1823)
Libretto by Andrea Leone Tottola
Alfredo – Antonino Siragusa (tenor)
Amalia – Gilda Fiumi (soprano)
Atkins – Adolfo Corrado (bass)
Hungarian Radio Choir
Orchestra Donizetti Opera/Corrado Rovaris
Director: Stefano Simone Pintor
rec. 2023, Teatro Donizetti, Bergamo, Italy
Dynamic Blu-ray 58031 [136]
King Alfred of Wessex, who reigned between 871 and 899, was a ruler of some consequence. His significant achievements as, variously, military strategist, shipbuilder, promoter of religion, founder of new settlements and pioneer educationalist caused him to become the only English monarch accorded the accolade “the Great”.
Even so, if most people remember him at all, it’s likely that they do so because of a single colourful, and probably apocryphal, incident. Just as our collective mind’s eye will always picture King Canute sitting at the tide’s edge and demonstrating the inability of even a monarch to command the waves to retreat, the daydreaming King Alfred of our imagination will be burning a batch of cakes to a crisp in a peasant’s oven.
For one reason or another, more all-encompassing depictions of the king in popular culture don’t tend to come off. You might think that these days a warrior king of the blood-splattered Dark Ages would prove a sure-fire hit on film or TV. As, however, the scriptwriters of recent small-screen hits The last kingdom and Vikings were forced to recognise, the real-life Alfred was less an action hero than a somewhat sickly fellow (often incapacitated by haemorrhoids, since you ask). He was more likely to be found praying or studying than wielding a gory sword, axe or club himself.
Thomas Arne’s 1740 hybrid pageant/masque/oratorio/opera Alfred may well have introduced Rule, Britannia! to the world, but in general the king’s life story has proved something of a dramatic dud. That was certainly the case in 1823 when Donizetti’s early two-Act dramma per musica Alfredo il Grande turned out to be a commercial disaster. Thereafter, the piece languished in obscurity until its very recent revival by the donizetti200 project. That particular production was filmed and has now been released on Blu-ray disc and DVD. However, as Alfredo il Grande remains virtually unknown to most music lovers, it will probably be useful for me to give a brief outline of its plot.
Act 1 opens in the year 878. Having been defeated in battle by Viking invaders, Alfredo is disguised and in hiding. He has found refuge among villagers in the Somerset marshes. Alfredo’s wife Amalia, accompanied by the king’s faithful officer Eduardo, discovers her husband’s whereabouts and the royal couple are reunited. Suddenly the Vikings, led by Atkins and his henchman Rivers, attack the village and capture Alfredo and his queen. Almost immediately, however, a surprise counter-attack led by Eduardo and the village leader Guglielmo sets them free again. Magnanimous in victory, Alfredo spares the Vikings’ lives and releases them, declaring that he will eventually defeat them in battle.
As Act 2 opens, we find the English army readying itself for combat and Alfredo encouraging his followers in the expectation of victory. After the English forces are, indeed, successful, the Vikings flee. As he escapes, a bloodied Atkins encounters Queen Amalia and takes her prisoner. Amalia snatches up a sword and is just about to take her own life when Eduardo, Guglielmo and their men come to her rescue. Atkins is led off as a prisoner. Reunited, Alfredo and Amalia are crowned, while the Viking leader becomes a Christian and a follower of the king. All rejoice that England has been saved from the invaders.
To call Alfredo il Grande’s plot banal or even trite would, I’m afraid, flatter it. Virtually all commentators agree that, regardless of Donizetti’s score, Andrea Leone Tottola’s librettodoomed the opera – on which the composer had placed the highest hopes – to inevitable failure. To be fair, Tottola was usually rather better than that. He had worked successfully with Rossini on, for instance, Mosè in Egitto (1818) and La donna del lago (1819) and collaborated later with Bellini (Adelson e Salvini, 1825). Donizetti himself seems not to have considered Tottola completely responsible for Alfredo il Grande’s failure, for he was to work with the libettist again on several subsequent occasions. Conductor Corrado Rovaris is, however, damning. Interviewed for the booklet essay and asked what, if it were possible, he would say to Tottola, he replies simply “I would tell him that he had to work harder”.
Alfredo il Grande’s libretto is, then, a real stinker. There is no back story at all, and the plot’s dramatic climaxes in both Act 1 (the capture of the king and queen) and Act 2 (Amalia’s recapture) are both resolved in identical manner by the deus ex machina intervention of Eduardo’s soldiers and Guglielmo’s villagers. Moreover, all the characters’ motivations are of the simplest one-dimensional variety. Indeed, they face no emotional dilemmas or inner conflicts whatsoever. Every Englishman is simply a good chap and everyone else is a bad egg. While the Viking leader’s ultimate conversion to Christianity might appear to offer an exception to that rule, I’d simply point out, albeit planting my tongue firmly in my cheek, that any character boasting the quintessentially English name Atkins and appointing as his right hand man a sidekick named Rivers might not actually be a Viking at all.
All this is rather regrettable, for, while Alfredo il Grande’s libretto is fatally inadequate as it stands, it might easily have been improved if Tottola had simply introduced the sort of back story often encountered in other coincidence-heavy 19th century Italian operas. He might, for example, have had a character tell us early on that, years before, Alfredo’s son had gone missing or been kidnapped by raiders and was now presumed dead. A more audience-involving libretto would then have introduced us to that missing child who had grown up in ignorance of his royal English origins and had become the feared Viking warrior Atkins (though, of course, never pausing to wonder why on earth his name wasn’t Aagaard, Andreasen or Asmussen). In the course of his invasion of England, he might have discovered his real identity, no doubt from an ageing family retainer recognising a birthmark, and then been forced to face up to the issue of which side he was really on – an already complex problem rendered even more complicated, meanwhile, by the attractions of rival, but equally nubile, English and Viking maidens. He might even have faced Alfredo in a climactic single-combat duel, with the king not knowing that he was actually fighting his own son… etc., etc., etc… Well, it may only have taken me three or four minutes to think up all that nonsense, but you have to admit that it’s already a distinct improvement on Alfredo il Grande’s dull and uninvolving plotas we currently have it.
Paradoxically, however, it is the very lack of a strong narrative in Tottola’s original 1823 libretto that allows Alfredo il Grande’s 21st century director Stefano Simone Pintor to impose upon its bare bones an imaginative new concept that actually works and gives the audience something to think about. Mr Pintor utilises a fair amount of back-screen projection, ranging from illustrations taken from medieval manuscripts to modern video clips, to illustrate the brutality and destructiveness of warfare in every period of history. In similar fashion, the characters on stage wear a variety of costumes. Those are often anonymous 20th century dinner clothes, but from time to time they are supplemented, as appropriate, by anything from sheepskins thrown around shoulders, indicating shepherds, to modern infantry combat fatigues. Presumably making the point that, throughout history, the church has frequently justified or even prosecuted wars, Guglielmo sports a natty set of ecclesiastical vestments – which is somewhat bizarre, however, given that the words sung on stage give no indication at all that he is anything other than a simple shepherd.
All this takes place, as I imagine that you will have guessed by now, on a stage devoid of anything much in the way of time or place specific sets or props. Rather than getting sidetracked by elaborate costumes, realistic landscapes, grandly majestic thrones, orbs, sceptres and savage weaponry, Mr Pintor’s main focus is, in fact, on books. There are books all over the stage. Characters are often found simply holding books or else actually studying them (the members of the on-stage chorus appear to be reading from musical scores). References to books and reading also pop up in somewhat unexpected contexts. When, for instance, Alfredo prepares for battle, we don’t see him putting on a suit of chain mail but instead slipping on a stylish pair of reading glasses and positioning himself at a lectern. What’s going on? The director has, it seems, latched onto the fact that one of the real King Alfred’s notable concerns was the promotion of education and, specifically, reading in the English language throughout his kingdom. The back-projected videos repeatedly make the point that war’s destruction particularly affects a country’s cultural heritage and that is the primary point that Pintor appears to want us to take away from his production. It is an interesting idea that has been well brought out in a thoughtful and rather clever fashion.
The singers appear to be entirely unfazed by both the unusual staging and the lack of credible three-dimensional – or even two-dimensional – roles. With so little help offered by the Tottola libretto, all of them are alive to the need to inject extra personality into their on-stage characters while simultaneously remaining alert to the danger of slipping into caricature. Gilda Fiumi, commanding in presence and demeanour and forthright in vocal delivery, makes a particularly strong impression as the loyal and courageous Queen Amalia. At the opening of the opera, her consort Alfredo, the scholar-king, is found reduced to refugee status in a poor village, so it is perhaps appropriate that Antonio Siragusa begins his performance in somewhat tentative and downbeat mode. Later, however, buoyed by the arrival, support and encouragement of his followers, he rises to the big occasions, including delivering two lengthy solos, even if his portrayal never quite attains the heroic level. All of the lesser roles have been well cast and I would pick out the mezzo Valeria Girardello, taking the role of Enrichetta, a shepherdess-cum-confidante-to-the-queen, and the tenor Antonio Garès, who plays the shepherd-cum-bishop Guglielmo, as worthy of particular mention. The Donizetti Opera Festival’s musical director Riccardo Frizza is also chief conductor of the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (misnamed in the booklet as the Hungarian Radio Orchestra) and may well, I imagine, have been responsible for recruiting the Hungarian Radio Choir for this production. They certainly sing the unfamiliar score with both enthusiasm and bite.
Conductor Corrado Rovaris is probably best known for his long stint as Music Director of Opera Philadelphia but is also well recalled as conductor of a well-received 2015 Bergamo production of Anna Bolena. Interviewed at some length in the booklet essay, he is very much aware that Alfredo il Grande is no forgotten masterpiece. Thus, asked what strikes him most about the score, his first thought is that “From a formal point of view, it is rather conventional”, and when the interviewer asks hopefully whether there is any originality in the orchestration, Mr Rovaris admits that “All in all, I would say no”. He does, though, consider the opera’s revival warranted both on historical grounds and for a handful of interesting musical features (“the treatment of the [briefly on-stage] band is… very original”). Even if not exactly brimming over with enthusiasm, Mr Rovaris is clearly a Donizetti enthusiast who is eager to make the best possible case for a flawed work.
The production has been well filmed in straightforward fashion by video director Matteo Ricchetti and both picture and sound are reproduced very well on Blu-ray. The booklet contains useful and quite lengthy interviews with both conductor Rovaris and director Pintor, though it’s a lost opportunity that neither of them – nor any of the singers – were interviewed on camera so as to add a potentially illuminating extra feature or two to the disc. Even so, Alfredo il Grande is an interesting work, well worth reviving, and it’s been given its best shot in this production. Enthusiasts for Donizetti’s operas will need no encouragement from me to go ahead and make its acquaintance, but this enterprising and welcome release really deserves an even wider audience.
Rob Maynard
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Other cast and production staff
Eduardo – Ludovico Filippo Ravizza (baritone)
Enrichetta – Valeria Girardello (mezzo-soprano)
Margherita – Floriana Cicio (soprano)
Guglielmo – Antonio Garès (tenor)
Rivers – Andrés Agudelo (tenor)
Set designer – Gregorio Zurla
Costume designer – Giada Masi
Lighting designer – Fiammetta Baldiserri
Video designer – Virginio Levrio
Assistant director – Veronica Bolognani
Video director and editing – Matteo Riccetti
Video details
All regions
Picture: 1080i60 – 1 BD 50 – 58031
Sound: PCM stereo 2.0 / DTS-HD master audio 5.1
Subtitles: Italian, English, French, German, Korean and Japanese
