Few of Giuseppe Verdi’s operas have a history as confusing as Un ballo in maschera does. As a bridge between the composer’s fruitful middle period, which gave us his standard repertoire favorites including La traviata, Il trovatore, and Rigoletto, and the more contemplative grand operas he crafted later—starting with La forza del destino and Don Carlo—Ballo gestures in both directions, both musically and dramatically. Derived from the French librettist Eugène Scribe’s Gustave III, which was written in the 1830s for an opera by Daniel Auber, Ballo’s intimate plot of an innocent courtly romance tragically ruined—the stuff of earlier Verdian melodrama—overlaps with great affairs of state and, most importantly, with a political assassination scheme carried out in concert with another of Verdi’s great themes, the inescapability of fate. Chromatically sweeping leitmotifs suffuse a score that can at times still sound jaunty and light. The vocal leads comprise a sympathetic tenor and a proud and outraged baritone at either side of a virtuous soprano who is not the usual bel canto voice but a heroine of nearly Wagnerian proportions.
The opera’s plot, which is based on the assassination in 1792 of King Gustav III of Sweden at, yes, a masked ball, proved almost comically problematic. Gustav, whose sexuality was and remains in some doubt, was not the hero the opera portrays him as, a fair-minded sovereign who happened to be consumed by romantic feelings for Amelia, the wife of his best friend Renato. He was, rather, an enlightened despot turned reactionary king who, in the shadow of the French Revolution, sought to restore royal absolutism in his realm and was killed for it in an attempted coup. Getting the libretto right was so frustrating that Antonio Somma, the dramatist Verdi engaged to adapt Scribe’s earlier effort, never again worked in opera.
As an art form, opera can easily overlook historical truth, but the papal censors, who governed Rome’s theaters at the time of Ballo’s 1859 premiere, and the censors of Naples, whose main theater had originally commissioned the opera, objected to a royal assassination on the stage. Verdi was thus forced to relocate the drama, and he contemplated settings as varied as the Caucasus mountains, the Baltic port of Stettin, and colonial Boston. Boston won out, and the opera’s original Gustavo became “Riccardo,” a fictional English governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, whose Puritan ethos would surely not have tolerated the sumptuous masked ball of the opera’s title. Verdi lived for another forty-two years after Ballo’s premiere, but, even in the absence of adverse censorship and the reactionary regimes that employed it, he never saw fit to restore the original Swedish setting. The Boston setting has endured in some theaters, but opera’s strong curatorial spirit now generally relocates it to Sweden.
This version history seemed to elude the Hungarian State Opera’s optional Italian subtitles, which alternated between references to “Gustavo” and “Riccardo,” but the director Fabio Ceresa’s production conveys a reasonable facsimile of the Swedish court of the late eighteenth century. Tiziano Santi’s descriptive sets skew toward the darker end of the spectrum, however, reminding us—perhaps gratuitously—of lurking death. An omnipresent bed suggests Gustavo’s eternal rest. In case anyone forgot what the opera is about, a dueling pair of angels, one white and one dark, rather distractingly stalk Gustavo as he proceeds to his doom. Giuseppe Palella’s costumes are colorful and imaginative—especially in the Act III ball scene of the opera’s title—but at times they are mere flickers within the void.
Hungary is blessed with the superb dramatic soprano Zsuzsanna Ádám, who floated splendid middle-register notes capable of rising to arrestingly high crescendos that fully held Verdi’s louder-than-usual orchestration in check. A rising singer here, she has a voice the world deserves to hear. As Gustavo, Adorján Pataki relished in his strong voice’s heft but lacked the Italianate delicacy the part needs to thrive. The sometimes-woolly instrument of Károly Szemerédy blustered through the part of Renato, the best friend and murderer. Zita Szemere sang peppily as Oscar, the king’s page, in a rare Verdi trouser role. The sonorous basses Géza Gábor and András Kiss were in fine form as the conspirators, Counts Horn and Ribbing (plain old Sam and Tom in the Boston version). Gergely Kesselyák led the orchestra lugubriously through the first two acts but gathered tighter phrasing and a more energetic reading in the third act, when the conspiracy comes to fruition. It was then that the principals sang best, with Szemerédy contributing a sensitive reading of “Eri tu,” his character’s great aria of blame and self-pity, in his best singing of the evening.
Happily, the cast also included the veteran mezzo-soprano Ildikó Komlósi, who sang the brief but chilling role of the fortune teller Ulrica, whose predictions, including the central one of Gustavo’s death at the hand of his best friend, always come true. Her international career has been admirable, and it was a pleasure to find her at home.
