I’m not the first person to remark that Verdi is getting oddly little attention in this his bicentenary year, especially when compared with his contemporary Wagner who, despite the usually much greater demands his works make in almost all respects, is not only receiving plenty of performances, but is also the subject of even more books than usual, not all of them about his alleged faults of character. Yet Verdi shouldn’t be less controversial a figure than Wagner; it’s just that Wagner stimulates people to react in such intense ways, while they placidly accept Verdi as an energising tunesmith and a decent patriot, ardent for the unification of Italy in contrast to Wagner’s shameful nationalism.
The ardent patriot is apparent in Simon Boccanegra, though not so blatantly as in some of his other operas. But then one of the striking things about Boccanegra is that almost nothing is blatant, except for curses, which are always accompanied by a fortissimo dissonance and a drum roll. It’s an opera whose stock has risen over the years, with ‘sombre’ and ‘subtle’ the adjectives of choice to describe it.
In the latest revival at Covent Garden of Elijah Moshinsky’s 1991 production, still apparently directed by him, it is fairly strongly cast, but not quite strongly enough to prevent some doubts in my mind. I have always found the plot irritatingly ridiculous even for Verdi. His passion for tales involving small children lost in the most unusual circumstances, their disappearance capped only by the freakish timing of their reappearance; the obsession with disguises, always a tendency in opera but only carried to such lengths in his chosen texts; and the extraordinary gullibility of his most devious characters: are these things to be simply nodded past?
In Boccanegra they are all at their most blatant.
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