“Yesterday your mother offended me, so I drowned her,” snarls Barnaba, a ruthless government agent, at the end of La Gioconda, Amilcare Ponchielli’s sole opera to enter the standard repertoire, performed June 8–20 by the Hungarian National Opera in Budapest. Barnaba is addressing the unnamed title character, whose sobriquet simply means “the joyful one,” in the hope of terrorizing her in her last moments on Earth. Gioconda, who promised herself to Barnaba if he would free her condemned lover, Enzo, from prison, has taken poison so that she will die before Barnaba can ravish her. But, as Barnaba then notes with consternation, Gioconda expires before she can hear his cruel words about killing her mother, a likewise nameless character who is only known as “the blind woman” (La Cieca).
Oh, if only that were the sole melodrama happening in La Gioconda, a work adapted from Victor Hugo’s sprawling Angelo, Tyrant of Padua but recentered around a jealous female rivalry rather than the vengeance of an outraged husband. Ponchielli’s opera, which relocates the story from Padua to the more dramatic Venice during that spectral city’s carnival season, goes to such emotional lengths that his version has figured as a virtual parody of opera as an art form since the time of its premiere in 1876. It is said, albeit not very reliably, that Ponchielli’s librettist Arrigo Boito, a composer in his own right who also wrote for Giuseppe Verdi late in the latter’s career, used the anagram “Tobia Gorrio” to conceal his identity because writing the sploshy riff on the grand-opera style embarrassed him. In 1897, Gioconda was the work chosen to open the Teatro Amazonas, the extravagant jewel-box opera house constructed deep in the Brazilian jungle at Manaus, an eccentric feat featured in Werner Herzog’s 1982 film Fitzcarraldo. The opera’s ballet sequence, “The Dance of the Hours,” is certainly the most famous dance music in all of Italian opera and, among other media adaptations, was memorably illustrated—complete with dancing hippopotami—by Walt Disney in Fantasia (1940) and satirized by Allen Sherman in “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh,” the singing comedian’s 1963 ode to summer-camp misery.
Despite Barnaba’s barbarism, the opera opens with hopeful love. Enzo, who has been banished, is coveted not only by Gioconda, who is poor but pure, but also by Laura, the wife of the Inquisition leader, Alvise. Their raging jealousy is tempered after Laura, who wants to run away with Enzo, protects Gioconda’s blind mother from condemnation as a witch. The jealous Barnaba denounces Laura, whom he also covets, for infidelity, causing Alvise to force Laura to poison herself. The grateful Gioconda, however, gives Laura a potion that will only simulate death so that she can fool Alvise and escape. Hugo clearly knew the Romeo and Juliet story, but this borrowing ends happily for the lovers. Laura and Enzo sail off together, singing offstage as Gioconda ironically takes her own life with poison to avoid Barnaba’s lustful clutches.
András Almászi-Tóth, the artistic director of the Hungarian State Opera House for the last seven years, altered the ending in his production, which premiered in 2019 and benefited from the artistic consultant Eva Marton, a Hungarian soprano well known to Western audiences of an earlier generation, who served the production as an artistic consultant. In the altered ending, Gioconda shoots Barnaba, who dies muttering that he strangled her mother, while Gioconda faces a lonely fate with the poison in her hand. Apart from the ending, the production captures a fairly traditional conception of Venetian opulence. Krisztina Lisztopád’s sets show concentric Renaissance-style vaulted ceilings receding back from the proscenium. Boats sail in and out via an onstage canal flooded with enough water for characters to splash through. Bori Tóth’s costumes are appropriate to the era, with sartorial elegance for Alvise and Laura and the more colorful carnival-style clothes for the other characters. Dóra Barta’s choreography sets the “Dance of the Hours” for six dancers, who form three couples that roughly mimic the opera’s plot.
The six dancers remind us of one of the reasons why Ponchielli’s opera is so hard to stage—its six main characters span all major operatic vocal types and require a star-quality singer for each. On June 11, the cast was headed by the splendid Italian soprano Francesca Tiburzi, a young singer of exceptional promise who has a thriving regional career. Her Gioconda was lithe and beautiful, with strong, passionate intonations capturing both her propensity for jealousy and disposition to angelic kindness. Tiburzi’s countryman Stefano La Colla sang a steady and impassioned Enzo, with emotion splayed across a fine legato. He certainly had admirers in the audience, whom he acknowledged by warmly placing his hand over his heart as he received showstopping applause for Enzo’s love aria “Cielo e mar.” Breaking character in this way is uncommon nowadays, but, if the opera is La Gioconda, it does not seem at all out of place.
Local talent was also impressively represented. The baritone Csaba Szegedi sang a swaggering Barnaba, auguring a fine career as a Verdi baritone. The skilled mezzo-soprano Andrea Szántó inhabited a regal Laura. Krisztián Cser muddied the very low range of Alvise’s bass line in his aria of condemnation, “Si morir ella de,” but soared through the part elsewhere. The contralto Atala Schöck contributed a fine mix of gravitas and vulnerability as La Cieca.
Pulling together six principals, a boisterous chorus, and a demanding score seemed second nature for János Kovács, who conducted a brassy but thoroughly entertaining performance.
